The current issue of Time focuses on vegetarianism ( http://www.time.com )

Most of it is extremely vegetarian-biased, but it does have some mention of
problems in the vegetarian diet.

One of the things I found most interesting was the ethical argument for
meat-eating:
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n the spirit of fair play to cowboy Jody Brown and his endangered breed,
let's entertain two arguments in favor of eating meat. One is that it made
us human. "We would never have evolved as large, socially active hominids if
we hadn't turned to meat," says Katharine Milton, an anthropologist at the
University of California, Berkeley. The vegetarian primates (orangutans and
gorillas) are less social than the more omnivorous chimpanzees, possibly
because collecting and consuming all that forage takes so darned much time.
The early hominids took a bold leap: 2.5 million years ago, they were
cracking animal bones to eat the marrow. They ate the protein-rich muscle
tissue, says Milton, "but also the rest of the animal—liver, marrow,
brains—with their high concentrations of other nutrients. Evolving humans
ate it all."

Just as important, they knew why they were eating it. In Milton's elegant
phrase, "Solving dietary problems with your head is the trajectory of the
primate order." Hominids grew big on meat, and smart on that lovely
brain-feeder, glucose, which they got from fruit, roots and tubers. This
diet of meat and glucose gave early man energy to burn—or rather, energy to
play house, to sing and socialize, to make culture, art, war. And finally,
about 10,000 years ago, to master agriculture and trade—which provided the
sophisticated system that modern humans can use to go vegetarian.

The other reason for beef eating is, hold on, ethical—a matter of animal
rights. The familiar argument for vegetarianism, articulated by Tom Regan, a
philosophical founder of the modern animal-rights movement, is that it would
save Babe the pig and Chicken Run's Ginger from execution. But what about
Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse? asks Steven Davis, professor of animal science
at Oregon State University, pointing to the number of field animals
inadvertently killed during crop production and harvest. One study showed
that simply mowing an alfalfa field caused a 50% reduction in the
gray-tailed vole population. Mortality rates increase with each pass of the
tractor to plow, plant and harvest. Rabbits, mice and pheasants, he says,
are the indiscriminate "collateral damage" of row crops and the grain
industry.

By contrast, grazing (not grain-fed) ruminants such as cattle produce food
and require fewer entries into the fields with tractors and other equipment.
Applying (and upending) Regan's least-harm theory, Davis proposes a
ruminant-pasture model of food production, which would replace poultry and
pork production with beef, lamb and dairy products. According to his
calculations, such a model would result in the deaths of 300 million fewer
animals annually (counting both field animals and cattle) than would a
completely vegan model. When asked about Davis' arguments, Regan, however,
still sees a distinction: "The real question is whether to support
production systems whose very reason for existence is to kill animals. Meat
eaters do. Ethical vegetarians do not."



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