I do really love my meat, as many of you on this forum clearly do as well.

And I agree with the people who say that our bodies are made for the consumption of both meat and vegetables.

However, I have real problems with the WAY in which meat (including chickens and fish) is produced. In order to keep meat inexpensive, meat must be intensively farmed, with animals not given very much space to graze.

They are also fed very low quality feed in order to keep production costs and therefore prices down. In the UK, cows were being fed feed that contained matter from the brains and spinal cords of other cows - waste products from the meat production system. This resulted in the development of what is known as mad cow disease and the human varient, CJD.

Recently, a case of mad cow disease was reported in Canada. The US has yet to have a reported case of mad cow disease, but routine testing is much less stringent in the US than it is in the UK (for example).

Although I am a committed omnivore, I do think that it is immoral to treat animals like they are any other commodity - like tennis shoes or paper - just another product to be produced and marketed. To do so, in my opinion, degrades human beings in equal measure to how it degrades the animals.

I also think it is unsafe - consuming the flesh of diseased, mistreated, medicated or genetically modified animals seems to me to be taking a real risk with our food supply. A hypothesis which is borne out by the tragedy of CJD.

The solution, of course, is to insist that all meat be produced in accordance with organic standards - in the way that meat WAS produced by family farms, before the industrialisation of farming. Unfortunately, that means that meat would get a lot more expensive.

I TRY to buy organic meat (this is widely available in the UK, less so in the States), but by the end of the month, I've run out of the extra money to do this and eat regular old beef and chicken, knowing that the animal that I'm consuming was crammed into a tiny pen, indoors, fed animal food mix that probably contains animal remnants, given injections of antibiotics to keep him from becoming diseased in the cramped, unhygenic conditions he is living.

I read a lot of PETA bashing on this board and a general gung-ho carnivore spirit. I understand this, but I would also pose the question -

If we are going to have diets based around plant and animal products, shouldn't we be concerned about the quality of our food supply? And shouldn't we also be concerned about the treatment of the creatures which form the basis of our diets.

Just because we eat them doesn't mean we shouldn't respect them.