IEET Readers are Omnivorous Eaters

A recent survey revealed that the majority of IEET readers eat just about anything - 55.38% are omnivorous.

I’ve been following the Paleo/Primal lifestyle for the past few months and have been seeing a great deal of success.  Please read about my story and the method I followed here:  http://mikeshonestreviews.com/paleoprimal-diet-review

George Dvorsky and I also are Paleo eaters - well, so long as we discover that cavemen fermented grapes - and so far I’ve lost 24 pounds and feel great.

I’ve been following the Paleo/Primal lifestyle for the past few months and have been seeing a great deal of success.  Please read about my story and the method I followed here:  http://mikeshonestreviews.com/paleoprimal-diet-review

When is it ethically acceptable to harm another sentient being? Or to pay others severely to harm sentient beings on one’s behalf? We can all agree that causing harm to other sentient beings is sometimes unavoidable. But on some fairly modest assumptions, harming or causing suffering to a non-consenting subject of experience for trivial or frivolous reasons is ethically indefensible.

 So where does eating meat and other animal products fit into this ethical scale? Humans are not obligate carnivores. Across cultures, human dietary practices range from the overwhelmingly meat-based diets of Inuits to the traditional vegetarian and quasi-vegan diets of the Indian subcontinent. I won’t here enter into the debate over whether a meat-based Paleo, vegetarian, or vegan diet is typically healthiest for humans. Instead, what ought to be uncontroversial is what follows from the fact vegetarians, statistically, live longer and record higher IQ scores than meat-eaters. Any nutritional deficit experienced by non-meateaters must be subtle, to say the least.

So this leaves the question of culinary taste. What intensity of pleasure must one derive from eating meat to justify the suffering its production entailed? We’re all prone to rationalisation. How confident may we be that our answer to this question is impartial, i.e. uncoloured by self-serving bias?

IMO, “Back to the Paleolithic!” is not a transhumanist ethic.

I’ve been following the (mostly) paleo diet for the last year. I’ve lost 61 pounds, and that is a lot on someone who is only five feet tall. I’ve still got 30 to go. Actually, this wasn’t as difficult as some people think. I just tossed all the bread, rice, pasta, and milk and most of the cheese (I still keep a bit in my freezer, grated, for a special treat.) There are a lot of cookbooks for this, but I’ve never felt any need for them. This might not work for everyone, but I’ve tried everything: vegetarian, vegan, Weight Watcher’s, diabetic, and on and on. This was the first one where I wasn’t hungry *all the time* and I actually lost weight at a constant rate. I don’t worry about eating sentient things (have you ever wondered what chickens are talking about?)

“anxionnat”, a subject of experience is not a “thing” - any more than you, I or a mute human being are “things”. 
(cf. http://biophile.co.za/ethical-consumerism/the-hidden-lives-of-chickens ) 
In common with human infants and some adult humans, chickens lack the generative syntax necessary for the production of linguistically novel sentences. But how does this lack of language capacity ethically entitle us to kill, harm or abuse them?

The development of distinctively human intelligence has been bound up with our “mind-readng” prowess - and consequent opportunities for co-operative problem-solving. By contrast, the autistic conception of other sentient beings as “things” is a cognitive deficit we need to overcome.

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