Re-Inventing The Wheel Kinda Creepy

When I was a vegetarian in the early to mid-1990’s, it was never about animal rights or some ideal cause. In fact, I had great fun on mailing lists and newsgroups, stirring up the vegan and vegetarians who were all about “not eating anything with a face” or “animals are our friends, we don’t eat our friends!” Basically, I was a vegetarian because I was just plain tired of eating meat — even the smell of it made me feel a bit ill.

This is not to say that I don’t respect people who do actually become vegetarians because of some ideal, whether it has to do with saving animals from slaughter houses or making themselves a healthier being. I do have problems with vegetarians and vegans who take themselves way too seriously or are hypocrites or are extremists or eco-terrorists. At the very least, the first three of those are bound to get laughed at and joked about by me.

Anyway, I started all of this rambling for an actual reason.

As some of you know, I’ve been eating about 75% vegetarian for years. Before the actual vegetarians jump on me with their definitions and baseball bats, I know that’s not actual vegetarianism. I’m just more aware of my food choices. I tend to choose vegetarian-type healthy eats.

I have, however, partaken in meat, though I have in the last year or so begun to move away from beef, substituting soy products, when I wanted to make a beef-like recipe. It’s been a natural progression, where I was listening to my body, even though I struggled and fought against it. I’ve eaten more seafood, focusing on those omega-3s everyone’s talking about. And tried to stick with non-fried chicken breast.

My faithful readers may also know that recently, my alternative medicine nutritionists have put me on a stricter diet. So, now I’m an involuntarily Pescetarian, which is a psuedo-vegetarian who eats seafood.

But, after seeing last night on the news that the FDA is expected to rule that cloned animals can be served in our restaurants and sold in our grocery stores, I may not have any problems going back to full vegetarianism. Messing with the food chain is never a good thing. It upsets the balance of things. Who know what sort of illnesses this sort of thing will make the way for. An excellent example is Mutant by Peter Clement:

A former emergency room physician, now a private practitioner, Clement (The Procedure) here offers his fourth medical puzzler. This one centers on genetic engineering and its potential for devastation if not properly and morally controlled. ER physician Richard Steele joins geneticist Kathleen Sullivan, prominent among anti-bioengineering forces, in her investigation of the effects of genetically modified foods and genetic vectors that can cause diseases to cross the species barrier. Gradually, they unravel a complex web that spans the globe. After a young boy in Hawaii succumbs to an illness that previously affected only birds, the story line expands to include three corporate entities, which may be in collaboration toward a perilous goal. Richard and Kathleen find their lives in danger, and the threat of genetic weapons becomes increasingly real. [Amazon.com]

The truth is once scientists, government and who knows who starts playing with our food, who know what’ll be in it and what it’ll do to us.

Why can’t we just focus on making sure the food that grows naturally in the world today comes to us without disease or bacteria? Why is it that we have to worry that our cows my be infected with Mad Cow Disease or our grocery store veggies might have e. coli? Why not focus on these thing rather than try to re-invent the wheel all Dr. Frankenstein-like?

Yup, time to start growing my own garden and become a vegetarian.

Tags: vegetarianism, vegetarian, pescetarian, cloned animals, Peter Clement, FDA