I am a non-vegetarian. It is no secret. My wife is a vegetarian. So, we end up disucssing about the pros and cons of being either. She came across a nice piece on vegetarianism. I will disucss this here.
Most vegetaarians claim that they are vegetarian becasue they are not harming life. i always had an issue with this. These vegetarians are eating plants which is life and as far as I am concerned killing life. Non-vegetarians eat meat grown explicitly for consumption and so do vegetarians except the plants do not move. So, I always wondered whether there is a true vegetrian way of life. This brings me back to the discussion with my wife and the piece she read. Yes, you can be truly vegetarian, if you eat plant food that is discarded (for the lack of a better word) from the plants. So, you eat fruits that have fallen down from trees then that is not harming any life form. So then you are being a true vegetarian. When you grow paddy, at harvest time the plant dies and after that you use your paddy you are not killing the plant for food. So, this for me makes sense. Of course, it is pretty damn hard.
The article does mention that there is a natural gradation in life and animals have more choices than plants and hence killing them is "worse" than eating plants. So, if there is a scale, eating plants is better than animals. This seems dicey and a matter of opinion to me. But the concept of being a true vegetarian rings true to me. So, thought i would share this!
Feel free to disagree with me (I didn't have to say that, Did I?)
1 comment:
A couple of thoughts:
(0)I don't think anyone on this earth can survive thought harming another being at all. The food chain we learn about exists even if we are vegetarian, for example, we might kill an ant when walking, or kill rats/snakes to cultivate plants.
(i) plants, for the most part, re-grow when a part of them is cut off, whereas animals do not. This is not true for all plants, though, such as roots, etc.
(ii) Another idea is that plants represent a lower form of consciousness than animals, which have more freedom of thought and movement, whereas plants are more restricted. So in some sense, the idea is to minimize harm done; not that NO harm is done. The flip side, therefore, is as humans who have an 'evolved' consciousness, we contribute as much as possible positively.
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