This is not about vegetarianism

Here's Looking At You, u/lifesastich on reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/Art/s/SjhVjSaMxr 

If you would not be able to kill the cow that's now your steak, you should not be eating it. We come from hunters, but that past is far gone. Running around the tall grass plain trying to catch an antelope is now an activity reserved for lions. We only need to take a trip to the supermarket, and we can readily buy any type of meat we desire. The meat we eat has lost all its identity, it is just food, just nutrition, proteins and fats. There is no image of a living creature associated with it anymore.

Ignorance is bliss.

We also come from gatherers. Foraging fruits, mushrooms, nuts and seeds went hand in hand with fishing and hunting. And when those two failed, and the hunters came back empty-handed, there was still something to eat. Agriculture changed everything. Suddenly, there was a somewhat steady and controllable supply of food. But planting the seeds meant you had to grow roots with them. Consequently, we became less and less mobile, stuck to our lands and customs. Sedentariness is a double-edged sword.

Technological advancement in agriculture and farming made it easier to sustain a larger population, and thus, the numbers kept rising and rising, and food evolved from a basic need to a commodity. Yes, we still need to eat to survive, but nowadays, the vast majority of people eat for enjoyment. We're constantly improving our art of cooking, blending tastes and fragrances to excite as many neurons as possible. But we have forgotten where it all came from: hunting, gathering, and surviving. Do you even deserve to eat if you wouldn't be able to procure it yourself?

Yes of course! We are not solitary creatures. On the contrary: we are pack animals, we work together for the greater good of the community. Or at least, we should. It seems that we are becoming increasingly individualistic, increasingly driven by greed. It's a game capitalism plays with all of us, and yet, none of us seem to be able to quit. We dance on and on to the tunes of money and power, until our feet bleed and we're either too tired or too angry. Survival is an instinct, but it's been tainted by the comfort of modernity.

So, if you eat meat, would you be able to kill it with your own hands? Maybe if you needed to survive. But the meat you eat on a daily basis is not a need. The next time you reach for the package of chicken breast at the supermarket, think of that living creature it once was. Imagine you fed it every day for the past month. You raised it since it was an ugly featherless baby, and now you're holding it by the neck, head on a log with an axe in your hand. Would you chop it off and watch it bleed? Just to be able to eat some delicious soup.

The point is, if you were to raise your own animals, you would not be eating as much meat as you do now. You wouldn't kill a chicken every other day, or a cow every week. The resources required to grow them, the amount of time you must put into taking care of them every single day, it all renders eating their meat a luxury.

But now everything is grown on fast forward, bunched together in hellish barns, stuffed with water and hormones, and you don't get to see any of that. You can eat tomatoes, pumpkins and oranges all year round, no matter where you're from, no matter how many kilometers the bananas had to travel to get to you. We have access to foods and spices our ancestors could not even imagine. But this is not quite right. Abundance leads to overindulgence. It is not normal to eat cake every day, so why should you eat certain produce all year round? Perhaps, if we learnt to appreciate food more, we would stop wasting it. Going back to our roots, becoming humble and more frugal with what and how much we eat would benefit us all, both physically and mentally.

But ignorance is bliss.