What do I owe a goose?

I've been debating whether or not to post about a certain moral dilemma I've been having as of late. Might as well:

I've been an on-and-off vegetarian for about five or six years. During that time, I haven't eaten any beef or pork (or as I like to say, cows or pigs), but I've eaten fish and poultry on-and-off, usually in one-year periods of time.

2009 is an ON year, which means I'm abstaining from all meat products. My roommate is reading Skinny Bitch right now and loves to tell me about the fucked up shit that happens in slaughterhouses, and the environmental problems that consuming meat creates. It's not my intention to write about this in a self-righteous way, but it is a genuine moral question that I've struggled with since I got to college and was introduced to the world of vegetarianism.

And so, as I was reading some R.D. Laing tonight for blogging purposes, I came across an interesting philosophical argument for vegetarianism. I'd like to try to incorporate the philosophies of vegetarianism into this blog, although I have to admit that I'm pretty ignorant aside from some essays by Peter Singer that I read in an Informal Logic class. Here's Laing from The Politics of Experience, subheaded "His most famous book! His most challenging statement!" :

If an animal is debased to a manufactured piece of produce, a sort of biochemical complex--so that its flesh and organs are simply material with a certain texture in the mouth (soft, tender, tough), a taste, perhaps a smell--then to describe the animal positively in those terms is to debase oneself by debasing being itself. A positive description is not "neutral" or "objective." In the case of geese-as-raw-material-for-paté, one can only give a negative description if the description is to remain underpinned by a valid ontology. That is to say, the description moves in the light of what this activity is a brutalization of, a debasement of, a desecration of: namely, the true nature of human beings and of animals.

The description must be in light of the fact that the human beings have so brutalized themselves, have become so banal and stultified, that they are unaware of their own debasement. This is not to superimpose into the "neutral" description certain value judgments that have lost all criteria of "objective" validity, that is to say, any validity that anyone feels needs to be taken really seriously. On "subjective" matters, anything goes. Political ideologies, on the other hand, are riddled with value judgments, unrecognized as such, that have no ontological validity. Pedants teach youth that such questions of value are unanswerable, or untestable, or unverifiable, or not really questions at all, or that what we require are metaquestions. Meanwhile Vietnam goes on.