Comment by vemom

8 months ago

You somehow can't apply logical statements to what we choose to kill and eat. Cultures differ on their opinions here. But at some extreme we should all be vegan.

The logic is simple, we eat what's convenient to produce and we construct our morals around that.

  • Meat costs a lot to produce. We eat it because it tastes good, not because it's convenient.

    • No. Dogs also taste good but they are way less convenient to raise per kilogram of meat then cows. That's one of the main reasons we rather eat cows, pigs and poultry than dogs, dolphins, squirrels or guinea pigs.

      People do a lot of expensive and wasteful things just because they are convenient in many domains of life.

      Meat isn't tasty. If it was you wouldn't always eat it fried almost to a char with salt and spices. Tasty things you can just eat straight up. Meat is easy. It's easier to keep some cows on grassy hill then kill them, than to create and maintain a field there.

      Meat is also easy to cook and eat. It digests nicely. It can be used in mono diet with no immediate ill effects. It's a no-brainer food even an idiot can use to sustain themselves. It's hard to poison yourself with it because if it's not fresh it stinks like hell.

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    • True. Habits also play an unconscious role and tradition a conscious one. To demonstrate the former: bellow two studies on cats exposed pre, peri and post natal with a specific aroma. From the first abstract:

      > We conclude that long-term chemosensory and dietary preferences of cats are influenced by prenatal and early (nursing) postnatal experience, supporting a natural and biologically relevant mechanism for the safe transmission of diet from mother to young.

      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232700921_Prenatal_...

      https://www.researchgate.net/publication/40452868_Effects_of...

      I'll add that habits and taste can change later in the life voluntary or involuntary: There's plenty of people that "learn" to like something they didn't in their youth for many reason: new cultural environment, health, curiosity...

  • Why do some religions say don't eat beef or pork? Some religions care about how you kill the animal. How is this convenient?

    • Religions can be inconvenient. I'd still argue that source of some of their bans was convenience that just got frozen in time and kept alive way after its utility ended.

      I think in case of meat bans it was a deeper convenience. Something like that it's not convenient to avoid pork, but it's convenient to not get sick from low quality pork or the process of raising this specific animal. It might have been quite convenient rule of thumb two thousand years ago.