Every living being is food for another

जीवो जीवस्य जीवनं – Shrimad Bhagavatam

Jivo jivasya jivanam meaning every living being is food for another.

This shows that a living being has to eat another living being to live a life. As we can see we cannot eat stones and sand to be alive. We have to eat only living beings such as plants, fruits, legumes, nuts, fish, animals etc.

 

There is always a long and furious debate going on between people on vegetarianism vs. meat eating. People who stick to vegetarian diet do so for various reasons such as religious faith, moral grounds on not to kill animals, environmental reasons and more importantly for health and hygiene reasons.

While plants, fruits, legumes and nuts have a life, it is of the thought that vegetarians cause less pain to these beings as compared to the pain and horror caused to the animals by the meat eater. At least we do not see the plants defending for their life and we also do not see any blood as we cut the plants. Also when we pluck the fruits from trees we think we are causing very little pain to the trees and also the tree continues to live. Nevertheless it is agreed we do cause minimal pain for the sake of our survival.

Another interesting argument is that we can eat most of the fruits and vegetables raw without cooking meaning they are alive as we eat and they become part of us as we assimilate them in our digestion process increasing our life energy or “Prana”.  This could be one of the reasons why raw and live foods are found to be much healthier and claimed to possess magical healing powers. As a stark contrast, meat cannot be consumed without killing the animal which means the dead meat is what is being consumed which started its decaying process the moment the animal was killed. In modern times compared to the olden times frozen meat is commonplace in super markets meaning the consumer is often eating dead rotten meat after few days or few weeks if not few months after the decaying process has started. Note that the refrigeration process just slows down the decaying process and does not completely stop it. This could be a clear argument on why the heavy meat consuming countries have the highest number of major killer diseases including obesity, heart diseases and cancer.

In the capitalistic world the billion dollar meat processing industry will do everything they can to sustain their business. It is the responsibility of the individuals and families to find out what is good for their health and educate others on their findings. You cannot expect the governments, mass media and educational institutions to stop the menace as they are invariably controlled by those corporates. In the worst case if you are not able to leave the meat eating habit at least avoid red meat and stick with chicken and fish. If possible get the meat from the shop where it is butchered just as you purchase so that you can consume the meat within say 6 hours of killing. Avoid packaged and processed meat by all means.