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.