vegetables

for quite a long time, i've wanted to be a vegetarian, or at least reduce my meat consumption form the currently exorbitantly high levels to normal, dietician-recommended levels. now why would an almost carnivore like myself want to do this? upon much pondering, i've come up with three reasons

1) Health - generally, eating heaps of vegetables is healthier than eating heaps of meat, both in terms of reduced sodium (and I do have some mild hypertension, due either to poor eating habits or secondary to my daily dose of NSAIDs) as well as fat
2) Environment - meat is REALLY REALLY bad for the environment. It takes thousands of liters of water to produced just a kilo of beef, and while cow seems to be the most egregious culprit, rest assured vegetables always leave a smaller footprint.
3) Ethics - sometimes i wonder if a thousand years from now, humanity will look back and say that the people of this generation were barbaric for eating animals that clearly can suffer and feel pain. at the moment, such thinking is probably concerned crazy for non-PETA members, but i've read enough sci fi (haha, geek i know), particlarly a book called K-Pax (good read!) that i wonder. another way of looking at it - if we've got heaps of laws preventing cruelty to animals (most often domestic animals), how is it at all okay to kill cows and pigs and chickens by the thousand? is there not some sort of deep moral incongruence there?

now, i've tried to hop on the veggie-train in the past, but this has usually ended in me going to the deli and buying a pound of cold cuts and just gobbling it down within a week. i'm not sure if my self-control has improved much at all since then, but let this post be some sort of declaration of affirmed effort - when i return from china, i will look into how to convert to at least semi-vegatarianism.

so wish me luck - i'll definitely need it. it's like someone trying to quit smoking, but i don't think they have anything that i could parallel to a nicotine patch :P