Thoughts of food...

I remember when I was younger, for most of my pre-teen life and into my early teens that I was capable of consciously killing for no reason--even up to about 7 years ago the jerk reaction of slapping a mosquito was still with me. It puzzles me, now that I feel more conscious of my actions, still that I am capable of killing nonhuman organisms for the sake of other nonhuman organisms to live (e.g. killing fruit flies to feed ants in the lab and feeding 'defensless' crickets and mealworms to geckos). But I won't kill an animal for my own sake--if I do not have to? Is this pressing concern over another's reality (e.g. the ants and geckos needing flies and crickets) creating and giving me purpose to kill? I honor the fruit, the veggies, the grains, legumes, fungi that I consume. It's easy to honor them, easy to think about them as purposeful entities for my consumption. To me, I feel that this food wants to be eaten.

Whenever I have looked into the eyes of another creature or am aware of another's body language--their self reflections and constant thoughts swirling with my own--I have never felt as though any mammals, fish, reptiles, insects or others with eyes and legs and body and crawl wanted me to partake in their flesh. I have never wanted to partake in my own flesh. But the fruits, the leaves and the vegetables seem right to me, I feel a difference. When I eat something, it becomes me, too, it moves on in its life and death and is changed, just as I am changed.

Those Native Americans and indiginous peoples across the world who have a notorious 'closeness to earth' killed the animals and thanked them for their flesh. They sometimes even claimed that the animals offered themselves to be eaten or were created for humans to take. In this view, I can see any critter being responsible for it's own death in this way, since the animals are "god" in my personal view. Through their eyes and mannerisms in most animals I will get either indifference, or a general recognition that the creatures are just as much a part of me as I am them.

There are so many more aspects to the reason for not eating meat, but I feel that this reason is the one that always always always comes to my mind as the reason.