I consider myself to be a healthy eater, but I’m not one to avoid something because it’s not healthy. I bet most of you making the argument that we should only eat healthy foods eat your share of unhealthy items too. There’s nothing wrong with living a little and I’m not giving up my beer, ice cream and pork shoulders quite yet.

John – I certainly see your point. Nobody rolls into McDonald’s and thinks about the Cows being ripped from the pasture and killed to make your hamburger. Having said that I would encourage people to establish more respect for the animal like you suggested as opposed to having that cause them to stop eating meat. The reality is humans have evolved as meat eaters and there are many benefits to eating it. Here’s my hardass comment: I would encourage all meat eaters to get some blood on their hands – it really does help put it all in perspective. The one thing I don’t understand is how you think our current eating pattern isn’t sustainable long term – I certainly don’t see any evidence of that.

Mark Bittman – WTF? Are your trying to make people not like you.

I am also pretty soft, so it does bother me (sometimes) to think of what it is that I am actually eating and what happened to it to get there. For whatever reason eating chicken does not bother me nearly as much as eating cows. It’s probably those cow eyes that bring on the guilt. ;) Please don’t come back with some hard ass comment about the food chain and nature. I understand that, but we are also evolved intelligent animals and I think we could all think a little more about the choices we make and how that affects the lower members of the food chain. If we all got to see our meat from birth to death we might have a little more respect for the things that we are eating. I remember a buddy of mine whose kids were shocked to learn that the cow that they were just petting at the petting zoo was also the same thing as the hamburger that they had just eaten for lunch. I think we are so industrialized and detached from the process that we really have no clue what we are eating.

I’ve heard my label is “pescatarian” because I include fish, but I only use that label to scare my traditionally Catholic dad into believing I’ve picked a new religion.

My decision to change habits was the result of reading the book, Skinny Bitch. While the “skinny” part didn’t take, and I’ve managed to tune out the knowledge of hormones and antibiotics in my dairy, I can’t shake the mental images of what happens to animals between the farm and my plate. Even if the animal was local, organic fed, and humanely processed, it’s not for me.

Husband is a carnivore. He travels during the week, so we are free to eat what we each want. When together, I am happy to make hearty and filling vegetarian meals that he likes, or sometimes we’ll make separate meals, but prepare them at the same time and eat together. It’s not ideal (for him), but it works. My loss is that he used to make dinner occasionally for both of us – it hasn’t happened once since I stopped eating meat. Oh well.

As for meat being bad, I recently watched a show on one of the science channels talking about our evolution and one of the reasons why we evolved the way we did was because of meat. The protein we got from that helped our ancestors brain size increase…

I think I’m actually more of a semi-carnivore.

I really think the focus should be on eating the foods that are good for you and the bad foods just won’t fit in eventually.