Why are you a vegeterrian

[Spiffor]

Jon Miller:
Malnutrition doesn't come from our technical unability to grow enough crops for the whole wolrd population, the problem comes from a terrible wealth distribution and from unstable areas where only subsistance food is available (such as in Sudan)

[Jon Miller]

yah, I know

our problem is infrastructure

and greedy capitalists

Jon Miller

[Dr. Nick]

Current food production would already be able to put the world population on a fattening diet.

[Peter Triggs]

I've been hearing that argument for a good 40 years and it just doesn't work like that.

The US has always produced a huge food surplus. Back in the 70's, after OPEC had employed 'the oil weapon', there was talk of the US employing 'the food weapon'. I remember arguing with an Iranian and saying 'Look, you just don't realize how much food they produce there. If they were to cut off their food exports, there's going to be a lot of hungry people in the world." A day or two later, there was a documentary about this on the BBC, and the bloke was amazed at it. At the time the US was, amongst many other things, one of the world's largest rice exporters. It may still well be: I buy American rice at my local supermarket.

But the reason that you can't send a whole bunch of your surplus agricultural production to Somalia is because that if you did, you would destroy the local market. Somalian farmers would be screwed.

[Ted Striker]

i'd like to not eat meat, but i'd shrivel up into nothing

soy is a nice protein replacement, but unfortunatley, eating it in large quantities raises estrogen levels

didn't mike mentzer go all vegetarian though?

[Adagio]

I'm only half vegetarian: I eat that kinda meat you eat with pasta (Don't know the english word), though I don't eat steak (unless there's nothing else to eat)... there's two reason for this:

1) I simply just hate the taste of meat like steak and such
2) I don't like the fact that they kill lots of animals just to feed a couple of humans

[BeBMan]

I eat meat for ethical and political reasons.

[The Viceroy]

Don't eat Beef, but only because the wife is Hindu, and so doesn't eat beef, makes it so much easier that way.

Only thing I dislike, is when you get some sad tourist in India shouting off about how they are "VEGITARIANS" (yeh, ive seen thing more than once believe it or not) .. as if that will somehow make them fit in ... ha ha ha .. foreigners

[Starchild]

Indian food ( ) is perhaps the only way I could go full time vegetarian.

[Jon Miller]

Indian food is great

one of the best restaurantes near by is indian

jon Miller

[Combat Ingrid]

Originally posted by ADG
2) I don't like the fact that they kill lots of animals just to feed a couple of humans

Indian food

[Bosh]

But the reason that you can't send a whole bunch of your surplus agricultural production to Somalia is because that if you did, you would destroy the local market. Somalian farmers would be screwed.

When did that ever stop people? Agribusiness gets to sell food at a nice price to the government and then have it be given away and swamp the local market so that all the farmers go bust and have to sell their land to said agribusiness which then turns it into banana plantations or whatever for export back to the states...

[Dr. Nick]

Somalian farmers would be screwed.

I doubt that Somalian farmers do any 'legal' cash cropping.

[Sandman]

I don't buy this idea that vegetarianism is more efficient. Whilst the meat industry certainly has some truly hideous excesses, so does non-meat farming.

Meat is often the best option for marginal lands, which make up most of the Earth's surface, and are unsuitable for plant cultivation.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by El Awrence
I doubt that Somalian farmers do any 'legal' cash cropping.

They do, which is, paradoxically, the reason for the famine. The produce food for export to Europe, and when the drought hit, they didn't repurpose the still productive land for producing local food. You had the paradox of a country with a famine exporting food (like Ireland during the potato famine).