By Keith Stewart

Natural is one of the big words of the moment, with natural ingredients the key to food processors selling their brands, and with most consumers thinking that 'natural' means healthy. That makes no sense, as anyone with a passing understanding of the natural world can tell you. Natural may mean pure water and vitamin packed fruit juice, but it also means botulism and King Cobras, both of which can kill you quicker than it takes to phone the rescue helicopter.

Natural does not mean safe, just as man-made does not mean dangerous. Efficient drainage and antibiotics are totally contrived by humans and are amongst the safest things we have ever created, safe in the sense that both make for longer, healthier human lives. Which brings me to vegetarianism, which is neither natural nor safe.

The only reason humans ever become vegetarians is because of ideology (religion or some food fad), or because of misplaced morality. I say misplaced because the morality posited by vegetarians is focussed on the idea that killing is, by definition, bad, and as eating meat is only possible if a living thing is killed, meat-eating is bad.

The problem for vegetarians basing their diet on such morality is that it is a moderated morality that is sustainable if the wrongness of taking a life is associated only with lives that are identifyiably human-like. Taking animal lives, especially those of mammals, which have senses similar to humans as well as similar body design, is the worst crime a moral vegetarian can commit. Drinking milk is less compromised, because milk has no obvious arms, legs or eyes to be extrapolated from the meat on one's plate. The fact that milk demands the killing of baby animals is removed enough from most vegetarians personal experience and their flexible morality.

Killing other living things such as fish, insects, microbes, yeasts and such-like is less likely to alarm no-killing moralists, on a declining scale from fish down according to the visible comparison with human life. Way down on the scale, below fish and probably even some insects, are vegetables. All are killed, some buy the act of eating, others by being torn from the ground and starved of life support to the point where they are suffocated or starved to death.

All this is of course a specious argument, because humans are designed to be omnivores over millions of years of evolution, and like all animals, humans kill to live. Eating demands we kill living things, vegetable or animal. Other foods, such as wine and beer, demand the killing of millions of yeasts, after various plants are maimed in the process of harvesting their crop. Fact is, life is death, and vice versa. The sooner we get used to that fact and manage it in the best interests of a sustainable environment, the better it is for the whole planet, as well as the human race.

Vegetarianism is a romantic nonsense that shelters those who object to death from the realities of their existance. In a life more closely associated with the 'natural' world such people would starve to death, but in contemporary Western society that is not the an option. Instead vast organisational and production structures are in place to allow vegetarians to indulge their sensitivities by shielding them from involvement in killing things to survive. Some of this comes in the form of alternatives to meat so that their metabolism has protein enough for its natural sustenance.

By indulging vegetarians with the idea that they can have a choice about their metabolic functions we create a problem. That problem is that vegetarianism offer an ideological means of avoiding the demands of living naturally. They are by definition an unnatural option.

While this is not in itself a bad thing, it does encourage the idea that we can avoid the basic rules of life on this planet, and in doing so compromise our survival be beliveing that everything has a sythetic option. The complexity of life and the past few thousand years of experience tell us that sticking to the basics as closely as possible is the only way our species can survive. It is essential if global population is to be mainatianed at anything like present levels.

Quite simply, vegertarianism is completely un-natural and so it is dangerous. Allowing people to believe in vegetarianism is like letting them believe there is no such thing as climate change. In a sane world it should be discouraged wherever possible.