Vegetarian homesteaders

Hi Hike;
I have the opposite problem. I was sickly all the time: allergies, asthma, arthritis and my hair fell out. I gave up meat and I improved beyond belief. My hair has grown back and is full. When I quit the dairy I stopped having asthma attacks and burning pain in my joints.
I do not fault anyone in what they eat or drink, as long as its not vegans or other human beings.
Tami

Everyone is different, I love cheese but have HATED milk all my life. I have horrible allergies, every time the wind changes its something different. When I'm at my place in Oklahoma (basicly forest) I have no allergy problems at all. I think the pollution around Dallas has a lot to do with my usual problems.

I love meat, absolutely love it. I go absolutely nuts when my FiL makes his trashcan turkey. But we keep kosher, and kosher meat is expensive, so we tend to eat vegetarian during the week and just have meat on the Sabbath. Also, I'm lactose intolerant, so milk & cheese & all don't make up much of my diet anymore. Once we start raising chickens, though, if I find I can't stand cutting up and cooking a chicken I knew personally, I'll probably go veg again. Not, mind you, that I would even try to package this as an ethical decision. I just figure if I can't handle the reality of what meat is, I shouldn't eat it.

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Peace, tremulous, unexpected, sent a taproot out of nowhere into Morgon's heart. -Patricia McKillip, Harpist in the Wind

ethical omnivore here...

I have two freezers full of venison and pork, harvested off the homestead... an endless supply.

I have BIG time problems with any product produced from soybeans. Soybean production grows each year with demand...South America is clearing more and more rainforest each year to make soybean oil (biofuel). In America, bottomland hardwood forests are the choicest areas to convert to soybean fields.

In a soybean field, wildlife isn't allowed to exist...only soybeans...an ecological monocultural desert, where beforehand there was a thriving ecosystem.

Similar to the thriving ecosystem on my place, where I can sustainably harvest 2 deer and dozens of wild hogs encroaching from the forests nearby. I could plant most of the place in peas, soybean, and corn, but if I did, I'd have to destroy the ecoystem, and kill the deer and hogs, because they'd be destroying the grains... so I just skip the process and eat the deer/hogs, which fatten on acorns.

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Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Seneca
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival. W. Edwards Deming

Pork is my favorite vegetable.

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-Paul

"If women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy." -Red Green

We've been vegetarians for 15 years, about 5 of those years we were vegan. I've pretty much dumped all soy from our diets and we eat our home raised eggs and goat milk. We tried the raising and killing our own scenerio and have hunted our own meat. We just couldn't justify killing something to eat when there is so much food available to us. We're healthy, the kids are healthy so I guess it works. My DH is asked CONSTANTLY at work how one can lower their colesterol, he says it's simple.... only animal products have colesterol in them, lower your intake, lower your %.