Warning: yucky pictures.
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That’s what’s always amused me about various SF face-eating monsters. They’re all just us. Imagine, if you will, a fenced-off compound, where the violent, unpredictable warlike creature lives, their prey-species corralled for them by a lesser predatory thrall species, centuries of selective breeding and subjugation having trained them to act as guardians of the territory and controllers of the prey species.
Or, in fewer words, a sheep farmer with a couple of collie dogs 
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Wow, vore fetish goes back a lot further than I realized.
Everyone eats and everyone gets eaten. That includes us at some point.
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Full disclosure: vegetarian (not vegan; hence totally personally complicit in the continued existence of most said farm animals), not ethically bothered by individual acts of carnivory.
OH HOLY FLYING SHITBALLS YES, virtually every farm animal ever turned into meat or glue would be MUCH better off never having existed. And that’s with an extremely generous overestimation of the percentage who live on idyllic photo-ready free range joints before they make their appointment with the bolt gun.
Now, like I said, I’m not laying that on the doorstep of everyone who eats them. And I’m not a raving PETA chest-beater with a hundred gory stories of sadism queued up. But from a simple utilitarian-calculus standpoint? Yeah, in sum and in specific, farm animals end up light-years below zero on Bentham’s scale. You can make raising animals for food less than utterly brutal, but you can’t give them “good” lives as what’s left of their wild-type brains would understand it.
(To be clear, I’m not saying you can’t give a sheep or whatever a “good” life. But that’s totally inconsistent with any actual plan to eat it before it has turned into the gristliest and most expensive mutton in the world.)
I’m truly not trying to wade into a debate with anyone on either side of this here. Again, just to be absolutely transparent, it’s been 30 years since I even felt the faintest twinge of interest in lecturing someone for the moral implications of their food choices. But yeah. Farm animals meant for food fail any sort of “good life” test you can conceive of.
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Oh I agree, pretty much all of this Western preference toward meat is basically cultural indoctrination (basically brainwashing); your previous post where you mentioned that if we think we need meat, we don’t, I also totally agree with. There is nothing that says that meat provides things that other foods can’t.
People don’t realize that they can subsist (and thrive) on foods that they don’t normally think of as sustaining. For me, I once had the “screw everybody else” mindset of rejecting their “normality” for meat and went full vegan; for me my slipping is direct result of a psychological need for being sociable and connected to others.
I’ve always thought if I could just disconnect and reject those people completely, I could go full vegan again. For me the ideal is about not being affected by others.
And I should amend my previous sentiment that it’s not appetizing, because it is. My head and psychology becomes my own worst enemy in wanting to think about meat and how that somehow “overrides” veganism. It’s dehabilitating. I’ve done a lot of solo traveling and if I could isolate myself again fully, it would be an environment where I could go back to being fully vegan again.
What I do with cuisine is: flavored / spiced tofu (never bland), lots of nuts, seeds, and legumes. The nuts and seeds get tedious, so I need to work on a way to spice them up. Vegatables are always flavored - sauteed in a skillet again with seasonings.
I went through a time during my vegan period where I was getting repulsed by the smell of and thought of meat – so reprogramming one’s brain, genuinely, is possible and doable.
Fungi are more closely related to animals than plants, so eating them is probably worse.
Everything we eat screams
Salt.
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We live in a cruel world. There are animals that spawn thousands of babies. Most of them don’t make it to adulthood. The mola fish, for example, spawns 300 million eggs every breeding season. Rabbits breed like, well, rabbits. Most of them get eaten before they can breed. Eating animals is as natural as eating plants. People are not brainwashed into eating meat, most people, as do chimpanzees, like to eat meat. I respect vegans and vegetarians, and I am happy to cook appropriately for them when I host them, but it would be nice if the respect could be mutual.
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Catch!
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Is that Lost in Space?
Sodium and Chlorine are both formed by stars dying and going super nova. That’s one hell of a scream.
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Gummy Bears scream?
Higher-protein, lower-carb diets also do wonders for maintaining stable blood sugar levels, for people who care about that.
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Sure was. @TheGreatParis has reminded us of one of the first incidences of “Jumping the Shark”… and one that was well before ‘Happy Days’.
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OH man… considering what they are made from, oh yes… Very much so. I mean, I’m not a vegan or anything, but still.
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All our horror stories and fantasies involve so much projection - for example the Europeans who would thrill to the stories of explorers and foreign cannibals (completely fictionalized to emphasize taboo qualities) could nip off to the local pharmacy to buy a preparation of dried, ground human bodies to ingest (for “medicinal” reasons!) well into the 20th century. So many horror stories about aliens do just take human behavior and describe them in alien ways.
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o_0 say what? Tell me more, I am learning something new.
