Reading this thread and some of the great points from many of the vegetarians and vegans coupled with all the known health benefits of staying away from meat (health wise I'm not so sure about where fish fits in) I should definately be a vegetarian. However, I'm not. But I have cut down on my meat eating a lot. So I like to approach this from a very pragmatic stand point: If I eat less meat I contribute less to killing (murder?) of animals which is better than keep eating as much meat as before. Also, I'm in the camp of "wanting to have the cake and eating it too" where to solution I envision, in the coming Age of Abundance, is that we develop technologies to grow meat artificially that is impossible to distinguish from "real" meat when it comes to texture, taste, look etc.