If you're a vegetarian because you just don't like the taste of meat, well, that's one thing. But if you have a moral issue, or believe that "meat is murder," there's a few things you should consider.

Before I go much further, let me say that I am no fan of "factory farming" and corporate commercial feedlots and slaughter houses. What these operations do to poor animals and the miserable conditions they are forced to live under is criminal and beyond cruelty. Nobody with a conscience should do business with them.  Nor to I think its a good thing to make meat – especially  beef – a main part of one's diet. Raising animals for meat is not a great use of land and resources; the acreage required to raise meat for one person could provide grains and legumes for seven.

That said, I don't think there is anything morally or physically wrong with having a meat meal on occasion. Even chimpanzees, who share 98% of our DNA and are primarily vegetarians, catch small animals to eat once in a while.

Humans have been eating meat since the Stone Age, and for a lot of First Nations, there wasn't much else (this is still true for people like the Inuit and Laplanders, who live in Arctic regions). For Plains Indians like the Arapaho, Pawnee, Sioux and Cheyenne, a close relative of our beef cattle – the American bison – was not only a primary source of food, but clothing and shelter as well.

For most people in the world however, beef was an occasional treat, because it took a lot of land to raise it. Pigs, sheep and goats were more common, since they didn't require so much acreage, but even these were not eaten every day; the latter two were used mainly to produce milk and cheese.

That all changed about 450 years ago.

What happened? The Spaniards started arriving in droves, that's what. Colonizing and claiming vast tracts of land from South America up into what's now most of the western U.S., they found for the first time enough room to raise all the beef cattle they wanted. The Spanish pretty much invented the modern beef industry, and this shows up in the language with words such as "ranch" (ranchero) and "buccaroo" (vaquero).

Of course, the world was a whole lot less crowded back then.

Today, recognizing that factory farming is inhumane and cruel, an increasing number of ranches are going with the "free range" method of raising cattle. This is much kinder to the animals while they're alive, and when it's time to slaughter and butcher them, this is done as quickly and painlessly as possible. It spells the end of 98c a pound hamburger, of course – raising beef this way is more labor intensive and therefore more expensive.

It seems like more and more people are gravitating toward this alternative however, and are willing to pay more for it – even if it means a return to eating beef only on occasion. Ranchers who adapt and meet the demands of the marketplace will find that raising beef animals can be just as profitable – if not quite as scalable – as the old ways.