To me, vegetarians - and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans - are the enemy of all that is good and decent in the human spirit. Now, I'm not talking about those who do it for religious reasons, or those who aren't so much vegetarians as people who don't like meat, but rather all of those who subscribe to PETA's philosophy that "meat is murder."
Is meat murder? Murder is what happens in Cambodia, in parts of Africa, Central and South America, and in former Soviet republics where the local police chief's son decides he wants to turn your daughter into a whore and you don't like the idea. Murder is what Hututs do to Tutsis, Serbs to Croats, Russians to Uzbeks, Crips to Bloods. And vice versa. Murder is what happens in some third world backwater when black SUV's pull up in front of someone's house in the small hours in the morning and drags away their overly opinionated and somewhat unpatriotic son - never to be seen again. Murder is what people in Phnom Penh and St. Petersburg do for a living so they can have a nice satellite dish and watch American TV reruns.
Murder is most certainly not some Portuguese family killing a pig on their farm and then using every bit of it for food: blood to thicken sauces, intestines for sausage casings, trotters, head, liver. All of it! Why? Because they respect the meat, because they are aware that an animal died to provide them with sustenance. And because it tastes good. Is that salmon, or that lamb, or that calf going to do much with its life of their evil little crusade should, through some freak chance, prevail? Of course not. They'll just stand around in the fields or swim in the stream, doing bugger all and chewing their cud all day. And eventually there will be so many that we'll have to cull them. But instead of eating them, we'll just throw their carcasses out - after doing some wierd shamanistic dance that those Greenpeace people are so fond of.
Vegetarians sit in their comfortable homes in suburbia and moan about cruelty to animals - suggesting that everyone from urban Yuppie to Mongolian goatherd should start eating only organic vegetables and buying expensive soy substitutes. But of course they stop complaining about all of that suddenly as soon as you point out their fancy leather belt or shoes. To look down on entire cultures that are centered around gathering meat, fish, and vegetables is arrogant in the extreme. Some of these people even feed their pets vegetarian meals - and they talk about cruelty to animals.
And not one of them can cook a vegetable. Their quest to turn soy into everything that it isn't knows no bounds. Soy milk, soy cheese, soy ice cream. I was in Whole Foods when they had vegan cookies out for sampling. I'd rather eat a grilled squid made by some Vietnamese woman in a street market of dubious hygienic standards than that crap. At least the squid will taste good. Personally, I shudder to contemplate a life without offal, pork fat, sushi, and good stinky unpasteurized cheese. So clearly, vegetarians have no soul if they can't appreciate the wonders of these animal products.
It seems to me that in the case of most vegetarians, something has soured them against the word: be it a divorce, a breakup, losing a job. So now they seek new rules to live by, or something new to believe in. They comb the internet for horror stories of radioactive dairy products, BSE, and genetically-altered beets, swapping them with their vegetarian friends like victory stories. Every person who dies from mad cow disease is a victory for those people. All this time, they are conveniently oblivious to the fact that much of the world goes to bed hungry every night, and would take some of that striped bass they are throwing at the provincial legislature in protest, even if it's slightly iffy.
Ever get the feeling that vegetarians consider themselves morally superior to you? Like they think that not eating meat makes them special? Well they do. Apparently, when someone stops eating meat, they suddenly become holy and dignified and it excuses them for the years of inconvenience and frustration they will inevitably inflict upon their friends, family and co-workers who just want to go to a restaurant and order a steak without constantly being reminded that they're going to hell for eating an animal that spends most of its life doing nothing in a field. There are many of us who don't have a hyperactive sense of guilt and we don't care about your mixed up self-righteous moral vegetarian agenda.
And of course there is the anthropological argument. If we weren't meant to eat meat, then how come we do? How come our teeth are formed exactly in a manner to make them perfect for eating meat - and vegetables. Humans are omnivores - and were meant to be by design. That's why our bodies need protein: because we're used to eating meat - not getting it from some chemical-laced substitute.
So, hide in your homes and eat vegetables. Put a Greenpeace or PETA bumper-sticker on your hybrid car. Save the rain-forest - by all means - so that maybe you can visit it some day on a fashionable ecotour wearing comfortable hiking boots made by twelve-year-olds in forced labor. Go save a whale while human beings are shot, tortured, sold into slavery, and forgotten. And when you see a starving child on TV, be sure to send a few dollars.
P.S. If you're a vegetarian who has just read this and is morally incensed, then why not leave a comment to tell the world how morally incensed you are? On the other hand, if you are capable of intellectual debate, and would rather do that, then also leave a commet, but leave one that has some basis in intellect - not ire.
There's always one, isn't there? Someone who always seems to take a major incident, and turn it into a partisan issue. In this case, that one is 
