not eating animal X

[mellowtigger]

I have a question more about eating than "healthy" eating, I suppose, but it is heavy on the "diet management" aspect.  Are there foods that you will not eat as an omnivore? 

I've finally taken the time to write down my thinking on this matter.  Please critique if you find flaws in my reasoning.
http://mellowtigger.dreamwidth.org/210437.html

Comments

[claire_chan]

Anything that doesn't smell right - namely spoiled milk and the rubbish in the back of the fridge that has been sitting there for a long time.

This probably needs a bit of work.

[raze]

I have always found the sentience argument a bit flawed in general; something about "well I won't eat the SMART animals" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, namely because a) cognitive research on animals is in its infancy as a science, and if we've learned only one thing so far, it's that virtually every animal continues to reveal greater depths of mental ability than we once believed b) it's a really arbitrary thing to base moral decisions on, as compared to a capacity for suffering, environmental impact, socioeconomic factors, etc. and c) if you're speaking in terms of a defensible ideological argument, it has fewer legs to stand on than say, an anti-exploitation argument, which if nothing else is at least consistent and not based on factors that are still pretty open to debate - which sentience/intelligence in most species quite definitely is.

IF this is how you plan to base your dietary ethics, I will say one thing: do a lot of reading in a lot of cognitive ethology and behavioral science journals if eating intelligent/aware/suffering creatures bothers you - and set some extremely specific criteria for yourself for where you're drawing the lines. It is increasingly popular opinion in the scientific community that most animals are thinking, feeling beings - so if that bothers you but you are committed to this type of eating, it may be better to accept that you will indeed be eating things that are intelligent and that suffer not just physical but mental anguish in modern food production systems.

On your topic, were I an omnivore, I would probably be basing what I would or wouldn't eat less on the species and more on things like, What is the impact of this item on the environment? On human rights? On my health? On my finances? - this is how I base my choices as a vegan. I would not, for example, buy industrially farmed animal products (for environmental, health, and human rights reasons), nor fish species that are markedly declining in number or harvested using methods that have significant bycatch. I would avoid fish species known to have high levels of pollutants. Were I selecting terrestrial flesh, I might go for something like grass-fed bison steak over corn fed ground beef due to a combination of environmental and health reasons. I may decide to raise my own chickens for eggs and meat - I might even elect to hunt, especially if I lived in a state were deer were overabundant and CJD risk low.

As a vegan, there are some foods I avoid for a myriad of reasons. I won't eat anything with palm oil in it, because the methods producing the VAST majority of palm oil at present are extremely unsustainable. I do not buy chocolate unless I am certain it is fair trade, because there are a *ton* of human rights issues surrounding chocolate production. I forage and/or grow a good deal of my produce because I quite frankly can't afford most local and organic produce, but don't particularly like the thought of my food being shipped vast distances from countries with even poorer regulations than this one. I have been recently avoiding gluten-heavy products because I find they seem to contribute to my joint pain. And so fourth.

[majoline]

I will second the spoiled/gone off, but otherwise, I don't know that my opinion will be the same as most people's.

I grew up on a cattle ranch/orange orchard and we ate our homegrown meat as well as what we could catch/grow because you haven't been poor until you've been Western food producer poor.

The thing about the primal diet is the fact that it involves eating the whole cow. You totally can live a long and healthy life eating only beef you grow. It also involves eating liver, tripe, bone marrow, heart, etc.

Not to turn you off of your goals! Because all of those things are yummy, but they also aren't the typical diet here anymore and you might have just as big a squick factor on those as bugs for example.

[thegorgon]

I really feel like "can this animal suffer?" is a question whose answer is almost always yes, and anytime people try to tell you the answer is no it's because they have a vested interest in the suffering of that animal -- see, the meat industry.

If I ate meat, I'd focus less on "is this animal capable of suffering?" as a criteria, and more on "was it raised in a humane environment?" And then look at environmental impacts, etc.

[ex_daily276]

Spoiled food, of course.
Dogs and cats are also on my no eat list.
The older than average the wild creature is, the less likely I want to eat it. Not so much as wanting to avoid toughness, but respect for their ability to survive. Anything that survived for over 80 years, I wouldn't want to eat.