carrol> Kendall Clark wrote:
>>
>> a vegetarian diet is pretty widely conceded to be more healthy
>> for its consumer than a meat-rich diet.
carrol> Vegetarian diet vs meat-RICH diet. The comparison
carrol> limps.
Why? I don't have numbers to hand, but from what I recall, the average diet in the US contains more meat and animal products than just about any other national diet, certainly vastly more than diets outside the "first world".
Switching from the meat and processed sugar rich diet which most Americans consume to a vegetarian or near-vegetarian diet would, on average, increase healthiness. (And, of course, if you don't buy the species-boundary as morally relevant, there are other moral considerations, too.)
There *is* a political angle here: corporations make huge profits from selling foods loaded with empty calories, especially refined sugar, foods that are often nutritionally nearly empty. Securing cheap markets for sugar export in places where US foreign policy defended corporate interests is not *entirely* unrelated to the domestic diet.
It's fine to invoke stereotypes about Berkeley and the like, but the politics of food strikes me as serious business.
What about a vegetarian diet vs a _mostly_ vegetarian
carrol> diet seith with limited amounts of meat?
Both are more healthy than the average American's diet. What's your point?
(And of course you
carrol> also dodge the full Vegan thing: no dairy products, no eggs,
carrol> no leather belts etc.
I also dodged whether the Yankees would win the pennant this year. Didn't-mention != dodge.
I'm not a vegan, nor do I have any interest in defending a vegan diet. Vegans can defend themselves.
Doug said he could see *no* moral value in a vegan diet; that's the only claim I'm interested in probing here, whether there is *any* moral value, say, in improving one's own physical health. Which is a different category of question altogether from the Nazi eugenics genocide, despite what Doug implied.
Best, Kendall Clark