Hehe, good discussion, everybody - I'm glad to see people participating and interacting! =)

A handful of short comments:

Yes, generally speaking I also agree that a bit too much of 'anti-farming propaganda' is biased (ie. some nasty examples cases are used to generalize a conclusion like 'all animal farming is bad because some animal farms are bad'). In Finland, on structural level I think most 'problematic' examples are standard pig and chicken farms - both are raised in smallish cages, and packing too many animals in too small a space makes them develop stress-behaviour like biting / pecking others. Well, but of course, giving more space per individual animal leads to higher expenses, so the farmer should get higher prices for improving the conditions of animals - and then we get a crowd of angry customers complaining that mince in supermarket costs too much. Which takes us back into the political-economical questions (where I believe that every worker should be paid a decent salary. Which, in my opinion, also means that the city-dwelling worker should have enough money to spend on ethically raised food, and the farmer should be paid enough for producing the food in such a way that it doesn't involve things like clear-cutting vast forest areas for pastures, nor packing too many animals in too small cages never letting them roam in the pasture). Hehe, questions like these, they can hardly be tackled in isolation, as every questions tends to be connected to all the other questions =)

Mr. Polecat, most of the time when I comment on Mariska's or Clemetine's blog, I also have that same kind of feeling - 'maybe what I write is, despite my good intentions, somehow annoying. Maybe I'd better not post this'. And sometimes that feeling hits me instantly after sending a comment. I'd guess there isn't that much a rational argument to counter the feeling - and probably the feeling is there after facing too much flaming etc =) Hehe, well, but at least here in the comment section of my own blog I'd like to encourage people to express their views without fear - the only condition is that people need to be ready to face the differing views without hate and flaming. And, again, this alone is a big and complex topic =)

Hey, thanks for the question about "Swedish speaking Finns vs Finnish speaking Finns". I'll try to examine the theme in better detail in the near-future. But, apart from the all-around generic tribalism, I think the tensions date back to history, and come down to the general 'people vs elite' theme. A lot of finnish-speaking Finns have a prejudice towards Swedish-speaking Finns, because they are thought to be arrogant elite, 'the swedish-speaking better people', as the saying goes. (Also, in post-war period a lot of Finnish people migrated to Sweden, because there were a lot of work opportunities and in Swedish factories they paid good salaries. Now, many of those people were traumatized by the war, and sometimes caused trouble by over-drinking and fighting. So, in Sweden they say 'A Finn, again' when there is news about alcohol-related crimes of Finnish-speaking people. I'd guess some of these attitudes are shared by the Swedish-speaking people living in Finland.) Well, but again, there's more to this theme, so I'll return to this in some future blog post =)

Ah, and finally, Murtaugh; for your diet, have you tried adding a lot of fish? Sure, of course fish is meat, as fish are animals, too. I'm under the impression that fish oil and fat contain vitamins and ingredient which the brain needs. Although, here we also come to the details. For example, according to scientific studies farmed salmon has only half the amount of healthy oils compared to wild salmon. So we face questions of balancing fish farming and sustainable fishing...