Why I can't be a vegetarian

Not that I haven't considered it. I have, in fact, gone through several phases of pseudo-vegetarianism, the most recent after having read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, which made you want to be on the right side of the ethical food divide. The book details the evils of factory farming and the massive destruction being wrought on the environment just because we like our meat. It will also make you feel guilty for discriminating between animals. Why is it OK to grow and torture chickens and pigs but not a dog or a cat? Plus, a vegetarian diet has never harmed anyone, unlike the artery-clogging (but oh so delicious) fat marbling down a fine cut of cow.

But my resolve always goes out the window when I visit a country like Spain or Argentina, where they revere their meats, treating their cattle with love, letting them graze freely on the grassy pampas, not an ounce of hormones injected into them. They love their pigs, and consider their killing a beautiful sacrifice for the table community of men. It's almost not hard to imagine the animals, if they had a humanlike conscience, to be willingly led to slaughter after having a good, albeit brief life on earth.

That and learning that vegetable farming is also quite destructive to the environment. Essential forests and mangroves have been cleared to make way for potatoes and cabbages and ecologically-unsound monocultures and GMOs. There is no easy answer. Even if you try to go all organic, how do you really know you're eating the best possible thing?

And the last reason why I can't be a vegetarian: if one were to follow the blood type diet, my O type requires that I consume meat and not grains. My blood is build for consuming blood. If you believe that kind of thing.

I like meat, and I love vegetables. I try to eat more of the latter, and eat the former only if it's really good and ideally "happy" (like this wonderful chorizo and steak from a parilla in Buenos Aires). Until someone gives me a foolproof argument for drastically changing my diet, I can't reconcile the contradictory issues and can only just eat as healthily and responsibly as I can.