Most of the time, DV draws a great mix of perspectives, with sharp, creative, open-minded people in abundance. On this one topic, however, you reliably turn into a pack of whining hypocrites, seizing on pat answers to avoid thinking through a subject that makes you uncomfortable.

It's understandable, food being a highly emotional topic, thoroughly tangled with love and guilt and oedipal whatnot in most people's psyche, all of which colors our decisions and responses before we can even consider things like nutrition and ethics. Nearly everyone goes on the defensive when they feel their food choices are under scrutiny, overreacting to perceived slights and creating conflict where there need be none. Honestly, the "I'm vegetarian BUT..." crowd is probably the most relaxed and secure in their diet of anyone, and least hypocritical in its defense.

For the ethics of omnivory in general, I'm with the Buddha: if you didn't kill or otherwise cause the death of a specific creature, you've done no harm. You can't do harm retroactively by eating the flesh of something already dead.

It is, however, perfectly appropriate to express disgust at disgusting practices, as in the video above. Current practices in industrial animal agriculture are not remotely necessary to our nourishment, and in fact DO NOT nourish us. The overabundance of animal products at artificially deflated prices impacts our health in ways that ultimately cost us a lot more than a certified organic, grass-fed steak; the facilities themselves are often as bad or worse than a steel mill in their output of solid waste and noxious gases, impacting the long term nourishing capacity of our environment; and employing people to essentially torment the damned eats away at our culture. Then there's the simple matter of quality--the products of an automated death camp come nowhere near the standards of an actual farm, and the pervasiveness of a cheap, crap standard limits both the viability of better producers and consumer access to their products. Rather than employing our collective will to look the other way, why not make the decision to demand that our food industries actually nourish our health and humanity?