For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Health Issues page, All About Organics page, and our Farm Issues page.

Vegetarians and vegans can put up quite the convincing argument when it comes to what they are passionate about – not eating meat. Several have even appeared on this site. With all due respect to them, in the interest of fairness there is another side to the story. Humans are omnivores designed to use both animals and plants as food. Entirely removing one or the other can not only be detrimental to human health, but, if done on a mass scale, could even have environmental consequences.

While everyone certainly has the right to freedom of conscience and one could go about making a credible case against eating meat from a humane perspective, it should be noted that many of the health-related arguments are essentially straw-men set up for an easy knock-down. For example, conventional, factory-farmed beef today is full of antibiotics, tumors, and growth hormones (not to mention ammonia laced pink-slime in some cases), all of which have an ill-effect on human health. Making an argument against beef by bringing up the many health dangers related to consuming the artificial toxins therein is akin to saying one should not ever swim in water because chlorine can be harmful. What does the excess chlorine in the local YMCA swimming pool have to do with swimming in a clean lake? So, of course, any argument in favor of beef (or meat in general) assumes it is organic and fed as nature intended.