Meatetarian or Plantetarian but not Vegetarian

"A guy I once knew, who worked in a slaughterhouse, used to say that if he kills a cow, it feeds a lot of people. And the cow dies as instantly as possible.  If he eats a handful of sprouts, each sprout is alive and is slowly crushed to death in his jaws."

The quote's from the Food Choices blog by my favorite psychic in New Orleans, Alobar Greywalker.

For a long time, I've had a problem with vegetarianism, too.  Not as eloquently delineated a problem as Alobar's, but eating one type of living thing but not eating another type never sat right with me.

What's the difference between plants and animals? I can't really tell, because they're both alive. Whatever we have that most people call souls, I'm pretty sure that both plants and animals have those things.

A lot of plants don't have as neatly defined of a soul as most animals do. With most animals, if you cut off their heads, they die. You can cut off a lot of a lot of a plant and it won't die. Most animals, at least the animals we see most of the time, the animals depicted on the Noah's ark pictures, fit neatly into cartoonish monogamous male-female relationships.  Most plants don't really fit into a happy family mold. One of the largest organisms in the world is this hill of trees here in Utah, and even though most plants have male and female parts, when's the last time you saw two parent plants with a bunch of little baby plants walking down the street?  Maybe that's why it's easier to eat plants, because they're heathens.

I think I heard once that plants like being eaten. Maybe that's just similar to when bullies beat up kids in grade school and tell them that they like being beaten up.  Maybe plants don't really like being eaten. I'm sure animals don't either, but this is mostly about plants.

I have a lot of friends who are vegetarians, or wanna-be vegetarians, or wanna-be vegans.  Whenever I talk to them, I always wonder what I should call my own philosophy.  Vegetarian is an unfortunate word, because it seems that you'd be a vegetarian if you worshiped vegetation, and if you worshiped vegetables and plants, you wouldn't mercilessly crush dozens of live sprouts to death with your hard pointy teeth. It seems that meatetarian would be a better term for one who worships meat so much that he or she doesn't eat it.

So my similar philosophy, if I were to espouse one, would be to eat only meat. I think I like plants just a tad more than I like animals, so if I were to avoid ingesting some kind of organism, it would probably be avoiding plants.  I'd eat only meat and avoid plants.  Not in an Atkins-y kind of way, because I'd eat everything besides plants, I'd eat as many non-plant carbs as I could find, if those kind of carbs even exist..

So, I'd be a real meatetarian or maybe I'd call myself a plantetarian, to be technically accurate.





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