food is for enjoyment?

how can you enjoy life when you can't enjoy food? yes, mass killing animals and eating corpses may not be the best thing in the world, but hey, these corpses sure taste good.

this is an issue that has vexed me for some time. am i giving up the right to pleasure? i mean, i'm not masochistic, am i? by turning vegetarian, am i missing out on some of the essential joys of life?

the exchange is this:

- a temporary moment of enjoyment of ingesting that juicy slab of meat

- a calm conscience that i'm not partaking in violence. i can look a cute puppy in the eye and not wonder why i had something more intelligent than him (i.e. a pig) for lunch. (most people are blissfully unaware of this, of course, lucky them.) it's difficult to describe, but it seems that i can now enjoy life a lot more on an overall basis.

the closest analogy i can think of is exercise. i mean, who likes to exercise? we're out of breath, our lungs are burning, our muscles are aching. the results are very nice, but in fact, exercising sucks for the most part - we feel really good when we stop. we're exchanging the temporary pain of exercising, for our overall sense of well-being. after a while, we even begin to possibly enjoy exercise. but, for a lot of us, it's difficult to classify exercise as a pure source of bliss in itself.

plants have feelings too

at some point i'll have to start somewhere with this, but to get started, here are the 10 most frequent questions/remarks when people find out i'm an aspiring vegetarian.

1. don't plants have feelings too? i read that they have rudimentary nervous systems. so when they prove that as well, are you going to just eat fruit?

2. you need to live your life and to enjoy it, and good food is one of the essential things in life. otherwise life has no point.

3. who says an animal feels pain the same way we do? no one knows.

4. a lot of people are going to be unemployed if we all become vegetarians. who's going to employ them?

5. that UN "long shadow" report has been disproved, so please spare me the environmental argument.

6. if the environment is so important, why do you drive? why do you turn on lights when it's unnecessary? can't you flush less and put up with a little smell?

7. if eating meat is so detrimental to our health, wouldn't we have heard about it by now? humans were born to eat meat - the caveman diet really works.

8. it's part of our culture and tradition to celebrate by eating [insert appropriate animal]. it's in our blood (really bad pun intended)

9. fruits and vegetables don't really prevent cancer, contrary to what you believe in. you will have some long term health problems from it, like vitamin B12 deficiencies.

10. my God, the one true God, created animals for my consumption. but since you're not going to heaven anyway, it doesn't matter and you wouldn't understand.

there are more here, but these ten are the ones i come across pretty often.