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You
are What you Eat (May/June 2005)
It's
been three years since I last ate meat. During that time period,
I've done a lot of explaining. My dietary choices inevitably get
brought up, typically as a subject of mockery, occasionally as
a subject of curiosity. I guess when people poke fun at me for
eating my "rabbit food" they don't realize that as the
scrawny kid that got thrown in trashcans in elementary school,
not much rattles my cage anymore. So I endure the snide remarks
and attempt to offer up a justification that will suite the average
American, however, most people don't want the truth to ruin what
they are about to digest. They would much rather prefer to criticize
and then change the subject as quickly as possible.
And yes, I am
aware that vegetables had to die to make my precious salad.
I also am conscious
of the fact that clearing land for cattle grazing is the primary
reason for the ongoing destruction of the last remaining rainforests.
Eating meat is just less sustainable than eating vegetables. It
produces more carbon emissions, more agricultural pollution, and
requires more acreage of land. We are destroying the lungs of
the planet, so we can give ourselves cardiac arrests and diabetes.
Life feeds on life, this is an ecological law. However, mass producing
life and commodifying it for the sole purpose of ingestion by
one particular species has dire and far-reaching consequences
that will last generations. This is no longer a kill or be killed
world, this is a kill everything because it all belongs to us
world. We are not out hunting our food, intimately entangled inside
the web of life. We have commandeered this web, bent it to our
will, and produced an industrialized feeding trough so out of
sync with the imagery of farming we are ingrained with as children,
most people don't believe it exists.
Animals shut
into cages so small they can't even scratch themselves, treated
as products without souls, numbered like holocaust victims, mutilated
and electrocuted, living in their own excrement, in the dark,
weak and crying out to deaf ears, administered massive doses of
hormones and antibiotics just to keep them alive long enough,
to grow large enough to slaughter. The chickens eat the leftovers
of the cows, the cows eat the leftovers of the chickens. About
three million pounds of chicken manure was fed to cattle in 1994.
If you've never
heard the sound of bellowing cattle waiting their turn to die,
well, they sound a lot like people screaming. The same way an
under-paid migrant worker screams when they lose an appendage
in the slaughtering equipment.
And if you're
still laughing to yourself about my backwards tree-hugging ways,
and want to continue to eat factory farmed meats, be my guest.
If you like food that has been drenched in shit and blood, that's
just fine. In the summers, up to fifty percent of this nation's
cattle are infected with E. coli 0157:H7. Make sure you cook that
tainted flesh long enough, because dying from E. coli is sort
of like dying from diarrhea, only you hallucinate and your brain
turns to mush. Every day in the US 200,000 people are sickened
by a foodborne disease, 900 are hospitalized, and fourteen die.
So do me a favor,
next time you meet a vegetarian, try seeking understanding instead
of spreading condemnations. We are what we eat, and right now
we are a nation of Veal. Chained to a dirty floor soon after birth,
barely alive, our growth restricted, we are kept too weak to break
free, until all knowledge of how to survive independently of industrial
food production has been forgotten.
-Jason M Glover
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