Letter: We can actually exist on plants

This, as we all know, is an age old retaliation towards vegetarians/ vegans.

Even natural herbivores like the rabbit which, by the way is a lagomorph and not a rodent, cannot live on lettuce alone.

Methinks that Sam is also banging his drum a bit regarding his lettuce comment, just as he writes that vegetarians bang theirs too!

He asks: “Can vegetarians really resist the smell of a bacon sandwich?”

My answer to that is yes they can, really, because it is totally unappetising to them and, in fact, can smell terrible when one is of a mind that it is a dead piece of meat and one has compassion for the animals that meats come from.

Sam writes that “Eating meat is good for all of us”, which is actually not true.

A very good example of this is that evil man Adolf Hitler. He had a very ill stomach after eating meat and his doctors advised him to lay off it, which he did, but each time he got well again he went back to his carnivorous diet.

Hitler is actually another bang drumming that meat eaters often direct at vegetarians, stating that the evil man was a vegetarian too and look how he was. But Hitler was NOT a veggie.

Human beings are NOT a carnivorous species. We are an omnivore, which means we can exist on plants or animals or both.

That is to say we can and millions have and do exist without any meat eating.

Sam also writes that he cannot see how he can eat his cereals without milk and that he likes milk in his tea and coffee and often drinks a glass of the white stuff because, he says, he believes milk has some important vitamins in it.

Well now then Sam, we have soya milk and very nice it is too. There are lots of alternatives like rice milk, coconut milk, etc. Do take a look in the supermarket aisles.

Milk is actually baby food. And cow’s milk is especially made for calves. Not for humans and not for adults.

All mammals secrete milk after birth from their mammary glands to feed their young because their young cannot eat solids. Milk has everything in it. It is a perfect food – but for mammal babies.

All mammals’ milk is different. Less of this and more of that, etc. In other words, perfect only for the mammal’s own offspring.

This is why cow’s milk perfect for calves has to be altered for human babies.

When a child is weaned (and any offspring of any mammal), genes are turned on to cause an intolerance to this baby food (milk).

This is natural and is called lactose intolerance. But many years ago a mutation occured which led to some adults being able to take milk in adulthood and this mutation seems to have become more widespread.

Many, many humans are unable to digest milk in adulthood because they are lactose intolerant and many people think that these people have a problem. They haven’t. They are, in fact, normal adults.

So with respect, just why Sam cannot see how he can have cereals and his beverages without this white baby food, which we call milk, is nonsensical to people like me.

It is simply a part of our conditioning to drink cow’s milk, which is the baby food of a calf and we steal from its mother.

In closing, Sam says that he despairs for the future.

Well he is not on his own because so do I, but for entirely different reasons, the main being the intensive farming that is practised today. My heart knows that treating animals like we do nowadays is callous and not right for a so called civilised country.

Eileen Girling

Sigston Road,

Beverley