You've provided such a loaded question. The lines are not so clear, and that's where I will start.

The question assumes that eating food with a face somehow must be different from eating food without it. The assumption is that the animal kingdom is superior to the others, that raising animals only to eat them should invoke a moral horror that should not apply to things without a nervous system. The reasoning seems to be: if it can feel pain, you should feel pseudo-pain that you would eat it.

This comes off as disingenuous as soon as you view the contrapositive. "Oooh, look at me being morally superior because I'm eating non-sentient objects! They never felt pain, so it's perfectly fine for me to grow them only to eat them. I didn't even look them in the eyes when I yanked these potatoes from the ground. You'll have to excuse me, as I need to make a virgin pressing of some olives and take out my anger on them."

All agriculture is both necessary and a heavy investment of resources. It's true that raising livestock takes far more resources: you have to grow what they'll eat. However the animals provide far more resources to assist in raising the crops: they poop.

Oh man, do they poop. Methane is a problem for the atmosphere. In fact many of the older reasons to raise animals came from using them to work the fields. Now we use diesel. The fertilizer in manure has been replaced with chemical fertilizers -- and the addiction to agribusiness.

The more I talk about this, the less I'm coming to any conclusions. I cannot untie the assumptions in the original post without getting angry. I want to keep this separate from my own eating habits, but I just keep thinking "f*(k you for judging me, and everyone else that claims to be vegetarian but really just eats Oreos".

I'll restart from here: I've met too many vegetarians that wouldn't eat my vegetarian cooking. "Eww, eggplant?" "You eat mushrooms?" Yeah, I can make so many delicious things from these items.

The vege-slope (vegetarian but eats fish, vegetarian, vegan, breatharian) is just as annoying as the bacon-slope. My own mother thought I was insane for not liking bacon. I didn't even like it until I had it in Australia, where it's served with the rasher (the strip) still attached to the peen (aka Canadian bacon). It was thick, not crispy. It worked REALLY WELL with bitter greens. It was killer brekkie.

I like to cook. I grew up with the big Sunday meal at my Sicilian grandmother's -- the ravioli, the three-hour tomato sauce, the works. I learned how to make her sauce and from there I learned how to make the food chemistry swing.

The guilting of meat is a very Protestant, Puritan approach. It implies all food is a punishment. I like spices in my food. Scratch that -- many root vegetables require long cooking times to be digestible, so the solution is to spice them. This is the centerpiece of Indian cuisine.

Lentils... I heart lentils. My wife set up the crock pot with lentils and celery for dinner. Happy...

I have cut down my meat consumption over the years. I only allow myself red meat once a week, and I often skip a week. I try to eat only one meat meal per day because I don't need more.

However it gets back to the vege-eww problem I mentioned earlier. So many Americans eat like children: the same few bland foods every day. You have to sneak food on them. This is why the Slow Food Movement and even the pompous angles of the Foodie culture are important: we can't fix the bad diet problems if we do not make nutritious food more readily available and appealing.

If it weren't for Trader Joe's, it'd be a lot harder to eat properly. Frozen food that is worthy of your body, $4 lunch.

Enough guilt and negative reinforcement about meat, I say. Create a positive movement -- that diverse food high in fiber is cheaper, easier to spice, and feels good.

Ugh.

I've still been away for a while, but this topic irks me so much for some reason that I have to jump into the fold again.

I eat meat. I enjoy meat a lot. I've been a hunter for a decade now as well, but very rarely get out. Guns and ammo are expensive, yo. nowaypablo mentioned getting a wild pig. I can tell you nothing is more exhilarating and terrifying than boar hunting. And really, Pablo, we should do that some time.

So that's one level of things to tackle. People want to make that mention of 'more ethical meat'. So let's lay out the levels of arguments on meat.

-The one I already mentioned, those that don't oppose meat eating when you're hunting for it, or at a stricter level, those are hunt meat to survive. These are the vegetarians that are able to take a step back from their First World privilege where they have the ability to not eat meat and recognize that other places in the world have no choice. Okay. Cool.

-The types of people that have no problems with meat being eaten by others, but don't personally want to. I don't see an issue with this. These are people that are usually conflicted in some way about taking a life or find animals adorable or have the ability to not eat meat without much issue. They recognize that they have their choices, and other people have theirs, and stepping into others' lives claiming 'ethics' is a breach of boundaries and common decency, despite whether they believe animals have freedom of choice or consciousness.

-The vegetarian, usually vegan as well, that opposes the entire entire of meat or animal products, that they are morally superior for not using these products in any way at all, and it is their god-given duty (and I mean God-given, as this more closely resembles Christian religious evangelism than anything else) to tell every last person on Earth about it. These are the people who don't take a step back from their position of privilege to understand there are other circumstances, and who will spout that even 'free range animals would prefer to be free than eaten :)' when, no, in reality, they'll still be eaten, just not by humans, and I don't think you understand that wolves don't have consideration for ethical killing, nor do they really care about the quality of life of creatures living in the wild vs. living in a range managed by humans. I think this is the most fantasy world that's most disconnecting humans and animals, despite their claims of "one in the same!" because they have some idea of an equation where "animals - humans = peaceful harmony where everything lives forever and is cute and happier."

-Lastly, the people who don't oppose meat, but oppose factory farms. I feel like factory farms are what lead most people to be vegetarians in the first place. I subscribe to this pretty well, for a lot of reasons. Nothing should have to have a miserable life, whether it has consciousness or not. A chicken doesn't care if its life purpose is to be eaten, but it does care if it never moves. Animals should have a high standard of living that meets or exceeds what it would in the wild (i.e. space, regular feeding, medication, safety). Beyond this, at a capitalist level, removing corporations and strong-arming small and family farms is absolutely fucking vital to every country. Allowing corporations to wholesale owning agriculture and food is one of the most dangerous things possible in the long term, and it isn't addressed enough.

Of course I have conflicted feelings on eating meat. There's always the chance of it turning out that every animal on Earth is exactly as conscious and aware of everything as humans are. But I don't see where that leads to making eating meat morally wrong. Everything dies at some point. Everything. Death is the absolute most important part of the life cycle. Why it shouldn't serve a purpose of sustenance of other creatures and enjoyment of others is beyond me. To discuss moral questions, one of the things that rustles my feathers most is Western human funeral procedures. We die, fill our bodies with toxic chemicals, seal them in boxes, and bury them, where they cannot become a part of the life cycle, and don't feed other creatures. How is that not wrong? We should provide animals freedom to die, or be eaten by other animals, but when you factor humans into the creatures that eat them, it becomes different because we're aware of what we're doing, or planning it agriculturally somehow it inverts it? And at the same time, we don't believe in the Earth completing its cycles naturally in our deaths, and well, fucking billions of other ways as well.

But sure. I can't actually come up with a reason why one should eat meat, in a wealthy, first world country with other options. Because there are other options, and you are taking a life from eating meat. If you find that makes you uncomfortable, that's your own right. There's nothing wrong with not eating meat. I simply don't find anything particularly wrong with eating it either. That's my stance, at least. I enjoy it. I don't find qualms with myself enjoying it. It's going to get eaten completely regardless, by other animals or 'eaten' by the soil when it dies. 'Life' is such weird, vague, ethereal concept to the human mind as it is, limiting it to the discussion of whether we should eat something is bewildering.

Personal anecdote on hunting: I have always found that hunting-- and most other hunters seem to think this way too, across the whole gamut of people who hunt-- is an activity that is completely a commune with nature and evokes an enormous respect for the world around you. I can't express what it's like to be tracking a deer for three days in the woods. You have every kind of life around you, and the majority of your time is spent is silence, and hopefully reverence. You try to understand the patterns of everything around you and the animal you're hunting. The kill isn't really the focal point at all, it's usually just a rote part of the cycle. You kill the animal to clean the animal, the use the parts of the animal for a world of necessary things, and you have the meat and energy provided by the animal to sustain yourself and others. It's a wonderful thing. And that hippy-dippy "one with nature" bullshit isn't possible without something like that. You can't separate yourself from animals and believe that you're respecting it when you simply close your eyes and cover your ears as to how the systems of nature work. It's belittling to believe you love the animals and respect them just because you don't eat them.

This reads more spiritual than I meant for it to be. Perhaps that's good, because most of the arguments against meat seem to read spiritually as well.

I grew up on a small subsistence farm. Killing animals for food was part of it. My dad was a hunter. I used to go out with him ever since I was a little boy. Luckily he was a bad hunter, we would more often come back with water cress picked at a pristine stream than any feathered or furry thing. I remember my dad teaching me how to use the shotgun. I must have been 8 or 9. We killed this little sparrow. I remember picking up the small lifeless body. Its beak and brains blown off. The remains consisted of an empty half skull attached to a body of mangled feathers, which felt so soft to the touch...

I didn't like seeing animals killed for food either. I remember closing my eyes while holding the pig or chicken, or skinning the rabbit alive (because "it's tastier that way"). The excruciating human like scream of the pigs, as the 10 inch knife pierced through their throats to their hearts and left to bleed and drown in their own blood, was particularly hard to bear. I was repeatedly told, this is what we need to do to survive. I believed that. Furthermore my family is religious so it was the accepted "natural order". The animals, hell the whole Universe exists for human enjoyment and exploitation. And the animals sacrificed their lives so we could live. It was hard to accept but I conceded that it was a necessity.

In late teens religion stopped making sense to me and I've been agnostic since. Fast forward to mid twenties when I met the first vegetarians. They seemed strange people at first and I was convinced they were living an unhealthy lifestyle since I was repeatedly told that I needed meat to be healthy. I never actually gave them any credit or tried to understand their arguments with a truly open mind (but if you asked me if I considered myself to be an open minded person, I'd have said yes without hesitation).

Fast forward a few more years and I started dating a vegetarian. I was exposed to the reality that a healthy (and tasty) meatless diet is possible. So I became vegetarian also while still believing that some animal products were essential to the human body. Fish for omegas, eggs for protein, milk for calcium. These are the lies that get imprinted into us by society and even formal education.

Fast forward a few more years and I'm now dating a vegan and once more she has shattered the myths I was carrying around. Omegas can be obtained from certain seeds such as flax, protein is available in all sorts of vegetables (heck, the biggest land mammals are herbivores!) - most abundantly in legumes - and calcium is better absorbed from dark green vegetables, such as kales and broccoli alongside a complex healthy cocktail of vitamins, minerals and disease fighting anti-oxidants non existent in animal based foods. After learning that a healthy body was possible without harming anyone (Yes, I mean anyone. Ever noticed how the English language uses s/he for people and it for animals? Human supremacy or anthropocentrism is embedded in our very language.) there was no going back. It seemed obvious to me that a vegan diet is a win win situation. It puzzles me that more people can't see this and that a discussion about eating animals is usually received with defensiveness and often aggressively.

Along the years I have also done quite a bit of research and watched a few compelling documentaries and talks. Eathlings, Vegucated, Forks over Knives, Speciesism, Live and Let Live: to name a few. One thing to bear in mind is that animal foods are addictive. For example, casein is a protein in cheese known to be addictive. So cravings are natural when replacing animal foods. However the will to not harm another creature ever again is way more powerful than any flavour that has ever crossed my tongue. With the availability of an extensive online resource of nutrition info & tools, recipes, suggestions and ideas, it has never been easier to live a cruelty free lifestyle where diet is just the first step. Clothing is an important second.