Holy Cow! In today’s world the issue of meat eating raises a lot of controversial questions. Many people believe that human intelligence should guide us to forbid from killing animals. This belief is far from my opinion. I was raised in an omnivore family. My father eats over five kilograms of meat every day. He’s strong and healthy. I find it funny how depressed he sometimes gets when he comes home from work and sees that mom made a soup for dinner. It seems like he’s closer to the primitive caveman than any modern human can still be, and this leads me to think that forbidding of meat eating is just as unethical as, some may think, eating it is. Humans are carnivores designed to eat meat. The evidence of thorough research proves that the human body is more of the carnivore than herbivore. The length of our digestive tract is similar to carnivores’. Our stomachs produce hydrochloric acid that breaks down a variety of food by activating protein-splitting enzymes. The HCL is nowhere to be found in herbivores’ organisms. Also, the presence of the multiple stomachs declares a tremendous difference between us and herbivores. These few and a lot more differences destroy the popular claim that people should follow a non-meat diet. The answer to what we should eat is deeply encoded in the structure of our bodies (Comparison Between). The studies also show that going back to Stone Age nutritional habits can be very beneficial. Dr. Staffan Lindeberg, an expert in this field, proved one of its advantages in his research in 2007 on people with type 2 diabetes. Among people who were put on a Stone Age diet and those who were on Mediterranean diet (mostly fruits and vegetables) for the duration of three months, 26 percent drop of blood sugar was noticed in the Hunter-Gatherer eaters (Eat like a Hunter). “The evolution hasn’t been going on for long enough to adjust human’s digestive tract to what we eat today,” my A&P’s professor says. United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization reports that each year 925 million people are malnourished (World Hunger Statistics). In India, the country we all know well for its ‘Holy Cow’ belief, the population exceeds 1 billion people with fifty percent of them not being provided with adequate nourishment. In this country sixty million children are starving while the ‘walking food’- Holy Mother Cows, are wandering on the streets. As if it wasn’t enough irony in it the “overburdened government of India provides shelter, food, and medical care for homeless aging cows” (The Question of Cultural Stupidity). In the anonymous article written by India’s citizen, he reports on how the situation looks like on the streets:”Millions of cows are allowed to wander the streets, eating what they will, dropping their dung on pavements and street with complete impartiality, and aggressively attacking people” (Holy Cow). The author, himself, was a victim of cow’s attack. He was “repeatedly injured, and once potentially lethally” (Holy Cow). From the report of someone who actually lives there, we can notice the irony and stupidity of peoples’ choice to starve but not to eat the cows. We all should be able to see that beautiful ideology fails to work in practical life. Just trying to picture ourselves being the starving to death family, when the food was at our fingertips, is extremely hard to digest. Understandable becomes the attitude when the author says: “And I eat beef, not because I like it particularly, but for revenge” (Holy Cow).
Assuming that eating meat is unethical, what is the alternate solution? In today’s world millions of people become vegetarians. The vegetarian diet restricts from eating foods of animal origin, but not many people are true vegetarians or vegans. Most of them eat some types of animal products. Corby Kammer says in the article What Vegetarians Don’t Get that “It is estimated that of the five or six million self-described vegetarians in America no more than two percent are vegans,” and quickly explains the nature of it: “They like the word vegetarian because of the implied virtue” (What Vegetarians). People simply like to think that vegetarianism is more ethical toward animals and it’s healthier. The truth about vegan’s ideology can be misleading in this sense. People like the idea, but in real life they poorly follow the rules. These, who follow, face other challenges. Because vegan diet is extremely strict the following of its rules can be very difficult and complicated. Not many people specialize in creating the individual dietary plans, and many don’t have the money to pay for exclusive plans. This often leads to malnutrition and vitamins deficiency. “Strictly vegetarian diet is one of the most common causes of B12 deficiency in our country,” says Asha Shah in her study on megaloblastic anemia (Megaloblastic Anemia). Also, the thorough research done among Taiwanese omnivore and vegetarian women in 2011 showed that “vegetarians have higher levels of CRP than omnivores, along with higher homocysteine and triglycerides” (Taiwanese Vegetarians). Another study from 2005 conducted in China compared vegetarians’ heart disease markers against an omnivorous control group. The results were pretty surprising. Vegetarians had significantly “thicker arterial walls, reduced flow-mediated dilation, higher blood pressure and higher triglycerides (again) than omnivores” (Vascular Dysfunction). These studies prove that vegetarian diet isn’t necessarily a better choice when it comes to a healthy eating.
The choice of becoming vegan is not only stimulated by health issues. A lot of people believe that animals should be treated in just the same matter as people treat themselves. Vegans believe that all animals’ should be given freedom. To argue with this ideology I refer to the poem “In Praise of Self-Deprecation,” written by Nobel’s Prize laureate Wislawa Szymborska,
The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.
The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly live as they live and are glad of it.
The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilos but in other respects it is light.
There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun.

The poet strongly implies that animals have no ‘ethical’ problem when it comes to killing each other. We all know that animals can be aggressive toward people as well. I’ve been bitten by dogs multiple times, and even though it didn’t make me hate them I still fear them. The evolution decided that humans rule the world. We coexist with animals, and we only choose a small part of the huge animal world that serves as a source of our food. It’s not unethical to eat them. In some parts of the world the hunting is the only way that people can actually survive. In Jack London’s story To Build a Fire readers are exposed to a picture of extremely harsh nature. London describes in details the freezing background of one man’s tragic adventure. The traveler, who “was without imagination” is determined to survive, but insanely cold temperatures aren’t in his favor. The reader is being introduced here to the world so cold that it’s difficult to imagine that anyone can live there. But people do, they follow the rules of nature and in order to survive they hunt.
For me, eating meat is not only ethical, but it’s also the best nutritional choice I can make. I have wheat allergy. It is the kind of food intolerance that forbids you from eating wheat, soy, rye, legumine, and many more. If I was to choose to be a vegan, my life would become miserable. The vegan diet is so strictly limited to very few sources of protein that I could barely survive. People like me, or others with lactose intolerance or celiac disease have not much choice but to be omnivores for life. This is my main reasoning for thinking that eating meat is ethical. If I believed it wasn’t I’d possibly must starve myself to death. But it seems like the constantly improving technology might be bringing us another solution to the problem. There’s in fact research on in vitro meat. Shmeat is the common name for the meat grown in labs. This type of solution is thought to be available to people on a large scale in the middle of the century. The cultured produced meat will be healthier and possibly will end the long time discussion about ethics of meat eating and animals’ killing. Until then I will be enjoying the natural meat. In conclusion, making meat unethical means that we have to sacrifice getting the nutritional benefits our ancestors had since the Stone Age. The benefits of meat have been proven to be very important to the way our bodies function. The existing alternatives are not suitable for everyone yet, and many people will never be able to conduct a meatless diet. Meat eating and hunting are often the only options for people to feed their families. Calling meat eating unethical in the cases of starvation and widespread malnutrition is cruel and narrow-minded. I don’t know what else to write….