Mostly Meat: A Manifesto

One thing that really annoys me in the diet world (diet, not nutrition) is all the false dilemmas: there’s a lot of black and white thinking. Vegans are particularly good at this, to them a ‘plant-based’ diet can only mean vegan and they group all diets including animal products in the same group whether it’s the standard American diet ‘SAD’, Atkins or someone who only eats fish once a month. The other end of the spectrum, the ‘zero-carb’ers group all others, even very-low-carb diets, under one banner of ‘those carbs will kill you sooner or later’ .

In this day and age this is more unacceptable than ever. The world is not black and white, those who aren’t with you are not going to stab you in the back. If someone has a different opinion, that’s fine! Even if you can’t even start to get your head around their point of view: if you deny others the right to have an opinion then you are selfish, as the only opinion allowed is yours.

We should be focusing on the similarities, not the differences. We all want to better ourselves and the world and we will get nowhere if we all keep fighting over the pettiest things. Yes caging animals in tiny cages and feeding them farming by-products is bad, but that doesn’t mean we need to all stop eating them, instead letting them graze freely on their natural diet before quietly being let off and gently put to sleep in a calm and peaceful atmosphere.

Yes, it may be better if people didn’t kill animals, but you will NEVER get the whole world to change, and even then lions in Africa are going to still hunt and eat the antelope. Do they need a moral lesson too?! The simple fact is that humans have been killing and eating other animals for a minimum of two million years. We’ve now found that chimpanzees, those noble peaceful leaf-eaters vegans try to emulate, kill and eat other animals. They even eat monkeys and other chimpanzees!

If you define yourself on an absolute then anything you do, no matter how small, outside that ‘purity’ is ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’, you have FAILED AS A HUMAN BEING! If you declare yourself vegan or zero-carb to the world, one bite of the wrong food and everyone around jeers, suddenly you’re on the other side of the fence, an outcast from your former comrades. This isn’t how it should be: a ‘planet-based’ diet should be allowed to include animal products in small amounts. Similarly just because you eat meat doesn’t mean you’re a complete carnivore.

That is why I named this blog ‘Most meat...’, because I’m not a carnivore, I’m an omnivore and I will never give up eating plants completely. This doesn’t make me a failure for living up to some absolutist standard. I am what I am and mostly meat is what I eat.