I am writing in response to your contest, “Calling All Carnivores.”

Why must the NY Times encourage readers to eat meat?  Why was the contest not called, ”Ethical Reasons to Stop Eating Meat?”

Those two are rhetorical questions.  The answers are because the NY Times does not want to award people for insisting eating meat is unethical.  On the contrary, this contest is strong evidence the NY Times wants to reward people for insisting eating meat is ethical.

In your article, you assert that “those who love meat have had surprisingly little to say.” How can you make this assertion and live in the United States, where every meal is pig, chicken, fish or cow, and where bookshelves are crammed with titles encouraging popular but illogical “compassionate carnivorism?”

My complaint is not that you believe meat fans are silent, or under-represented. As a meat eater, you are likely as unshaken by Turduckens and bacon as the rest of America, so your belief that meat-eaters have “had surprisingly little to say” is understandable.

My complaint is about the end goal. The result of this contest, intentional or not, is an article which causes readers to think, “Ah-hah. So that why eating meat is ethical. I knew I was right for doing it.”

The world does not need more reasons to eat meat, much less a contest recruiting the most convincing and popular logical fallacy.  The world is not better for increased demand of dead or dying animals.

The world needs people who, as you said in another article, feel crummy when unnecessarily ending the life of another, and it needs articles from those people saying why they refuse to repeat the act.

Related reading:

• More than a Main Course: Dissecting Discourse around Killing a Turkey by Nekeisha Alexis-Baker
• The Main Course Had an Unhappy Face by Ariel Kaminer
• Calling all Carnivores, also by Ariel Kaminer

As an extra-curricular activity, try putting your television on the Food network and hold back the vomit as they prepare Bacon Something Something Wrapped With A Maple Bacon in Pork Tur-duck-ham Bacon Glaze.

Ingredients

• 1 bunch (2 to 2.5 cups) of chopped asparagus
• 2C almond milk
• 1C water
• 2T nutritional yeast flakes
• 1T Bragg’s liquid aminos

You know about proteins, right? Those things North America is insane with consuming far too much of?  Well, there is one amino acid called asparagine, and guess where it gets its name?  No, not an Italian racecar driver; the name comes from asparagus because is so full of this compound [1].

Stuff You’ll Need to Do

• Chop asparagus into 2” long cuts
• Steam 10-15 mins until soft but not mushy
• Combine water, almond milk, flakes in pot and heat to gentle simmer
• Once simmering, add in the asparagus
• Turn off burner
• Let sit with occasional stirring for about a half hour.  (You can skip this step if you’re in a hurry)
• Scoopy 1C at a time into a food processor, but don’t do like I did and overload the thing or you’ll have a watery green explosion all over your kitchen.
• Pulse the food processor it each load of soup is smooth.
• Pour through a strainer into another pot or serving dish.

This is another subtle but pervasive opinion of vegans which I take issue with.

A phrase like “vegans believe meat = evil” trivializes the belief that killing innocent beings is immoral.

“Evil,” these days, is a hard notion to take seriously. “Meat” is a faceless, tasty product that most of us in the United States grew up eating. Most importantly, I think, a phrase like this keeps the animal out of the picture and the emotionless product, meat, as the focus.

A non-vegan listening to my friend would likely construct in his head an image of a wobbly, little, pink cut of meat and a red-eyed fringe lunatic vegan screaming “evil” at it.

Many vegans think killing innocent beings is immoral. Meat is a product of killing those beings, just like a black eye might be the byproduct of getting punched in the face. No one would scream that black eyes are evil, yet nearly everyone would object to an old lady receiving one (unless she works at the DMV).

In all dealings with those who think like us and with those who disagree, we absolutely cannot forget about those who, for food and entertainment, are stabbed, bludgeoned, slit open, drown alive, electrified, gassed to death, prodded with hooks, chucked with their brothers and sisters into grinders, chainsawed and even thrown into pits of despair (for “science”). At this very moment, by the thousands, all of that and worse is occurring.

If we think anything is evil, that is it. Not “meat.”

I just love a man (or woman or robotic assistant) who outfoxes the patriarchy and breaks free of the indoctrination of the herder culture!

Inspired by the currently-trending Twitter topic, #30WaysToMakeAGirlSmile.  This is slightly tongue-in-cheek for those of you with your Serious Hats on all the time.

1. Make her feel safe by not exploiting other females for their milk. Girls get nervous when they think you’re going to steal their breastmilk.
2. Acknowledge that enslaving female animals and forcing them to reproduce is a human feminist issue.
3. Cook her a truly happy meal.
4. Don’t claw her to death with the big, scary apex predator claws which you do not have.
5. Smile at, don’t bite her with, your stubby little “canine” teeth that are cavity-prone and need braces to keep straight.
6. Don’t force your beliefs down her throat!  Learn to kiss properly!
7. Adopt, do not breed!
8. Learn to count to 30.

30. Go vegan!

Even if you still eat meat, deviating even once from the social norms is going to get you reactions like this.  If you have no interest in going vegan, then at least try eating a conspicuously vegan meal a few times in mixed company.  For instance, vegetable fajitas when everyone else is having cow in theirs, or a veggie burger at a place which servers cow burgers.  Watching people’s reactions as they try to figure out why you’re not joining in on the meat eating is fun and philosophically profitable.

You may notice the jacket looks really familiar to a certain sweater worn in another webcomic.  For my first page, I wanted to pay tribute to Penny-Arcade, who have provided me with years of chuckles and a few outright guffaws.

The result is that people eat garbage they might not normally eat because the garbage doesn’t look entirely like garbage.  For instance, and with emphasis added:

Betty Crocker Carrot Cake Mix has no carrots, as such. Instead, it has “carrot flavored pieces” made with corn syrup, flour, corn cereal, partially hydrogenated cottonseed and/or soybean oil, a small amount of “carrot powder,” unspecified artificial color, and Yellow 6 and Red 40. Most varieties of Mt. Olive and Vlassic pickles appear greener and fresher thanks to Yellow 5. Kraft Light Catalina Salad Dressing contains Red 40. And caramel coloring and cocoa darken Pepperidge Farm Pumpernickel Bread.

More at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

What can you do?  Eat fresh meals made from whole ingredients.

• For nutrition and texture:
• 2C lentils
• 2C quinoa
• A bunch of rolled oats
• A box of wheat gluten (you won’t need the whole box, but measurements vary based on taste)
• Flavors:
• Garlic salt
• More salt
• An onion

1. Assuming you’re going to eat these for dinner, put the quinoa and lentils in a big pot with lots of water in the morning.
2. While at work, spend some quality time on YouTube arguing about pointless garbage.
3. 8 or so hours later, you’re back home and ready to cook some lentil burgers.
4. Heat the pot to boiling.  Let it boil a couple minutes.
5. Reduce to simmer and leave it that way until the mixture thickens or the beans are soft.
6. Drain as well as you can.
7. I recommend making 1 patty first, before you go all Henry Ford Production Line on your kitchen:
1. Scoop 1/2 cup of the quinoa/lentil mix and drain it even more.
2. Dump it into a bowl.
3. Add 1/4 cup oats.
4. Add 1/2T  diced onions.
5. Add 1T to 2T of wheat gluten.  (Tapioca starch might work – I haven’t tried yet)
6. Add 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt (or more/less, to taste).
7. Mush together until it has a texture like wet, clumpy Play-Doh.  It should not be crumbly in your hand.  It should not be grainy like the ocean sand.  It should stick together like the E in Ella.  Unlike cow hamburger, it won’t give you salmonella.
8.  Press into a patty and fry in light oil.  I salt each side of the patty before frying it.

Each has about 20-25g protein, very little fat, and delicious taste!

Season 2, Episode 5 of Battlestar Galactica is called, “The Farm.” Kara Thrace wakes up in a ‘hospital’ which turns out to be a breeding ground run by Cylons.

She is asked by a woman prisoner to cut the power and kill her, because she “can’t live like these. We’re baby machines.”

Kara and, hopefully, the viewers are sickened and probably enraged at this disgusting mistreatment of human beings. They should be.

The same goes for our treatment of animals. The same garbage discrimination is used by humans to enslave animals in real life as was used by Cylons to enslave and breed humans in Battlestar.

Hulu offers the show if you’re willing to watch 90 minutes of commercials first. Here, I’ve embedded the scene for your viewing pleasure:

Omnis mundi creatura
quasi liber et pictura
nobis est in speculum;
nostrae vitae, nostrae mortis,
nostri status, nostrae sortis
fidele signaculum.

All the world's creatures,
as a book and a picture,
are to us as a mirror;
our life, our death,
our present condition, our passing
are faithfully signified.

More info by A. G. Pluskowski.

1. “Veganism is expensive.” I build muscle on $4 a day. Grains, legumes, beans, veggies, etc., are incredibly affordable and nearly all the recipes can be cooked quicker than you can drive to a restaurant.
2. “Vegans are elitist.” There is nothing more elitist than subjugating innocent beings and killing their children because you prefer the way their milk tastes.
3. “Vegan diets just aren’t healthy.” This nearly always follows someone assuming you went vegan ‘for health reasons,’ and then trying to find some criticism when you tell them you stopped eating animals for ethical reasons. Vegan diets are incredibly healthy.
4. “Plants feel pain, too.” You have to be out of touch with reality to utter this as a reason to eat animals. To produce a plate of animal-based food, you have to spend 20 plates of plant-based food and a tremendous amount of water. Eating animals means eating, by proxy, 20 times as many plants as a vegan does. Plants do not have any nervous systems.
5. “Vegans cram their beliefs down other people’s throats.” No, foie gras is cramming your beliefs down throats.
6. “Vegans are weak little waifs.” I can’t speak for Mac Danzig, Brendan Brazier and Robert Cheek, but they are not waifs. Anecdotally, I have been vegan four years and I still squat twice my body weight. Vegans are just people. If they lift weights and eat right, they get big. If they argue on the internet all day, they get pasty and skinny (or fat), just like meat eaters.
7. “All vegans love PeTA and are domestic terrorists.” No, vegans want you to live longer, healthier, and to stop exploiting animals. Shoving 1,100 pigs down a killing line per day is a terror factory. PeTA has as much to do with vegans as the National Rifle Association has to do with eating chicken.
8. “It’s too hard to be vegan.” Too hard to shove food in your face? Too hard to say ‘vegetable fajitas’ instead of ‘chicken fajitas’ when you are eating at a Mexican place? The ‘too hard’ excuse reminds me of all the excuses I heard when I was a personal trainer.
9. “You can only get protein from tofu.” Tofu has protein, but you don’t need tofu to get all the protein you need. The world has gone protein crazy. People have been convinced through protein suppliers that a human needs 50g of cow-based juice every 3 hours or they will shrivel up and die. Don’t believe the hype. Do some research. You’ll be fine.
10. “Growing plants causes field mice to be killed, therefore eating animals is okay, and vegans are hypocrites.” People forget that it takes tremendous amounts of plant material to feed 56 billion land animals every year. More field mice are killed feeding meat eaters than feeding vegans. And the idea that accidental harm justifies intentional and unnecessary harm is just stupid.

This update is a little grumpier and less polished than most of mine, so if I’ve offended you, please go vegan.