Carnal Reason

I stole the cartoon from The Agitator, who got it from the New Yorker, a magazine known for great cartoons. I thought it might nicely accompany this censored rant, Why vegetarians should be force fed with lard. Here’s an excerpt.

I became a vegetarian because I was told about what happens to meat in the gut. It stays there for ages and rots, getting infected with bacteria.

This argument is based on squeamishness and terror-tactics. That some veggies were converted to their creed by this argument is evidence that scare stories can work, even if they are rubbish. The notion that meat stays in the gut for much longer than other things I find amusing. The intestines are long narrow tubes, and food is worked along these tubes by the automatic contraction of bands of muscle around them. How might some vegetable matter over-take some meat? “Beep-beep! Pull over! Fast-track non-meat produce coming through!” Similar myths exist for meat’s sitting in the stomach for an age, in some cloistered waiting room, apart from less sinister food forms. No it doesn’t. Take a look at an anatomy text book and look at the shape of the stomach, then tell me where the separated-out meat stays for its alleged extended period. Also, offer me a mechanism by which the meat might be separated out in the first place. Last, offer me a reason why on Earth the body would have evolved to separate out meat and then harm itself by letting it go toxic.

That meat rots in the gut is true. However, it is also true that all food rots in the gut. The gut is filled with bacteria all the time. The bacteria break the food down. This is how digestion works. When your food exits your body in the form of faeces, a quarter to a half of its weight is made up of bacteria. If you hate the thought of bacteria in your body so much that you wish to avoid any breeding in there at all, then I’m afraid that even if you ate no food at all, you would not achieve your aim. There are more parasites living in and on your body than there are cells of your own body.

Posted on May 20th, 2006 by pwyll
Filed under: General, cartoon