I used to go to steakhouses all the time... I'd order 16oz ribeyes with loaded baked potatos. Meh.
After I read Steve's stuff, I read
The Food Revolution, and then I did a 30 day vegan trial... now being vegan is a big part of my life.
The effects of meat eating on the environment are pretty drastic. They're real bad, its not really about your own personal beliefs. If you read the stats and have any capacity at all to think beyond yourself you'll end up realizing it sooner or later.
Some people don't want to admit that such a deeply ingrained habit is such an amazingly poor decision. But it is. Read the stats in food revolution and find out, its all there for you to look at. The vegans that you're saying are stuck up are probably just telling you how it is and you don't want to hear it.
I'm not some new agey animal sympathizer. I grew up on acreage in Ohio. I hunted, I've shot a dozen or so groundhogs every year since I was about eight to keep them from ruining the foundations of our barns. I've shot deer, skinned rabbits, all that. To this day I probably wouldn't have an issue cooking and eating something I killed myself.
But the "food animal" industry isn't like that. The "free range" stuff isn't any better. Dairy cows live for four years, instead of twenty. The animals you eat are pumped with antibiotics, covered with cysts, and tortured for their whole pathetic lives. Are you really sure you wanna be eating / contributing to that?
Have you looked at the
videos? The pigs can't even stand up. They're too fattened from genetic modification and their muscles are too atrophied to support them because they can't even turn around in their penns. They literally just fall down and rot until they get slaughtered, and that's an animal with the intelligence of a four year old. And it happens hundreds of millions of times every year, because no one wants to admit that they create / contribute to that situation.
Not to mention the pollution. Or the waste of grain by feeding it to animals instead of directly to people.
Also,
human anatonmy is geared towards being a herbivore. Also, going vegan is better for you. Also its better food. You skip fast food, you drink fresh juice, eat raw chocolate, make smoothies, almost everything is unprocessed or organic. Stuff tastes better.
It's not that going vegan isn't a sacrifice, because I guess it is in a sense, its just one that makes your life (and everyone else's) a whole lot richer in the long run.