Meatless Mondays on The Center for a Livable Future:
Meatless Monday has the potential to not only improve the populations’ health, but could also reduce unsustainable levels of demand for meat products, particularly industrially-produced meat, which use huge amounts of valuable natural resources and pose significant public health and environmental risks.
And Blackie.
When I was twelve years old, my family ate dinner a friend’s home and midway through the meal, our host commented on our hamburgers – “They’re pretty tough! Blackie was all muscle and he loved to run around in the fields.” And my preteen self was silently mortified—we were eating an animal with a name! Try as I might, I couldn’t force myself to finish my hamburger and hid the last few bites of meat under my napkin. And now—wouldn’t it be something to eat a cow or a pig or a chicken that lived such a full life, been the recipient of such attentive care that it bore a name of its own, that its keeper remembered it fondly and particularly? I've been reading about industrial farm animal production and may never eat anything again, just to be safe...
That's exactly how I felt after I finished reading (actually, listening to) Fast Food Nation.
ReplyDeleteWould you have been happier eating the animal knowing it had been beaten? I say if the animal is going to be used as food either way, might as well treat it nicely while it is alive
ReplyDeleteYou know, I had only a vague grasp of the world of industrial farm animal production as a preteen... had I really known, I would have probably been an immediate vegetarian - no food with names and no food that's been terribly abused for the sake of the market.
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