Steiner mentions in a lecture* about eating, that a vegetarian has “a certain activity within oneself, that is spared the non vegetarian”. What is this activity? I tried to find an answer, and I thought it very fitting.
The short answer is (as mentioned in the lecture) the making of your own fat. A vegetarian have to make their own fat*, a omnivore hasn’t.
The middel length answer is: animals transform plants into fat and other proteins. This is, besides a physical proces, an etherical and astral/soul proces. Every plant has it’s own etherical qualities, and indirect astral influence if consumed.
To transform these qualities in the ones a animal or human body needs, the qualities contained in fat, the animal or human’s own etherical and astral body are processing the etherical and indirect astral qualities from the plants. Partially absorbing the qualities, partially transforming them.
A rough analogy, comparing this proces to rope making; a human needs rope, a plant only gives short fibres. So the human has to process the short fibres to make a long rope.
Animals already do this process, so the human hasn’t to do this.
Two downsides to the animal doing it; as mentioned, the human gets stronger, more independent by doing it themselves.
The animal gives their ‘rope’ animal qualities. As if the rope they make are colored, or a bit sticky, or otherwise a bit different from the basic/specific rope the human need.
*. Here the quote, and within the link to the whole lecture. Thanks goes to Ridzerd van Dijk for the daily quotes.
*. there’s some deeper point to this, the long answer, from Rudolf Steiners agricultural lectures, where he suggests we humans don’t absorb through our intestines food; more that our intestines copy the structure of said food and create said structures in our body, by carbon taken up as CO2 in our lungs.
This seems easily debunk-able by modern science, so curious if some did that. Or tried and failed to debunk it.
Edo Pronk 