How important to you is (scale of 1-10, 10 being “extremely important”):
1) morality of eating animals
2) morality of contributing to current factory farming system
3) impact of diet choices on environment
4) impact of diet choices on personal health
Me:
1) 5 or 6
2) 8
3) 3
4) 9
My friend Halcyon came up with this list and it’s currently being discussed on Anybeat. What do you think?
I think “morality of eating animals” should have been at the bottom of the list because there are many factors involved in answering that question – if you eat meat, at least – a lot of them having to do with the other three issues, so I’m going to answer issues 1, 2 and 4 first:
I hate factory farming. I don’t think anyone particularly likes it, except maybe those who make their money doing it, so I’m expecting this to be one of the highest on everyone’s list. I would love to not participate in the factory farming cycle and it would be a 10, if it were a matter of choice. I would even love to say that we try not to, but we don’t because we can’t. We live in a town of 2,000 people with one very tiny grocery store that gets almost all of its meat from factory farms. The only thing it doesn’t get from factory farms that I’ve seen are frozen “Cowboy Beef Burgers” and steaks which – I think – are manufactured locally (edit: they are). The next closest grocery stores are all 40 minutes away, but they all get their meat from factory farms as well.
We have two alterntive options, 1) the organic, cruelty free shop in town and 2) Blake has a friend who runs a small farm and we have the option of buying a half of a cow who ate grass its whole life and who was killed as humanely as possible. We can even come visit the cow from calf to butcher and “know our meat”. The organic shop is out of the question because our budget just doesn’t allow for it. His steaks are like, $15 a piece. For fillets we could get at the grocery store for $7 or $8 (which we can’t afford either, but we get sometimes). I don’t know about his chicken, I don’t really eat chicken, and Blake’s never really checked. I don’t believe he sells pork, but I could be wrong. His fruits and vegetables, which I would love to purchase because they’re guaranteed GMO-free, are equally expensive. I would love to support this man’s business because I believe in what he’s doing (and I can’t figure out how he’s still in business in this town) but we simply cannot afford to.
So that leaves option 2, the friendly farmer who has cows for sale; who raises his animals ethically and with love and who probably whispers a prayer with each one he kills, the way I understand it. Blake believes the last time he inquired about buying half a cow, which comes butchered in pieces (like steaks and roasts and ribs etc), individually wrapped and frozen, it was around $350 which is a REALLY good deal, but we don’t have $350 to just lay out all at once. We could save that money, yes, and we would if…we had a chest freezer. As it stands, we have just the fridge freezer and that’s certainly not going to fit half a cow. Chest freezers are expensive both to buy and both to run. If we could afford to buy one, we would, and we’d save the money for half a cow, but we can’t so we don’t have one. We would put it under the carport where there’s an outdoor hydro outlet and it would be protected from the rain and snow. One day we will do this, we really really want to, but today or next week or next month, is not the time.
Related, I would like to raise my own chickens not for meat, but for eggs. I think it would be fun, I like animals and it’s one less time we’d be supporting factory farming. I watched a video last week about where chicken nuggets came from and they touched on factory farmed eggs too and it was pretty revolting. I mean I knew the gist of how the eggs got to my plate, I’d read about it, but seeing bloody eggs in the egg tray of a factory farm is something I won’t soon forget. Seeing chicks having their beaks cauterized without anesthesia is something I won’t soon forget either. I’d like to say that since we live in farm country, we buy locally raised eggs, but we don’t. For $3/dozen it wouldn’t be worth our time and gas, which isn’t the nicest thing to admit to, but also farms don’t sell eggs by the dozen anymore. At least, I haven’t seen any signs on the side of the road saying so and we drive by a dozen farms on the way to the beach all summer.
As a further aside, it makes me absolutely crazy that the rest of my family eats chicken wings. I’ve asked Madison – because they’re her favourite food – if she knew that they came from baby chickens and she said yes, but she really didn’t care because they taste good. The exasperation I felt after having this short discussion with her is probably how vegans or vegetarians feel after most conversations about meat and animal products with omnivores times a thousand. (And I’m sure this post would drive most of them nuts too, my apologies.)
I don’t eat chicken wings (also because they’re gross). I don’t eat veal (also because it’s gross). I don’t eat foie gras (also because it’s gross). These are lines that I just wouldn’t cross, as hypocritical as they may be.
So that brings me to the “impact of diet choices on personal health”. I have always been (well, not as a kid) very concerned about my meals being as nutritious as possible but I’d be lying if I said it was as “extreme” as it is since I got sick this spring/summer. Traditionally I’ve been a junk food junkie, not caring what kind of ingredients were in my ketchup chips or what kind of oil my McDonald’s french fries were cooked in. The truth is, I still don’t care, I just eat a LOT less of that stuff. (Although I’ve been eating ketchup chips almost daily for the past two weeks because life sucks and that’s the only joy I have these days. I just don’t replace meals with junk food anymore.)
I’m paying more attention to things like portions; instead of having a steak half the size of my dinner plate and the other half buttery potatoes, I try and make sure that our dinners are more like meat being 1/4 of the size of the plate, same with potatoes and then the other 1/2 being a vegetable of some sort or a salad. Because of my extreme anemia, I’ve also been trying to make sure that my vegetable choices are things that “count” and that I’m eating a full serving with 2 out of 3 meals, at least, along with snacks which are often salad, apples or oranges or clementines. Also related, I have this handy dandy guide from Foodland Ontario that tells me what’s in season, and when, and I try to make sure we choose in season fruits and vegetables as much as we can. Certain things, like oranges, are never in season here, but they’re good for us and they prevent scurvy (okay that was a joke – sort of) so we get them anyway, but the rest we stick to as closely as we can. This means that our produce is (probably) GMO-free and that it leaves less of an environmental impact while also supporting local industry.
Because of my anemia and because it’s so bad now that I’ve required a blood transfusion within the last 6 weeks with talk of weekly infusions (which I’ve declined), the fact of the matter is that I need…blood. I need meat. It would be impossible for me to get my protein needs met with vegetables alone because I simply could not eat that much and there’s also the issue of haem/heme vs. non-haeme/heme iron. There are a lot of arguments either way (and please don’t link me to said arguments, I’ve read enough thank you), but it is said that veggie sources of iron are not as easily absorbed as read blood sources of iron and the fact of the matter is, my damn hair is falling out, so I’m not going to take my chances betting on veggies for my primary source of protein and iron. I get extremely sick of meat and would only like to eat it maybe twice a week but I have to eat it for 2 out of 3 meals a day, plus eggs for breakfast, plus a protein drink DAILY to meet my protein needs because I’m really really sick. Granted, I don’t manage to eat that well on a daily basis for a bunch of different reasons, but that’s even MORE reason for making the meals I do eat count! I don’t feel guilty about this because when it comes down to me or the cow, I’ll choose me every single time.
Do I feel guilty that I support factory farming for our family’s source of meat? Absolutely. Do I feel guilty about the morality of eating animals? I wouldn’t if it could be done humanely or if I could afford to buy cruelty-free meat. (I don’t consider killing a cow, in a humane way, cruel, although I admit that I’m not sure what a humane way of killing a cow would be.) Do I care about the environmental impact of my food choices? Not especially, which brings me to the last issue on the list.
Blake, who was a vegetarian for 9 years, says that if everyone in the world was a vegetarian, there wouldn’t be enough land for everyone to eat. I don’t know if that’s true or not (or if that’s even exactly what he said), but it’s always made me wonder about how much it really matters as far as what we eat and its effect on the environment. PETA would have me believe that raising meat is destroying the environment, but I’ve always thought we had bigger fish to fry in regards to our impact. Surely car factories and plastic factories and oil spills and fracking all have a bigger part to play in global warming and pollution. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t take everything into consideration and do what we can to not contribute to environmental issues, I just think it’s a lot easier to convince people that say, our dependence on oil is bad and we shouldn’t use it, than to change the entire planet’s dinner menus. And I’m pretty convinced that it would take a large majority of many countries to make a significant environmental impact. Of course I’m no scientist and the propaganda is just that, so it’s just a gut feeling that could be entirely wrong.
Again, this is not a debate, I’m just thinking out loud and sorting my own beliefs and opinions and wondering how they fit with yours. I respect everyone’s choices and I ask that you do the same if you’re going to comment. Try not to be insulting to your fellow man/woman, okay? I just think food is just a hugely personal thing and I don’t want anyone’s choices to feel attacked.
Anyway, that’s where I stand on Halcyon’s list. Feel free to comment or don’t, I’m cool either way.
