Living on Tortured Flesh

When it comes to my whole decision not to eat meat, I generally try to keep my mouth shut. Not that I can't defend my choice - nor should I have to - but honestly, it's really no one's business but my own. (Except today, it seems... ;)

Really, it's a personal choice that is part health-oriented (heart disease runs rampant in my family and I'm not stupid enough to take my chances with a diet of red meat) and part spiritual (which I'll get to later).

I don't judge others based on what they put on their plates. To each his own. Jim still orders chicken when we eat out, and I don't think twice about his decision to do so. He has however stopped eating both cow and pig on his own accord. But for me, my biggest beef, (pardon the pun), with the whole eating animals thing is in regards to those disgusting inhumane torture pits, also known as factory farms.

I hate to say it, but sometimes I lose sleep at night because I beat myself up for not being as hardcore as I should be. I'm sure I unintentionally consume more than my share of factory farmed animal bi-products without even realizing it.  For instance, I always buy free range eggs, but I'm sure I purchase products that use factory-farmed eggs in their ingredients. Or, what about milk? I'll bet those cows aren't exactly living the high life, so why haven't I switched to soy yet? I have no defense for my ignorance.

Call me a Kitchen Witch if you will, but when I cook I like to invoke feelings of love in the dishes I create. A Holistic Nutritionist friend once told me to always prepare your food with love, because love makes everything taste better. I really believe this. In truth, I'll often actually sing or softly hum "love, love, love..." to the tune of the Beatles song, "All You Need is Love", meanwhile stirring in a clockwise direction with the intent to raise the positive healing energy of my ingredients as they mix together.

Sure, it might sound silly... but try it sometime. :)

I know it'll sound like that monolog in Sideways about wine, but when it comes to cooking, I really do like to take time to reflect on each ingredient and where it came from. Who planted the seeds and who harvested them. How many individual lives have touched each of those ingredients -- from the vegetables, to the spices, and even the manufactured faux chicken breasts -- thereby contributing to the dish I prepare for my meal.

Our lives are all connected... and much like what they say about it taking a village to raise a child, the next time you prepare a meal, perhaps consider how it takes a village (or province, country, or even world - depending on your spices/ingredients) to prepare a simple meal.

So keeping that in mind, without getting on a soapbox here, if all living things are composed of the same energy, then it just feels counterintuitive to try to nourish my life force by consuming the tortured flesh of a creature that has suffered a horrible sickly life filled with pain and fear. How can that possibly be good for you?

Anyhow, those are just my own personal thoughts which were provoked by the following article that I read this morning on CNN. Now, naturally the author takes a less spiritual and more scientific approach in regards to how factory farmed animals are not good for you. The article, "Eating Animals Is Making Us Sick ", explores how the overabundance of antibiotics used to try to keep these poor factory farmed animals healthy in such insufferable conditions ends up contributing to our antimicrobial resistance which can then contribute to the risk of a pandemic. 

It's well worth the read, but in case you don't feel like reading the whole thing, here are a few interesting excerpts...


"....Why aren't more people aware of, and angry about, the rates of avoidable food-borne illness? Perhaps it doesn't seem obvious that something is amiss simply because anything that happens all the time -- like meat, especially poultry, becoming infected by pathogens -- tends to fade into the background.


Whatever the case, if you know what to look for, the pathogen problem comes into terrifying focus. For example, the next time a friend has a sudden "flu" -- what folks sometimes misdescribe as "the stomach flu" -- ask a few questions. Was your friend's illness one of those "24-hour flus" that come and go quickly: retch or crap, then relief? The diagnosis isn't quite so simple, but if the answer to this question is yes, your friend probably didn't have the flu at all.


He or she was probably suffering from one of the 76 million cases of food-borne illness the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated happen in America each year. Your friend didn't "catch a bug" so much as eat a bug. And in all likelihood, that bug was created by factory farming.


....In the United States, about 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock -- at least, that is what the industry claims.


The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that the industry underreported its antibiotic use by at least 40 percent.


The group calculated that 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics were fed to chickens, pigs and other farmed animals, counting only nontherapeutic uses. And that was in 2001. In other words, for every dose of antibiotics taken by a sick human, eight doses are given to a "healthy" animal.


The implications for creating drug-resistant pathogens are quite straightforward. Study after study has shown that antimicrobial resistance follows quickly on the heels of the introduction of new drugs on factory farms.


...Breeding genetically uniform and sickness-prone birds in the overcrowded, stressful, feces-infested and artificially lit conditions of factory farms promotes the growth and mutation of pathogens. The "cost of increased efficiency," the report concludes, is increased global risk for diseases. Our choice is simple: cheap chicken or our health.


...Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science, that something terribly wrong is happening. We know that it cannot possibly be healthy to raise such grotesque animals in such grossly unnatural conditions. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film.


We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory -- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat, we live on tortured flesh. Increasingly, those sick animals are making us sick."