Vegetarians are destroying the environment, page 8

I think the main issue here is that most people just don't get food from local sources anymore, regardless of whether it is meat or vegetable. For example, my grandparents had small farm (a few acres) in the early part of the last century and they grew pretty much all of their veggies (which they canned for winter use) and had chickens, a cow and a few other small farm animals that they used for eggs, milk and meat. My grandmother would also go out in the woods to trap rabbits as an extra source of meat. They bought little food from the grocery store, and made their own butter and other dairy products from the milk from their cow.

Other than hunter-gatherer-type lifestyles, this sort of way of living would probably be the most environmentally friendly way to go today. Unfortunately, many people, especially city dwellers, would find this sort of lifestyle impossible or at best impractical.

I'm not a vegetarian (meaning a diet excluding meat) but I do my best to obtain locally grown and produced veggies and meat (there's a farmer down the road whom I practically subsidize I buy so much produce from his roadside stand in the summer!). I get free range chicken grown by the Amish, and also Amish raised pork. I visit a pick-your-own farm in the summer near my home and pick lots of berries and fruits and freeze them for winter use. I eat fish when I can afford to buy it. Sometimes people I know who hunt will give me some extra deer meat if they have it (it is illegal to sell wild game for food in most places so it must be "gifted" and not sold) - that has far less impact on the land than raising a cow does.

If more people ate what's available around where they live (and in season), even if they can't grow it themselves, IMO that would be a wise thing to do.

With regards to health, people have tried to demonize meat for quite some time, especially "red" meat. However, as some here have pointed out, it isn't the meat per-se - it is how the animals are raised, what they are fed, any drugs they might be given, conditions in which they are housed, etc, that can make meat unhealthy. Meat is no worse than vegetables that have been doused in pesticides and exposed to other carcinogens in the land. Any type of food can be fouled by the addition of unwelcome additives that can cause cancer in humans.

It is true that many people eat way too much meat - and meat that is processed and cooked in ways that make it really unhealthy. There's a huge difference between eating a small portion of free-range chicken that's cooked in a healthy way and a big greasy burger at a fast food joint.

I do think humans are omnivores - and designed to be that way. You really can't go by teeth, gut, eyes and other things all the time. Take a look at bears. They have long, sharp claws, huge fangs, and forward-facing eyes, and yet any given brown bear's diet can consist of up to 90% vegetable matter in a given period of time! But if a bear chances across some meat, whether a carcass or a live animal it can catch, it won't pass it up. Same thing with pigs - we think of them as herbivores, yet they will eat meat if given the chance. Sometimes they will even feast on human corpses. If you get the chance, take a look at the molar teeth of these animals and compare them to human molars. They are very similar. Omnivores that eat a lot of vegetation but will gladly eat meat when they can get it, as are we humans.