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alent of just one small burger a day then your risk of bowel cancer is increased by 20 per cent there are numerous studies that show that veggie diets can cut the risk of heart disease stroke and certain cancers some of the most impressive data arises from a study of close to 2000 vegetarians over 21 years by the german cancer research center deutsche krebsforschungszentrum the study s results vegetarian men reduced their risk of early death by 50 women vegetarians benefit from a 30 reduction 30 and 50 are quite impressive statements for those of you familiar with scientific studies of this sort there are many other bad things that occur as a result of eating meat i e it is often said that world hunger could be ended if the world reduced their meat intake by even a small amount because all those crops going to cows could go to people but i m going to stop here for now ok so there are some bad things that result from meat eating without even mentioning the ethical issue of whether it is right to cause animals such suffering can we come up with some inevitable good results that come from eating meat i ve been racking my brain for a while and the only thing i can come up with is pleasure can you think of something else that doesn t ultimately boil down to pleasure i can t not that pleasure isn t important of course it is some might say what about nutrition and that is a myth we don t have to eat meat as humans and if we do like if you would argue that we need that miniscule amount of b12 from meat even though it is available from vegan sources we certainly don t need to eat very much of it so long as we have a diet of varied fruits and vegetables we will get the nutrition we need so it comes down to pleasure i love pleasure as much as the next guy but it does seem like at least to a degree we re sacrificing our own health and the health of our planet for pleasure and this is without even going into the ethics of whether it is right to allow animals to suffer so much so there s that that s karma as i see it you make a bad action and inevitable bad things result don t even have to get into mystic voodoo shit and now to get a little more new age y and out there as a further argument for the bad karma of eating meat in my last blog i spoke a bit about how when you get into certain philosophies or get into meditation you become better able to exist with the mad rush of thoughts that so often dominate our minds and often make us unhappy and i also spoke of how when that mad rush is not such a focus that the natural human compassion that is in us all perhaps is more free to come forth i m not saying you sit down for 5 minutes and become mother theresa no perhaps its much more subtle than that but something happens this has been my experience i m just much happier overall for having gotten into the stuff and so maybe i started taking a little more time to empathize and put myself in the shoes of a factory farm animal when we are not allowing our compassion to come forth perhaps our compassion gets a little blocked up a little atrophied if we are not allowing ourselves to feel compassion for an animal then who else are we not feeling compassion for if we cannot take a moment to try and imagine ourselves as an animal existing in a hell zone then who else can we not imagine as ourselves in a hell zone if our compassion is not being exercised could it also be that maybe we aren t allowing ourselves the compassion for our neighbor or god forbid our enemies how about compassion for ourselves as we live in this era of such war and ruinous greed it makes me wonder it makes me wonder if this bad karma that might result from turning a blind eye to our own innate compassion isn t a very real thing this innate compassion that i believe anyone would experience if they would allow themselves to watch a video of a behind the scenes at a factory farm and actually allow themselves to imagine what it might feel like to be that animal it makes me wonder if there aren t some inevitable bad things that result from this shunning of our own compassion from this lack of exercise of our compassion i m not saying this is true i m just saying i wonder sometimes when i tell someone that the movie fresh played a big role in my becoming vegan they say oh god no i don t want to see that film as they smile and shudder as if to say they don t want to see the horror show they assume it must be but would you please pass the chicken wings this says to me that we are shunning our compassion that we know we won t like what we see so we turn away from it and choose to ignore our own truth for the sake of grasping to and preserving our pleasures at what cost again i m not saying that we should all be vegetarians necessarily i think it would be great to simply eat less meat and to support meat that was raised and slaghtered humanely perhaps the bad karma comes simply from the excess of it i don t know after writing this paragraph i discovered some quotes from albert einstein that speak to this issue besides agreeing with the aims of vegetarianism for aesthetic and moral reasons it is my view that a vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind albert einstein could einstein be referring to human temperment in the same way i am referring to our compassion yes i just compared my own thoughts to einstein s and pythagoras math god and the father of greek philosophy for as long as men massacre animals they will kill each other indeed he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love pythagoras and finally einstein again a human being is a part of the whole called by us the universe a part limited in time and space he experiences himself his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness this delusion is a kind of prison for us restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty nobody is able to achieve this completely but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security albert einstein so yes bacon does taste good it is up to us to decide how good i would argue that we might make that decision having first allowed ourselves to fully witness all the facts i ll finish up with a video a friend sent now this video is not a horror show its a short touching cute story that takes place on the streets of our fair new york city not long ago i recommend you watch video much love eric truly man is the king of beasts for his brutality exceeds theirs we live by the death of others we are burial places i have from an early age abjured the use of meat and the time will come when men such as i will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men leonardo da vinci people often say that humans have always eaten animals as if this is a justification for continuing the practice according to this logic we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people since this has also been done since the earliest of times isaac bashevis singer all the arguments to prove human superiority cannot shatter this hard fact in suffering animals are our equals peter singer the photo in today s blog is 2009 eric m posted by erock at 4 10 pm 2 comments saturday march 14 2009 e s gone vegan i ve had a number of people say to me something to the effect of eric you re nuts why are you on a vegan diet well i thought i d try and explain that here i ll also try to answer the other question i ve been getting which is eric what exactly do you eat some people ask because they are curious and others are asking because they want to try the diet themselves even if only on a partial basis if you d like to just see what i m eating then feel free to just jump to the bottom ok so here goes for the first 15 years of my life vegetables were things that i did not understand mostly i did not understand why people ate them pithy grainy bitter yucky i believe was the term i would have used back then out of the vast cornucopia that is the modern day supermarket there were 4 vegetables that i would so much as touch as a child potatoes iceberg lettuce ketchup yes i m counting ketchup as a vegetable and an occasional can of del monte canned green beans but only the canned stuff you couldn t buy me enough video games to make me touch a fresh green bean and not mashed potatoes mostly just french fries and even many fruits were blackballed the foods i would eat were basically threefold salami sandwiches steak and burger king yes it was a limited list but to me it was more than enough i saw no reason for anything else what more could one need some of the items i refused to eat and this is no exaggeration included any non iceberg lettuce strawberries peaches nectarines berries of all types spaghetti who s italian seafood of any kind avocados peanut butter jelly olives tomatoes besides ketchup soup corn corn yes i was a jewish mother s nightmare plus i not only didn t want to be a doctor i wanted to be a mechanic like my hero the fonz my wonderful parents however cannot be faulted here they tried i refused adamantly until i was 15 they would diligently make sure there was one of the big three or little 4 at the dinner table while everyone else ate what was for dinner when i hit 15 i was at summer camp one day when i found myself piling a small scoop of spaghetti on my plate after watching everyone else in my bunk do the same for zillionth time i drew a forkful to my lips hm not so bad i thought soon after came corn soup tuna and others before long my aversions began giving way to passion through college i found myself becoming adventurous even as school progressed there soon seemed to be nothing i wouldn t eat i won t go into details of what i agreed to eat while pledging old aepi i had done such a 180 that i became a human garbage can of sorts who basically liked everything though i was still very much meat focused when my dear older brother daniel died at age 26 after a long battle with cancer i decided that perhaps my unrefined eating habits could use a makeover i felt that having lived all those years on basically meat and meat by products alone my health might do well with an equally stringent few years of veggie only living and also i hoped it would open up my palate to a new focus i slipped into it rather easily i found myself a bit of a cheese and potatoes vegetarian but also i found myself slowly awakening to the wonders of the vegetable spinach with garlic who knew eggplant mushrooms squash i lasted for about 2 years i cheated a bunch there is an infamous story i don t tell where at a pool party i ingested a dangerously large combination of captain morgan and nicorette ok i hated cigarettes but wanted to know what all the fuss over nicotine was about drunk yet strangely relaxed i could not stop myself from eating about 10 hotdogs as my friends taunted me for breaking my veggie vows i then proceeded to throw up captain morgan nicorette and hotdogs all over some poor stranger s bathrooom not long after i gave up the vow for good however the 2 years of veggie living had served to fully open me up to love for my veggie friends and i had become well acquainted with their various incarnations i would describe my eating habits as veggie focused since then basically this means that i would usually eat vegetarian but was not too strict my reasons for the focus were still health related i found the reduced animal cruelty i was supporting a nice but quaint side effect though i had never owned a pet in my life i had had the usual contact with the neighborhood dog and the best friend s cat i believed that animals felt pain and fear and had rights and so it seemed nice to not be hurting such folk but i don t think i really thought about it much more than that i think i just imagined that the animals lived relatively happy lives maybe on a large farm somewhere and had a moment of pain at their demise and basically didn t know any better so what s the big deal its especially easy to gloss over when there s a side of bacon looking up at you flash forward to 2008 2009 when three things converged to inspire the jump from being veggie focused to vegan the first was my new experience of living with an animal actually 4 animals in a 1 bedroom nyc walk up the first being my girlfriend faith s cat isabel followed soon after by the three 1 day old kittens she found abandoned and on death s doorstep along the side of a road the kittens were supposed to stay a month or 2 tops and then be given away 4 cats in a 1 bedroom come on we re going on 7 months now and i am deeply in love with all of them they have made me remember how much animals are like ourselves i m sure other dog or cat owners relate i don t feel like animals that are socially acceptable to eat like cows or pigs or chickens are terribly different they may exhibit different behaviors just like a cat exhibits drastically different behaviors from a dog but they all feel pain and fear and love for their children the second thing that i believe had an impact was my interest in recent years in meditation and buddhist flavored philosophies people often assume that buddhism has a rule that you must be vegetarian not so the buddha himself would eat meat if he knew that the meat was not prepared specifically for him its really more that vegetarianism follows naturally from the buddhist s practice buddhism or meditative practices in general are really about one thing paying attention retraining your mind to stay aware of what s going on around you and not get lost following the rush hour of thoughts that race through our minds sounds simple but its not in fact not paying attention is why i believe i found it so easy to gloss over thinking about where that side of bacon came from as you pay attention more a natural side effect is more compassion compassion for people your noisy neighbor yourself your boss your parents and yes animals it seems to me that when a mind isn t so busy moving on to the next and keeping up with whatever its keeping up with the human compassion that is naturally in us all finally gets a chance to focus on what s in front of it just happens ya don t even have to try also when you re in a state where you re not having many thoughts i think its easier to catch a glimpse of what its like to be an animal because presumably this is more like what its like for them their brains are wired incredibly similarly to our own minus some of the higher thought centers i think it must be so that animals feel pain and fear exactly as we do and when i say exactly i really mean exactly as we all learn in biology pain and fear arise in our reptilian brain this...