If you are telling me that the accidental, unintentional killing of small animals & insects while growing plant foods is of the same consequence, spiritually, as poleaxing a bison between the eyes, I don't go along with that. There are degrees to all things, and we all draw the line somewhere, even you who are trying so hard to make angels dance on the head of a pin.

I don't support vegetarianism for its own sake. I see vegans who I think need a good slab of red meat - for a while, anyway.

You asked a direct question, what is wrong with killing animals for food? If you as an individual need it - nothing is wrong with that. If you don't really need it from a nutritional standpoint, then it is wrong to do something to another being that you don't want to have done to you. That is basic decency as I learned it a long time ago. Your attempt to equate my purchasing plant food from a farm where mice and insects were inadvertently killed with slaughtering a mammal is laughable. You can do better.

No, I don't grow all my own food. I grow and/or gather and "put by" maybe 20% for me and my family of 3. I don't personally "produce" things like salt & oil, etc. I have grown small patches of grain when I had the space to do it - no mechanized equipment or slave animal labor involved. But it was hard, hard, work, like African villagers on their little plots.

I am not interested in moral or spiritual "purity" that some aim for in their day to day lives, like the Jains, but neither would I go to the opposite extreme that I see practiced by 99% of the unthinking, braindead population where daily diet is concerned.

No, I haven't been to Iraq, and that war ain't about oil for our "modern agricultural system", as you think. It is a war started by George Bush and his neoconservative, Zionist puppetmasters to keep Israel safe and happy.