If you’re my friend, you know I’m no hippie. I’m not even a very good activist. I believe in things, yes, but it’s not often I’m the person who’s blogging up a storm on one topic, spreading any type of “good word” anywhere. In terms of mind-changing — perhaps because I’m a journalist — I tend to be a little more libertarian-like about taking stands to one side or another of broad issues: Make your own bed, live your own life, but please be well-informed before you do or tell someone else how to live theirs. I don’t claim to know the answers (I think that’s up to each of us for the most part), but what I do believe in is education and open debate.
Having said that, I’m open to being educated and debated with concerning my possible switch to vegetarianism.
There are a few things you should know about me first.
1) In the past few years, I’ve been on a personal quest to learn about nutrition and have been reading significant amounts of literature on diet and food. I’m no expert. I’m just deciding what’s good for me.
2) I love how meat tastes.
3) I have never been a vegetarian.
4) I don’t have moral objections to eating meat.
So here I am, wondering myself how I got to this point where I’m thinking of throwing in the towel on future purchases of Superdawgs, Island Burgers and all the other meaty things I proclaim to enjoy. And the quick answer is, I read a book and it opened my eyes to what I’m stuffing my face with. The book is certainly not without its flaws or apparent biases: Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” is written by a vegetarian who previously has only written fiction, is written mostly in the first-person, and I haven’t yet attempted to verify many of the facts he puts forth that so affected me. But I plan to before changing my lifestyle. I would hope any person would.
Foer’s main point is that factory farming is the norm in meat production these days, and the mechanism is toxic to all involved. According to the book, animals aren’t raised in pastures and allowed to roam and feed until they become our sustenance anymore. They live indoors in cramped quarters, have shorter lives but grow bigger thanks to new genetics, are often skinned while still alive, are pumped with antibiotics just to survive long enough to be slaughtered, are often in bad shape before slaughter, and up to 10% are in such bad shape they don’t even make it to slaughter day. And even if the animal’s life is no concern of yours, the book argues those drastic changes to food production are taking their toll on our health too. In the end, it’s not so much meat he objects to, as what it’s become as an industry we depend on and a purveyor of what we currently consider nutrition.
On chicken (p. 106-107):
The very genetics of chickens, along with their feed and environment, were now intensively manipulated to produce either excessive amounts of eggs (layers) or flesh, especially breasts (broilers). From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of “broilers” increased by 65 percent, while their time-to-market dropped 60 percent and their feed requirements dropped 57 percent. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be three hundred pounds in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flintones vitamins.
…These genetically grotesque birds didn’t come to occupy only one portion of the industry — they now are practically the only chickens being raised for consumption.
Long story shorter, the chicken you consume exists today because companies figured out a way to produce more meat with fewer resources and money, and allowed the animal to be compromised. You’ve heard stories about overcrowding, de-beaking and Thanksgiving turkeys raised with breasts so big they can’t mate on their own, and it’s easy to think that’s not what happened to the animal at the end of your own fork. But this book has sources that claim all of this is true, and that it’s not a few crazed meatworkers or plants mucking things up, but the norm in modern chicken production to keep down costs. It’s everywhere, and all of us are eating it.
But perhaps animal welfare is not an issue for you. Perhaps your own health is? (p. 134) After slaughter:
Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the “water in these tanks has been aptly named ‘fecal soup’ for all the filth and bacteria floating around… After industry consultation, the new law of the land allows slightly more than 11 percent liquid absorption (the exact percentage is indicated in small print on the packaging – have a look next time).
… US poultry consumers now gift massive poultry producers millions of additional dollars every year as a result of this added liquid.
I don’t know about you, but I personally love eating poop water and paying extra for it.
There are a lot more reasons the book gives, but this is a blog post not an essay, and if your attention has stayed with me even this long, I thank you. Do some research, know what you’re eating and what you’re feeding others. I may not be an activist, but I don’t like senseless cruelty or being robbed blindly, and none of those things has to be inherent in food production, even with meat.
When I picked up this book, I thought it was going to be all personal memoir, stories about food. I read no reviews. I don’t like knowing what I’m in for. I didn’t know it had parts that resemble a modern “The Jungle”. I just knew I tend to love his writing, so I wanted to read his latest. And after finishing it last night, I went from planning a Bacon Explosion this summer to considering vegetarianism. Books don’t usually do that to me.
But hey, if you know some good vegetarian recipes or starter programs, email me. I know a crap ton about nutrition, but mostly that which focuses on meat as a protein. So I could use some help.