Vegetarian

The latest carbon-reducing tips from the Caring For Creation Project include the suggestion of having at least two vegetarian days per week.  Good idea! But what about a vegetarian lifestyle? There is no evidence that Jesus was a vegetarian or that Christians in all times and places should be vegetarian but maybe the time has come?
I've been a full-time vegetarian for 25 years and have no regrets.  I first started because of a concern about justice and "food politics".  I was persuaded by facts like:  you could feed all the hungry people in the world on the grain that is fed to cattle in the United States alone.  The production of animal protein requires vastly more land, feed, and water than the production of vegetable protein.  We could all enjoy more than enough food and arable land to feed the world's population if we didn't waste so much raising livestock.
Later I was interested in Gandhi's claim that you could judge the character of a nation by the way it treated its animals.  In Australia our animals are treated with enormous amounts of love, affection, veterinary care, grooming and food - if they are pets.  Meanwhile in dark, hidden places unprecedented numbers of cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and other livestock die gruesome, painful deaths, only to appear on supermarket shelves in bright, sterile packaging that looks fresh and pristine and nothing at all like a dead animal.  What does this say about our nation and our attitude to life and death?
Now, global warming has provided a new justification for vegetarianism.  The high carbon cost of raising and transporting meat reinforces further that it is a luxury item that we can increasingly ill-afford.  I have always shied away from taking the high moral ground about this because, in all honesty, I have not found it a sacrifice to give up meat.  In my younger days I ate everything from raw clam, which I gouged myself out of coral reefs in Tonga, to emu roadkill freshly extracted from the roo bar of a vehicle in the Gascoyne - and, of course, loads and loads of supermarket meat. But I don't miss any of it and I never have.
Clearly, we should all be cutting down on the amount of meat we consume but I don't know that it's necessary for everyone to be a vegetarian.  What I can recommend though, is making decisions, even very small ones, to reduce or avoid cooperation with systems, structures or behaviours you know to be wrong.