Concentric Circles of Ryan

In my eyes, animals and people are not equal. For this reason, I created the Concentric Circles of Ryan, which helps guide me in deciding who to eat. The CCR works as follows: as you move from larger circles inward to smaller circles, the membership within that band encompasses groups for which I care more and more. The likelihood that I will eat what is in a particular region increases as you move from the center outward. I have included an example for you viewing enjoyment.

Note: Circles are not drawn to scale

Perhaps you are wondering, why the need for this silly diagram? As a vegetarian, my diet should be composed of everything in the green, and nothing else. Simple, right? Wrong my friend. My requirement is to stay in the green region only for as long as I can maintain my own health and well being. Given that I live in a society where I can easily obtain non-meat food that adequately supplements my diet with the nutrition that I am missing due do my avoidance of consuming meat, this should be doable. However, if for some reason I need to eat meat to stay healthy, I will slowly move inward as needed. For example, if I’m stranded on a deserted isle with no edible plants, you can bet your sweet fanny that I’m throwing rocks and sticks into the water trying to catch me some fish. If that is not an option, but there happens to be a pig nearby, sorry lil’ porker, but you’ve got to get in my belly. And yes, if the only edible foodstuff is people, I would even eat that, (if you’ve ever seen the 1993 movie “Alive”, you know what people will do and eat in order to survive). However, while I could kill an animal in desperate times, I could never purposely kill a person for food, (they’d have to have died from a polar bear attack, or from a yeti encounter or from some other cause before I’d consider consumin’ human). Are you thoroughly disgusted yet? Good.

The point of all of this is to illustrate the fact that certain people and animals are more important to me that others. While ideally I wouldn’t want to eat any of them, I can imagine situations where such actions would be warranted. Hopefully, I’ll never find myself in those situations. And more importantly for you, hopefully you won’t find yourself in those situations WITH me. Because I just might eat you.