Alex: Finally, how can you use “taste”, the basest of our desires, to justify causing unnecessary harm and death?

HaRav Avraham: No, the purpose of the kid is not merely to be food for your sharp teeth, sharpened and polished by your lowliness and gluttony in eating meat; and certainly the milk is not intended to be a condiment for the satisfaction of your base desire.

Volatile: In any case, my point here is that you’re not “doing your best”, because you neglect to take even simple steps to change your behaviour, or to even accept that there is something morally problematic about eating meat. You allow base desire for taste to cloud your moral judgment. 

B.R. Myers: The pleasures of the oral cavity (though we must say ‘palate’ instead) are now widely regarded as more important, more intrinsically moral, and a more vital part of civilized tradition than any other pleasures. … Advertising has abetted the trend, while political correctness, with its horror of judging anyone’s ‘lifestyle choices,’ has done its bit to muffle dissent.

Kropotkin: Your story today on the “best” types of beef cuts would be absurd were it not so irresponsible. With livestock contributing about 18% to global warming and the environmental destruction farmers cause in their raising, you do not seek to promote the point that the biggest contribution people can make in reducing their own ecological footprint is to stop eating meat - instead you glorify it by appealing to base desire. Shame on you for your obscene capitulation to personal hedonism ahead of environmental and ethical concern.

Anna: BHealthy, you are so right and I am not doing the self flagellation. I do, however, read about the factory farms periodically so that compassion overwhelms my most base desire most of the time. How I know this is addiction is that I can actually put that stuff in my mouth knowing what I do.

Gary Lawrence Francione: What is troubling to me is the notion that our taste – the pleasure that we get from eating something, someone, from inflicting pain, suffering and death, whether it’s direct pleasure or indirect pleasure. I mean the bottom line is – this is what morality is about isn’t it Jonathan? There are things that we wish to do, there are things that may make us happy, that are wrong.

Jonathan Safran Foer: This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses.

Eugene: People staying silent during the holocaust is precisely what allowed it to happen. With vegans staying silent today, it is no wonder that billions of animals are tortured to death for the most trivial desires of man.

MasterNightfall: I mean, if you put it in front of people that they don’t need something, would be healthier without it, and would reduce the strain on our planet’s resources by abstaining from it… Logic is thrumped by their base desire to consume the tender, succulent fleshes of various exotic and non-exotic beasts.

iFrog: You’re putting a base desire over the welfare and happiness of animals, ignoring compassion and ethical considerations.

Elaine: Taste is a trivial thing. Sure, we all find ourselves doing things that appeal to “base” desires, but when we sit back and get some perspective, we can prioritize and realize that the consequences of our food choices on our health, on the planet, and to animals matter more than taste. Nothing tastes as good as doing the right thing feels.

Larry: Truly the choice is not between happiness or no happiness, but one that is the fruit of such radical values as sacrifice, service, love (for others), and self-denial [versus] one that glories in self (self-indulgence, self-centeredness, and self-identity). Without the helpful voice of Christians speaking the value of the cross, we are left with nothing to sort out the basest of our desires from those which reflect nobility and virtue.