I am a Pescatarian

[Nique]

That means I'm a vegetarian + seafood. I thought I would share my experience with you guys, and invite you to share your foray into dieting or changing your diet permanently.

I have been doing this for about a month. I have also tried to avoid deep fried food, and have basically cut off soda almost completely. Originally I was going to go full on veggie - no meat whatsoever, but then I realized I would be cutting off more delicious food than I could bear. Specifically, sushi. I am realizing now how much more lean seafood generally seems to be and have decided that this diet is overall the optimal choice for me.

If you have not tried to expunge something bad from your diet ever, or even for a while, I encourage you to try it if for nothing else than personal curiosity. I have noticed a significant change in the way I feel on a daily basis, and it is especially apparent after I slip up and eat something I probably shouldn't. For instance, I had some pretty greasy and salty fries with my veggie-burger at a restaurant recently. This would have been a little more normal 2-3 months ago, but after a month of eating mostly fruit veggies cheese and fish, I didn't react too well to the fries. Nothing serious, but noticeable.

Also, even though I haven't lost weight, I feel lighter. I imagine this stems from digesting everything a lot more easily and thus being more comfortable. I still need to work on cutting my portions and I think not taking in too many carbs as well, but all that grease and fat out of my diet feels pretty good. It feels good to avoid fast food places as well, and to have a solid reason why I shouldn't go there - if there's nothing there I can eat, why go?

Anyway, I'm not following any special diet plan or anything other than what I've decided, and I can't really recommend anything specific as far as diet and exercise. But I was feeling pretty good about this and wanted to share. Feel free to ask me any questions you want and share your own stories as well.

[Wigmund]

Originally Posted by Nique

I'm a Pescatarian

That means I'm a vegetarian + seafood.

And here I was thinking this was a thread about joining the Holy Order of Joe Pesci.




Ok, back to somewhat serious - I'm too much of an omnivore to go vegetarian or any of the phases thereof. I enjoy my steaks, ham, chicken, and whatever other animals can't get away from the butcher fast enough (oh god that reminds me, I need to see if my father bagged any deer this season). I'm a follower of the belief that humans are geared to eat whatever we can get our grubby hands on if it doesn't kill or severely poison us after eating it.

The thing that's bad about modern cuisine is that most foods are loaded down with preservatives and other artificial fillers that really aren't good for you in any decent quantities. Problem is, most foods that I can afford are cheap because they are loaded down with this shit. Going organic would be great, but it's too fucking expensive.

[McTahr]

Blah blah vegetarian for a long while. Weight lost, and general feeling up, but ability to find food fucking anywhere when eating out because vegetarian selection is the goddamn bigfoot way down.

Considering vegan, but I love chocolate milk in the name of a lost friend.

Oh, and I have weird dreams where I fuck up and eat meat at least once a week or so.

[Tev]

Originally Posted by McTahr

Oh, and I have weird dreams where I fuck up and eat meat at least once a week or so.

That's your inner carnivore. It slumbers in the recesses of your mind dreams of steak.

[Amake]

I like being able to digest any food I encounter, so I'd never cut anything out from my diet entirely. Cutting down is another matter, but when it comes to health I find exercise more useful than any diet.

Let's talk about ethical vegetarianism too! Or as Steve Dallas once called it, food hugging hippie &#$%. Recent research has shown that vegetables have emotions - a guy hooked his plants up to polygraphs and found that they reacted to stress and pain, and even worried when he was thinking about a trip out of town he was planning to make. If it turns out cucumbers are silently screaming in pain when you chew them, would that make eating anything that has ever lived equally immoral? Or should we continue to feel bad about eating animals cause they have faces, like us?

[Seil]

I generally dislike diets, or getting rid of anything in my diet. It's not because I hate animals, but meat tastes good. I have recently started to drink a lot more water and eat a bit healthier - less deep fried, more rice, less junk food and alcohol.

[Great Cartoonist]

I just eat a whole bunch of foods from all categories. Steak, broccoli, goat cheese, rice vermicelli, black fungus--if it tastes good, I'll eat it.

And apparently, being extremely selective about what you eat could kill you.

Also, spicy salmon rolls with avocado tastes great.

[Hanuman]

I stopped drinking the occasional soda the day I figured out that Kerosene is cheaper than any soda on the market.

A balanced diet that includes meat (seafood is meat) is necessary to being balanced health-wise, otherwise you'll have to figure out some way to ingest the BCAA level amino acids found in meat to help maintain your insulin levels, otherwise you'll get scrawny... muscle-wise.

[Lyaer]

I've been an ethical vegan, for all extents and purposes since I was maybe 13 (technically I'm more of an ethical vegetarian who additionally doesn't condone the practices of the mainstream dairy industry). To my knowledge, I've never slipped up in a huge way since I first went off dairy (I was raised vegetarian for "health" reasons based on my parents' religious beliefs and never tried meat), so I have no idea if I would have any negative reaction were I to (re)introduce animal products into my diet. I'm relatively healthy, but would be moreso if I exercised more and could remember to take my supplements. Definitely on the skinny side.

I was also diagnosed with a gluten sensitivity a few years ago, which I can say presents a much more restrictive diet than veganism ever has for me. I never noticed any cramps or anything before my diagnosis, which left me a little skeptical, so I've been experimenting lately, and I've found that I can eat some gluten here or there and feel perfectly fine, but if I overdo it, I start to get gas pains, so I mostly hold back still.

I find I can still eat a fairly diverse set of foods for a reasonable net price. I live in Portland, OR, though, which is a pretty diet conscious city on the whole, and I still find it a pain to eat out. There are some foods I miss (decent fake cheeses are rare, spendy, and limited to only a few flavors, and storebought breads are pretty much universally sub par, probably because egg and gluten are two of the most important binders in this culture--there are some good fake icecreams, though), but substitutes will only improve and diversify over time, with increasing demand.

Originally Posted by Invisible Queen

Let's talk about ethical vegetarianism too! Or as Steve Dallas once called it, food hugging hippie &#$%. Recent research has shown that vegetables have emotions - a guy hooked his plants up to polygraphs and found that they reacted to stress and pain, and even worried when he was thinking about a trip out of town he was planning to make. If it turns out cucumbers are silently screaming in pain when you chew them, would that make eating anything that has ever lived equally immoral? Or should we continue to feel bad about eating animals cause they have faces, like us?

(I'm not entirely convinced yet that plants can genuinely suffer, but I'll accept that they do for the sake of argument.)

I would suggest we -will- continue to feel worse about eating animals because they have faces like us. All else being equal, similarity tends to breed empathy. As to it being equally immoral, if it can be demonstrated that plants feel pain and distress to the same degree as animals, then yes. I would argue that the most intuitive and relevant metric by which to determine whether something deserves moral consideration--that is, whether we should take its interest into account when making decisions, and avoid causing it undue pain and distress--is the extent to which that thing has an interest, or experiences pain and distress. Anything else--intelligence, achievement, language, ability to reciprocate moral treatment--is only tangentially relevant, and will tend to require arbitrary line drawing that highlights egocentrism in a given moral system.

You are of course right to point out hypocrisy in the animal rights movement, as in any other. However, if it is wrong to harm plants and animals, it does not therefore follow that because we do harm plants it would therefore be more right for us to harm animals as well. Furthermore, when you argue against the arbitrary line drawn between plants and animals on the basis that it is based on similarity to us, you should recognize that it applies just as well to the arbitrary line drawn between less intelligent animals and humans. Following this line of logic, it would seem that if we don't give sentient plants moral consideration, neither should we give humans moral consideration. Rather than argue that I should be able to kill and eat whomever I please, because we're going to kill something anyway, I would argue that we should stop hurting plants.

This is problematic, however. I don't advocate that humans stop eating. I certainly don't intend to stop eating myself. True, if humans were to allow themselves to die out, they would stop being directly responsible for the suffering of other species, but given the competitive nature of the natural world, it isn't as though plants and animals would have it all that much better without us. If anything, we would be eliminating the only group capable of even partially mitigating their suffering.

Now, I don't go around condemning people who eat meat--it's counterproductive, and I know that I also am a benefactor of a system that thrives on the exploitation of other species, regardless of where I draw the line, dietarily. But even if I did condemn meat eaters, I would have a very difficult time doing so in the cases of people whose only choices are to eat other animals or starve to death, as I have little doubt is the case for certain foraging societies, especially in hostile environments, etc. This is in the same vein that I wouldn't condemn someone for killing in self-defense. Likewise, I would find it difficult to condemn the entire human race for eating sentient plants, so long as this is our only viable option. But this certainly doesn't mean that I am happy with the state of affairs, or that I think we are wholly justified in killing for the sake of pleasure (as in recreational hunting beyond that necessary for population control, eating meat/sentient plants just for the taste, without regard to whether it is necessary for survival, or I guess absently plucking leaves etc.).

The solution? I would argue, the solution would be to continue work on artificial foods, until we can duplicate all of the flavors, textures, and nutrients we need and enjoy in a lab, cheaply, without involving any sentient lifeforms. This is a bit sci fi, for now, but as far as I can tell, not inconceivable. Barring this possibility, we should continue our research into plant and animal sentience, so we can at least prioritize which species are capable of the most suffering (to the extent it can be quantified), and continually shift toward phasing the "more sentient" species out of our diets and products, and minimizing the suffering of those that we are forced to kill or otherwise injure for our own survival.

I also advocate keeping our exploitation of sentient plants and animals as close to the bottom of the food chain as possible, since even if vegetables were to experience pain and distress to the same degree as a cow, you have to hurt a lot more plants to raise and mass produce enough cattle for people to live off of than you do to just live off of the plants themselves.

As far as reaching this point as a society, I think that the best thing anyone can do is just propagate the value that all sentient entities deserve moral consideration, and to participate in the market in such a way that it becomes more and more profitable for companies to make lifestyles like vegetarianism easier, cheaper, and tastier for those of us who would choose to dabble in them to one degree or another. If there is less demand for meat and more demand for good substitutes, then the market will respond, on the whole, by killing fewer animals, and producing more and higher quality substitutes, which is better for everybody. So I guess I wouldn't say that I don't care what other people eat, but I don't see much benefit to having too extreme an attitude against people who don't see it as a moral issue, or who do, but find it difficult to drastically change their diets, because it just polarizes the issue and makes people defensive--more resistant to any change, and more likely to react in the exact opposite direction.

The fact is, regardless of the pain that is caused, in the current social climate, it is very difficult to see human and non-human interests as equal, or in many cases even remotely comparable. While I personally tend to take a more objective, utilitarian approach to morality, I still do not personally care for animals with anything approaching the same empathy I do for other people, all else being equal. Any time anyone tries to introduce a new moral into a society, a lot of people are going to resist it. So much of morality is how people are raised, so new morals are unlikely to feel intuitive to the majority, and no one wants to be restricted from an activity that they don't see a problem with. It is my personal hope that this particular moral will catch on, and eventually people will look back at (people like) me with my moderate regard for animals and possibly plants with the same sort of mixed feelings with which I look back on people like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln for their halfway attitudes toward slavery and racial equality.

Edit: Er. Long vegan rant. I know. Didn't mean to derail, but I felt compelled to defend my position.

[McTahr]

So far as I can tell from what the internet says, mostly the research done is correlating APs in plants, especially in carnivorous plants, to that of nerve tissue and fibers in animals.

Which, honestly, is shaky at best without a CNS.