2 July 2013
In the Introduction to Psychology course, we were asked to follow an activity called “peerScholar” which was like peer grading but more customized one. There were 2 assignments, if which we were asked to do just one of them. The first one was to relate the class (psychology) to the world events, the latter one was about argument related to animal use by humans. I chose the second one because I have ever written one related to that but I revised and add references (to other people who supported my view of course :P ) I chose an attracting title, but one of the peers criticized me because of the title is somewhat irrelevant to the content. Other also said that I put too much references and the references are not strong enough because most of them are just a blog post. Enough talking, the followings are my essay submitted to peerScholar.
Vegetarian is too mainstream
Although many relate going green as being a vegetarian[1][2][3], I think that a world of vegetarians will not make this world better, it will be the same.[4] Let’s say that everyone is a vegetarian. First, vegetarian products give less calories than meat. So to fulfil one’s hunger they eat more. Because they eat more, it means the world needs to supply more food. There are some ways to supply more crops: deforestation or intensification. Intensifying (e.g. modify the genetics so the products will grow faster) will create products that may harm their health. Deforestation will increase the global warming effect as the trees that are used to clean the air are cut down.
From human evolutionary point-of-view, human need to eat meat.[5] The digestive tract of human itself have evolved to be a meat-eater. Proteins and minerals from meat are more easily absorbed than those from plants.[6] Meat served as a high energy source for the body, this way we could use less space to produce the same amount of energy produced by the plants.
I object the idea that everyone must be a vegetarian, but I support the idea that everyone should be a vegetarian once in a while.[7] That is because our diet seems to be full of meat products and it is an imbalanced diet. We need to create a balance diet between vegetables and meat products. [8] If we can’t make a balance diet every day, then we should let it be that way: eat as usual, be vegetarian for a full day once in a while. That way, we can maintain the balance between vegetables and meat products.