to think parents shouldn't bring their child up vegetarian?

[Picante]

Unless for religious reasons.

Yes this is a thread about a thread but I think I was annoying too many people over there so I've started my very own for people to get annoyed with me here!

I just think it's mean. Meat is such a huge part of our culture and fair enough if you're old enough to decide that you don't want to kill animals... but children should be given all sorts of food in the early years, including meat, until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves!

meat yuk yuk yuk

i dont give meat to my dc,s ever why on earth do i want my precious children to eat dead animals.
why as i want them to have morals and to know eating animal and killing them for food is wrong.
surely this is a personal decision

lol @ it wouldnt exist if it wasnt going to be eaten....what a load of rot.

i take my children to see the animals and we visit the farm shop often they do know where meat comes from but think its cruel which it is
im an organic vegetable farmer and we eat many veggies/fruits and have fantastic meals instead of your old meat and 2 veg....

pisces all the dc,s know exactly where there food comes from.....in our garden

Ok, so if its sooo natural, why dont YOU go out onto the wild, with no weapons of any kind, and see how Mother NATURE has provided you with the equipment to catch food!

Lions, foxes, tigers have sharp teeth, sharp claws, and the ability to run fast.
Do you? No.

Cows - slow, blunt teeth, and generally rubbish - meant to catch food? No
Meant to eat grass? Yep

Ergo - Mother Nature didnt want you to catch food!

DUH!!!

Get a grip people. We dont have the teeth, claws or running power that other meat eaters have to help them catch food.

"it wouldnt exist if it wasnt going to be eaten....what a load of rot"

Do you think if we all became veggie the farmers would keep the animals there for their own good? Perhaps keep the herds as pets? They'd all be slaughtered and not replaced.

"Mother Nature didnt want you to catch food!"

We could get through a winter on vegatables because we have agriculture and can store them, but imagine our ancesters living outside in the winter and trying to manage just on what they could dig out of the snow.

For millions of years we've eaten animals. Stop if you want, but lets not pretend it's ssmething unusual.

"If you have a good balanced diet at home you can accept a Greggs sausage roll(are they worse than normal ones? "

Not sure where Greggs source their pork but I am quite partial to considering ethical issues when parting with my cash and pigs who have been kept in a cage for 5 years that is so small that they can't turn around is not a system of farming I choose to support (so buy British pork) - and when I inform my kids - it's no surprise that they find the system cruel too.

I'm a veggie but I don't stop my kids from eating meat (although I don't cook it) but I do try as far as possible to ensure the meat they eat is ethically produced.

Before they tried meat for the first time, we took them to a farm to explain the process. Treating animals with respect is not over emotionalising the issue. Intensive farming is something I find unacceptable - I'm quite sure most kids would be very sensitive to that too, if only parents were honest with them about where their food comes from.

Has anyone given their kids the choice of eating an animal that has been treated well and one that has been abused through intensive farming?

I only ever cook veggie food, so visiting school friends get food cooked from scratch (not processed crap) with good quality ingredients - meat eating kids leave my house telling their Mums how good the food is in my house - hardly what I'd call a hardship.

And as for health, my mainly veggie kids have had one day off school in the last 2 years.

"We could get through a winter on vegatables because we have agriculture and can store them, but imagine our ancesters living outside in the winter and trying to manage just on what they could dig out of the snow."

All other species manage!!!

flubdub, Cows- meant to eat grass= four stomachs

humans- not meant to eat grass= only one stomach

some other primates eat meat, so no reason humans can't, even in the wild

lots of evidence that humans did, very early on

snd human running power is amazing; have you seen the David Attenborough sequence where a man brings down an antelope simply by chasing it on foot?

Personally, I do think we should all eat more vegetarian food, because this is what the planet currently needs. And the Cory household is moving in that direction.

But pretending that this was always right and natural just seems bizarre. How are Eskimos or other Arctic peoples supposed to subsist on a diet of vegetables? They'd get pretty thin. Where I lived as a child, the only vegetable that would grow (and badly) was potatoes (which of course is a very late import); other than that people ate a lot of fish because they lived on a bare rock.

I think we should all try to eat local food as much as we can. That's going to mean a lot of vegetables in this country, where vegetables grow extremely well. And in the north it's going to mean elk meat and spuds.

"Define 'spurious'"

I mean when people say 'oh vegetarian food tastes of nothing' or similar. Well, only if you are cooking it badly, IMO. Or 'you won't like that' for no very good reason (have heard this said to a child in a restaurant who asked 'why not?' and the answer was 'it's vegetarian' - it was only pasta with tomato sauce and I bet the people in question buy spaghetti hoops and baked beans etc).

@ becklespeckle. Thanks!

We only buy meat that has been produced reasonably ethically, noidea, but I would definitely explain why we do that to DD when she is older. She's only 2.9 right now and a bit sensitive so I probably won't be explaining battery chickens any time soon!

FWIW, my meat-obsessed DD is skinny and pale but I rather suspect she'd be like that no matter what she was eating.

Yes, but its not just vegetables is it??
I havnt survived for the last 14 years (since being nine!!!) on Lettuce, have I?

however, I would love to see you chase an antelope, and catch and kill it, then skin it with your bear hands, as "nature intended".

re skinny and pale - I have until the last few years always been skinny and pale and not ever been a vegetarian. However, numerous of my friends think I am one and even a random person who I had just met asked me if I was, "because I look like one".

I did ask her to tell me what a vegetarian looks like and she rather shied away from the question - I guess she thought it was ok to imply that I was skinny and pale but maybe a step to far to actually say it out loud.

S'rubbish anyway - my vegetarian friends aren't skinny or pale.

And I never mentioned Grass!!
My example was that cows are VEGETARIAN, and therefore equiped in such a way; slow, no claws, blunt teeth.

On the other hand, most primates are vegetarian, and yet, bizzarly they seem to have most of our distinguishing features;
no claws
no razor sharp teeth
the inability to chase after an antelope.

Coinidence, yeah, course hmm

Anyway, Im going to bed, as my unhealthy diet, and crazy beliefs are making me tired. Maybe its my aneamia, or maybe Im just too damn pale. Tutut, I dunno. Us crazy hippies.

Got to go, job interview in the morning, and I just wont be able to drag myself out of bed in the morning due to my bad diet.

Mabye I should inject the meat?
Anyways, se ya. smile

No, what I am saying is that traditional peoples cannot have survived in northern climes by eating things like soya beans which will not grow there. Elks and deer eat tree bark and grass they did out of the snow: human stomachs are not designed for this and people have been known to die from such a diet during times of famine.

My running is not good, but if I needed to kill and skin an animal I am sure that I could cope with that without problems: I come from a northern county where some of my relatives still hunt and fish, because that's what people have always needed to do to survive there. It's just nothing odd to me. Though I don't think humans have ever skinned animals with their bare hands though; if faced with the need to do so, I would use some suitable tool, just like prehistoric man.

As it is, I live in a UK city, so instead I go down to the shop and buy my food, a lot of it vegetarian. But this doesn't necessarily seem a more natural way of living than the more traditional kind I saw as a child.

Cory makes a good point about Eskimos. Flubdub, I'd like to see you trying to be a veggie there

I don't think I've ever objected to people eating vegetables, but we have people like disneystar (for example) telling us we are immoral. So much for it being personal choice then.

Our teeth and gut are those of an omnivore, and an omnivorous diet does tend to include some meat when it's available.

Not all meat sources will/can run away, chicks taken from the nest require relatively little effort.

I think it's misleading to say what nature intended, nature has no real intention behind it, evolution doesn't occur because nature has a plan.

Besides evolution resulted in us walking upright which freed our hands, in time leading to the ability to make and use tools for the purposes of hunting,gathering,making shelters etc, our alternative to the claws, power and speed of carnivores.

Haha, my smilies are links!!! Oops, anyway, still going bed.
Night all.

bloody hell 14 pages!!!!
does OP propose that vegetraian parents cook meat for their dcs?
does she realise how bonkers that is?
I trust she is offering her dcs a full range of possible foods, including locusts, grubs, whale meat, dog and horse?
Of course you offer your kids the food you eat yourself (if you have any sense) this is what any normal person does.
And in our case they grow up perfectly healthy.
so OP is BVU. Sorry if I have missed some of the debate, 14 pages is a lot to trawl through!

I really tried to restrain myself from adding to this thread as it's mere existence grates on my nerves.

But hey ho - I have to pick up on some of what I have read so far. To clarify I am veggie my dh is and our 3 children are being raised as veggie.

First Horton and Beckle - I fail to see how any vegetarian parent could avoid 'actively discouraging' their children to eat meat as the very fact that you are the biggest influence on your child (at least in their early years) means that your choices are impacting on them, so aside from tucking into a bacon sarnie...? What can I do?

And Pisces - I was borm in a tiny village in the countryside with a cow field at the bottom of the garden, next door neighbour who let me help him skin rabbits and morris dancers on the village green etc. The fact I know where and how food is produced and I am not sentimental about cows and sheep. Has not stopped me questioning my diet and deciding that I cannot eat meat, fish or fowl. That intensive farming of animals is wrong and that I am happier since I cut meat products out.

The diet is very sensible in a heavily populated world where food shortages may one day become an issue. The whole world will need to evaluate its intake of meat, as producing beef burgers requires much more land and resources than bean burgers! So my kids knowing their mung beans from their Quinoa might not look so pampered and faddy then!!

So yabu - my kids, my responsibility to raise them in the best way I can - to be well balanced healthy individuals - I don't think anyone needs to call social services because ds hasn't had a chicken nugget or even a prime steak - he is just fine thanks.

I would be a veggie even if I was dying on a desert island, and there were chickens running around me!
However, I doubt many other people will share that view, and of course, I would not instill THAT on my kids.

I really do need to go now. Job interview at 9am.

But if you died from starvation on your desert island, who would look after your kids, flubdub?

I expect my ancestors have had an interest in keeping alive for the sake of their kids as much as anything else.

Though I fully accept that this does not apply to life in modern Britain, where the argument for vegetarianism seems to me a fairly strong one.

The chickens in that situation would have no such qualms about eating you Flub if they had the necessary means.

Because chickens are often a good place to look for moral guidance?

I think you pass from principled to nutter if you're on a desert island, literally starving and refuse to kill and eat a chicken.

That deserves a Darwin award for sure.

I will add if I was starving on a desert island that chicken would be toast sorry chicken, but at least it would be freerange.

But tbh those sort of arguements used to get on my tits as a student at parties there would always be some drunken twat rugby bloke, cornering me on the question of my vegetarianism coming up with bizarre and convoluted thought experiments to force me into admitting I would eat meat, or vote tory or whatever (i.e. "yes well if there was a nuclear war and I was in a bunker underground with no means of getting out and I was surrounded by tins of spam ..."). He would then be so smug as if he scored a point for the carnivores... bizarre. Why does it matter to others so much - 'tis beyond my poor weak protein deficient mind.

it does not matter for the original argument- whether parents should let their children be vegetarian

it does matter for the second argument that has evolved: that meat-eating is unnatural and not what Mother Nature intended

if you come from a traditional society that depends on meat/fish eating, you are going to find that offensive