Why I am not a vegetarian

I love eating meat. I really love eating meat. The taste, the texture, the juices that squelch out when you bite into a rare-cooked steak... The slight crunch of the outside of a chicken leg...
You get the picture.

I also acknowledge that my descendants might look back with disgust at the idea that I would consider eating even one animal, let alone the thousands, nay, tens of thousands of fellow thinking beings that have lived miserable lives and been slaughtered, often brutally, for my personal enjoyment.
I even acknowledge that I may become a vegetarian myself. As society progresses culturally, I have no intention of being left behind. We find ourselves shocked by the bigotry of those who live by the societal norms of previous decades, the people who spout racist, xenophobic and homophobic nonsense. The Daily Mail-readers who cry "It's political correctness gone mad!" whenever a straight-thinking person points out how stupid and hate-filled their comments are.
I have a bit of a prediction of my own about the future. I expect that it will be considered unethical across the Western world to be anything but vegetarian. Meat-eaters will become the backwards old bigots of tomorrow. In all honesty, the vegetarians have the moral high ground and us carnivores know it. And if there is one thing recent history has been teaching us, it is that good ideas have a tendency to win out.

So why am I not a vegetarian already? Simply because I enjoy meat too much. Giving up meat would be depriving myself of one of the top ten most pleasurable things in my life (maybe number 8 or 9?). Not gonna happen, I'm afraid. I'm simply too selfish. It's one of the few things I do that I recognise as being morally bankrupt but continue anyway.

I am rather relying on technology here. The day I taste artificial meat that tastes as good as or better than the real thing is the day I turn veggie. Quorn as it is right now simply does not compare. The texture is totally wrong, although the flavour is getting close. It doesn't have a grain. It doesn't have juices. It's just squishy mush that tastes quite a bit (but not quite) like chicken. And don't get me started on veggie burgers. I have tasted few things more vile.
But as production techniques get more and more advanced, I fully expect to see Quorn and similar products become more like the real thing. I would give it ten to fifteen years before a realistic vegetarian chicken can theoretically be produced (although it might cost a lot), and maybe even less time for minced beef. Steak might be a bit more tricky (it has to be juicy, tender, ooze blood and other fluids etc).

In addition to the obvious moral issue of ending the lives of creatures that think, feel pleasure etc there is also the issue of economics. It requires an area of land about ten times larger to rear livestock than it does to grow the same amount of crops. With significant portions of the human population malnourished twinned with exponential population growth, such an attitude towards agricultural land use is simply not sustainable in the long term.

There is perhaps one argument against vegetarianism: The "the animals wouldn't even have been born if we weren't going to eat them" argument. I don't accept that as a reasonable position. An animal never born is an animal that never suffers.

I don't know if you started reading expecting to see a genuine attempt at justifying my meat-eating. Sorry. Not here. It's just tasty and I'm too selfish to even consider the remotest possibility of giving it up any time soon.