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this week in rob, part one - where's the beef?
October 27, 2005
i've gotten some emails and phone calls of concern. i feel a bit guilty, but i also feel appreciative, and loved.
i got out of the weekend. sunday was much like saturday. sunday night, i called my friend julia, who's in town from cali with her husband, pat. i told her i absolutely had to get out.
we went to hut's. an odd thing, but for the last four or five weeks, i haven't eaten meat other than fish. well, that's not entirely correct. i have had some pancetta in some pasta.
my meat thing is this - i don't really care as much about ingesting a bunch of chemicals, pesticides, and growth hormones. i'd rather not, of course, but it's just not a big motivator for me.
i do have issues, however, with how we treat animals. it started with pork. i love me some sausage. i can do without pork chops, i prefer beef ribs to pork ribs, and bacon is just not critical to me. but sausage, in all its glorious forms, is irreplaceable. patties, breakfast links, bratwurst, fat sausages that spray scalding grease when you bite into them - that's good stuff.
but i haven't had sausage for months. pigs are smarter than dogs, supposedly. yet, we'll pile 30,000 of them into pens in "concentrated animal feeding operations," each of them confined in a pen that would make accomodation at gitmo or abu ghraib seem like the spa-prisons that your roves, scooters and delays would theoretcially spend short stays in.
where there's pigs, there's poop and pee. lots and lots. it's gotta go somewhere, so it goes into giant cesspools next to the facility... oh, i'm sorry, the pork industry has made clear that they're properly called "lagoons." i shit you not.
then, a few weeks ago, with the onset of the latest avian flu hysteria, there's images of extras from the final scenes of "E.T.," stuffing live chickens into bags for incineration, or mass, live burial.
now, it shouldn't have come to this for me to have made a decision. for years, i've known how chickens and other poultry are raised. no animal should spend it's life in a pen it can't turn around in, with thousands of other pens each full of an equally pissed off and distressed animal.
chickens should also not be eating other chickens. cows should not be eating other cows. in fact, herbivores should not be eating ground of animals of any kind. why anyone was surprised that these perversions gave rise to mad cow disease is shocking. we're lucky we haven't created a species of pissed-off, baby-eating zombie cows. and chickens. it's a bad movie just waiting to be written and shot.
and on top of it all, let's face it - chicken is just not that good. it's just cheap and pratical. it's only important for tortilla soup and proper molé.
and now, their miserable lives aren't even ending in some nice soup, or fajitas, or a strange hormone-laden, glued-together nugget to be served to our children so that they can start developing breasts at age nine. together with the persistence of mtv's total request live, britney spears is truly a harbinger of our no-surgery-necessary musical future.
all that said, i'm not opposed to eating meat. but like all of our interactions with nature, it needs to be done with respect, and we need to, out of compassion, if not self-preservation, work to minimize our impact on the links in our food chain.
my friend chris will only eat meat that he kills, and most of that, he does with a bow. many of my friends will blanch at that, and decry him as cruel. however, most of them will do this while eating a burger or some chicken nuggets (see rantings, above). at least he is consistent. he respects nature and the animals he eats. he knows that he often is preserving a balance where humans, vegetarians included, have supplanted natural predators, in just another sort of thoughtless gentrifiation.
chris is there, participates in their death, and feels the weight and responsibility of it.
there's nothing of that in buying a pack of ground sirloin, even if it's organic free-range.
so, back at hut's, i was trying to figure out what i could eat, when i remembered they have buffalo burgers, and free-range longhorn beef. longhorns that got to run around and be cows. they might even have had more sex than i'm currently having. then, one day, they died like we all do. but unlike us, who simply end up taking up space in the ground, or being scattered across the water, some animal gave me some life. it probably helped fixed an iron deficiency that had helped drag me down physically, and mentally, and then emotionally.
i ate my burger happily, thinking of that anonymous steer and what it had given up, and it made me a little sad, as it always should, but i also thanked it, quietly.
Posted by Rob at October 27, 2005 01:05 PM