[after serving the crew bbq'd shoulder of the dead guy they'd recently walked by] “Well, I didn’t have any behaviour protocols to run it through, so I thought ‘well, you eat chickens, so clearly you’ll eat anything …otherwise you’re just picking on the chickens’…”

And my point: everything we eat dies for the pleasure. The germ of wheat is alive until we digest it… carrots were alive until we chewed them up. Everything we eat was alive and through the process of preparing it and eating it, dies (except some of the bacteria) –even the raw stuff. The smell of death should be on the broccoli as much as the veal, no?

Or, to paraphrase Kryton, aren’t we just picking on the carrots?

And, to correct a few misunderstandings:

E.coli is a bowel-borne bacteria that can contaminate *anything* –including washed produce– with or without animal farming. People manage it in their own kitchens right in the middle of the city. One outbreak was attributed to mountain lions, and another to deer.

There is still not sufficient evidence to make it clear that mad cow disease is directly related to creuzfeldt-jakob in humans –the disease is very similar, but the causes only *may* be identical (soil-borne is also possible, and it may be hereditary or a spontaneous mutation) and may turn out to be completely unrelated to eating meat –for humans. To date, no known ‘lifetime vegans’ have been diagnosed, but they are so rare anywhere in the world, it would be hard to find one in the extremely small numbers of C-J victims. 200 worldwide –out of 6 billion, far more than 98% of whom are, or ever were, animal product eaters (there is some indication that prions infect milk as well as blood) means that there would need to be more than 30 million ‘never in their life had any animal products, including in utero’ vegans to get a large enough proportion of the population to be statistically represented by 1 case, supposing the tremendous bulge of cases in the UK is irrelevant. That’s nearly 40% of population of India… still supposing the bulge is irrelevant.

Still, at 200 cases ever out of 6 billion, it does rather seem to be cherry-picking risks compared to, say, driving a car (about 3000 deaths every year out of 33 million people in Canada) or eating raw spinach (just one of many e.coli outbreaks last year, killed 3 out of 206 confirmed cases in the US population of 300,000,000)…

One of the unfortunate side-effects of a vegan diet –and even some vegetarian diets– is the much larger volume of food needed because although our bodies are super-efficient at getting fat and sugar out of things like meat and milk, we’re not so fast at getting the nutrients out of all that fibre that’s sweeping through too quickly and taking lots of other nutrients with it. It is good and healthy to eat a lot of fibre, but this dramatically increases the number of calories needed to intake to get the same number of calories absorbed, which is even more dramatic when foods are not cooked before eating… and unless you’re one of the smart folks with a composting toilet, a lot more water to wash the waste into the sewers.

I think there are a lot of reasons, all of them deeply personal, for eating a carefully-planned plant-based diet. The one I’ve encountered to date that makes sense to me is ‘I prefer it.’