What is your diet - i.e. are you a vegan?

[hunter]

28. I've never followed any particular diet, but I always think about where my food comes from.

Mostly I decide to buy, or not to buy meat, for environmental reasons.

Eating lower on the food chain, foods that require less energy to get to my table, the treatment of animals, etc..

I'm not a vegetarian. My wife is.

I simply don't eat meat most days.

Humans are omnivores, and always have been for the millions of years there have been human animals. So I'm not going to dwell on that. I have dogs too and I don't think it would be right to force them to be vegetarians. Dogs are omnivores just like us to some extent, co-evolving with humans, but they are still less capable vegetarians than humans. Cats are simply carnivores. It wood seem hypocritical to me if I was a vegan because I didn't want to kill animals, but then I fed my dogs or cats meat.

I grew up with fish as our family's primary animal protein, mostly fish my dad caught until we were old enough to go ocean fishing with him. I've caught fish that weighed more than I did, but I didn't weigh much last time I did.

Modern industrial scale commercial fishing does terrible damage to the ocean, and internationally there is also great abuse of workers, some of them existing in conditions of slavery, their bodies thrown overboard as they die, or abandoned on the nearest shore when they are injured or just too old and worn out to work.

In my perfect world big fishing fleets would be banned, just as the commercial hunting of migratory birds in North America was banned. Shoot a couple of ducks as a licensed hunter to feed your family, that's fine. Shoot thousands of ducks to sell in the markets of New York City, no.

I might eat more grass fed beef if I could afford it. (My great-grandparents were ranching and dairy people; my mom's cousin and his son still have the original family homestead.) I don't like eating "factory farm" pork. Conditions in many of these industrial scale "pig farms" are horrible and inhumane.

I've no problem at all with people who hunt the wild pigs of California, so long as they eat them. I'd rather have the California wolves and grizzly bears back, and I oppose anyone hunting wolves or bears. Pigs are now the most dangerous wild animals in California, and they are destructive too, sometimes worse than overpopulations of deer. (If pigs hunted deer like wolves do then maybe things would be back in balance again, but for now things are not in balance. There are too many pigs and too many deer.) I don't hunt pigs or deer, but I won't turn down offerings of sausage. Wild pork prepared by an expert is nothing like bland corn-fed factory farmed supermarket pork.