having AS makes it more likely a person will be vegetarian?

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I'll eat pretty much anything as long as I know that it was already dead before cooking.

I am a proud member of People for the Eating of Tasty Animals (PETA). Cow would have to be my favorite. I'm hungry now, thanks a lot.
I was once told that Hindus believe you will spend seven years in hell for every hair on every cow that was slaughtered for your beef/leather goods. If that is true, I will burn for a long, long time.

Last edited by Orwell on 24 Aug 2007, 7:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I went vegetarian at 13... almost 20 years ago, but for a few years until recently, I returned to eating fish.
I am now back to eating no flesh because I got food poisoning twice from fish/seafood.
I do miss it a little, but not so much I will go back to it.

have read that autistics have a strong bond with animals. Don't know if this is statisically true, but it is for me. I am an animal. When I found where meat came from I was revolted. I was young and had no choice in the matter.

But I am old and on my own and the pain required to place meat onto my plate is so disturbing. . .vegge for a long time now.

As an architect I had to develop a site plan for a client. Old building on site. I measured it and felt inceasingly creeped out. then the tables all stacked outside. . .disassembly tables. this had been a meat processing plant! I felt as if wandering arouund Jeffry Dahmer's place.

I spent hours disinfecting all my equipment to get the death off it. A long shower. The thought still creeps me out.

Rather hug or bump them than eat them.

I have been a vegetarian since I was 5 years old because it just seemed so illogical to eat dead animals and I still don't get why a human life is worth more than an animal's or why a dog is a man's best friend while a pig is considered feeling-less. Nutritionally it does not make any sense either. Plus, I can't get image of the whole, alive animal going through the process of becoming meat when I look at a chicken breast or whatever. I can't detach the meat from its origin.

While I respect the views of the veggie/vegan crowd I would ask that you be careful of the moral arguments. Human beings are omnivores. Go look in the mirror and smile -- half the teeth in your head and basically ALL the teeth that you see when you smile are designed (evolved, whatever) for eating meat. Our digestive systems are designed to handle animal proteins and fats. Furthermore, we are very poor herbivores; unlike true herbivores we are unable to process the bulk of plant tissue -- cellulose -- and it passes right through the system. It's useful for keeping the plumbing cleaned out but there is basically no nutritional value in it for us.

Biologically, we are still cavemen, and in our distant past a meal of meat was a rare and extremely valuable treat. Meat is concentrated, high-quality nutrition.

The problem with eating meat now is two-fold: We eat too much of it, and it's provided to us by practices that are less than ethical and often unhealthy. One or two modest servings per day is probably ideal, but I know I eat way too much personally. As to the second issue, the answer is to be aware of the source of your meat and how it's raised and processed. I grew up on a farm and I can tell you that our animals were basically happy while they lived, and when they died to feed us the death was quick and painless. Not so with modern mass production techniques, and those same techniques have lead to practices that are questionable from a human health stand-point as well such as routine use of antibiotics and growth hormones.

Bottom line for me is that there is no inherent moral issue to eating meat -- no more so than a lion eating a gazelle -- but as moral beings it is our responsibility to treat our food animals with some measure of decency and respect and endeavor to minimize the suffering involved.

There is plenty of evidence showing that vegetarians are healthier than corpse-eaters.

And it is a moral issue. Killing animals to eat them when it is completely unnecessary in a western context is morally unacceptable. A lion is not given the opportunity to choose, human beings are.

Humans are omnivores the same way chimps are. We are capable of digesting meat if we have to, but we do much better on a vegetarian diet. For most other primates, meat-eating is more of ritualistic thing, when a predator is successfully killed, the alpha-male might eat parts of it. The annual amount of meat eaten by the average chimp is insignificant when compared to the average human. There is nothing inherent about our biology to make us eat meat. And even if we were meat-eater by our evolution, the thing about that is that we still are capable of evolving.

I personally think that evolutionary fatalism is just as bad as creationism.

i voted no. i eat pretty much anything that tastes good

burritos and hamburgers are my favorite thing to eat right now

An aspies moral code is often indepentent of cultural influences. If it is socially exceptable to eat meat in ones culture doesn't always meen that it is correct. Animals are often kept in terrable condition and continue to live misserable lives. All of it is out of sight out of mind from the general public.

And unlike me most NTs don't think an animal consiousness and ability to suffer pain is relative to its brain size. So I would consider it even more cruel from their standpoint.

When I think of it, eating meat is more cruel then running over a cat in the road. If I even do nail a cat, I will sell the body to a China man to make onto chopsui; everyone happy . The cat don't go to waiste and he had a happy free range life before he died. And I get the pleasure of running over the cats head at 50mph.

If that was the case wouldn't almost all of us be veggies? o: You are what you eat

If you are comparing the AVERAGE vegetarian with the AVERAGE meat-eater then I have no doubt that you are correct. But that's a false comparison for a number of reasons that are too long to go into here. But notice that I stipulated a MODEST amount of animal protein; most people eat way too much -- me included.



I'm curious in what context you would find it acceptable.

The plain fact is that this is basically a religious issue -- not for me, but certainly for you -- whether you will admit to that or not. But I don't ascribe to your religion and I'm not bound by your moral dictates any more than I am to Jewish kosher law or Catholic Lenten observation.



If you're careful to consume enough beans and such for protein and spinach for iron. But not only are we capable of digesting and metabolizing meat we actually make use of a far larger percentage of the mass of meat consumed versus plant material consumed. The primary component of plant matter, analogous to protein in meat, is cellulose, which we are completely unable to digest.



You know, while you're perfectly entitled to your opinion, you're not entitled to your own facts. I have no idea where you got that, but it's simply not true. Chimpanzees eat meat regularly and have even been observed constructing spears to hunt prey -- mostly small monkeys.



That's because we're better at it.



We're not compelled to eat meat, but we are by nature opportunistic eaters -- the closest animal analogy would be to the bear, I suppose -- and most people prefer the taste of meat because it is inherently more nutritious than plant material pound for pound.

And we're probably pretty much through with evolution. The normal physical evolutionary pressures have been largely supplanted by cultural factors. So, if anything, it would appear that we are evolutionarily selecting for poverty and religious fundamentalism as those tend to increase the pressure to bear children.



And I think that in-your-face, politically correct vegetarianism is just another religious fanaticism.

I am posting onto this old thread because of a recent thought. Yesterday, May 4, 2009, I saw a large semi-truck pass my house. The open grid work style trailer it was pulling was filled tightly with chickens. I don't think they could move much at all inside it. I felt tremendous sadness for the chickens. I began thinking about my dietary habits---and I told my wife last night, I think I want to become vegetarian. We both agreed that we think we would feel better if we make that transformation. As I have not prepared a lunch for myself here at school today, May 5, 2009 (I teach the gifted), I will probably eat lunch here (chicken nuggets ). But this evening, my wife and I are going to the grocery store and buying vegetarian. We tried vegetarian once several years ago, but we didn't stick with it. Maybe this time we will.

I didn't claw my way up the food chain so I could eat vegetables.

I voted 'no'.

Here is what I see happening with my wife and I---we will buy vegetarian foods, but eat them on occasion, and then also eat our regular meat dishes too. So in other words, we will eat a little less meat than usual. Like you---nothingunusual---I doubt I can give up meat dishes.

I don't eat much meat, but I'm not a vegetarian either.
Neither appeal to me too much.
They need a word for those of us who prefer to eat mostly "junk food", lol.

feel my self like dinosaur...i just love those good full meat beefs...and kebab meat grrrrrrr i get hungry