Adam's blogbox: the best argument against eating red meat is smelly farts

This morning I laid down a righteous fart in bed -- such a fat one, it woke me up like an alarm clock. It was a massive fart: one of those long, low, rumbly ones that end in a pinched high squeak, as my sphincter slapped shut suddenly in embarrassment.

It didn’t wake up my companion, thank God. But in my red-meat eating days (before I switched to only fish), if my fart HAD woken her up, she would’ve woken up with a STENCH so ruthlessly bad, songbirds would’ve dropped dead from the sky, stunned into lifelessness.

The fart was not deadly, only loud, because it produced no odor. Your farts don’t smell if you don’t eat red meat. That’s the best reason not to eat red meat, don’t you think?

(Other reasons pale by comparison: (a) you shouldn't eat anything that has a face (b) red meat is hard to digest (c) it's immoral to slaughter living creaures for food (d) eating red meat is akin to cannibalism, because we're genetically related to all mammals -- we share 99% of our genes with chimps, for example.)

Another fart reason has to do with the world’s biggest problem: global warming, The millions of cattle slaughtered to go into Big Macs, which are mostly raised in Latin America, fart a lot. These farting cattle produce tons of methane gas, which contribute more to the greenhouse effect than all the bad emissions produced by cars and factories in the world.

Yes, the worst polluters on earth are farting cattle, and the reason there are so many of them is that we raise them for our food.

Next time you want to do something for the environment, stop ordering steak. You’ll not only solve the problem of global warming, which is a very noble thing to do. You’ll also reduce the stinkiness of your own person, and your own immediate environment.