I am a recovering carnivore...and I backslide often. I've gone vegetarian a few times, but have a lousy diet, and don't eat properly. So vegetarian for me usually equals pasta and cheese---not a healthy diet. Mark and I therefore have instead tried to purchase meat that is locally raised, often by friends. We have a couple of chickens for our own eggs (although they aren't laying right now). One thing that always surprises me is people who won't eat beef for humane reasons, but will eat chicken. Cattle, at least, get some small measure of freedom. They are usually permitted to wander, are well fed, and while they suffer a hideous death, one might say they do at least experience some small space of "normal"life. This does not morally justify eating beef, to my mind, but if you are picking and choosing the animals you eat, it does have bearing on a person's decision.
Chickens, however, suffer hell from birth to death, unless they are raised on a local farm. So if you are going to pick and choose your meat based on "humaneness"---ditch the chicken.
Here's a YouTube video of how hatchlings are processed (it is not full of death and gore, but it is sad and alarming).
3 comments:
I'm not going to watch the video, although it may be a clip from a program I recently saw called "How It's Made". In this case, I saw a snippet of baby chicks on a conveyor belt, and they would be sexed and tossed down a chute. I wasn't sure what was at the bottom of the chute for the male chicks, but I assumed it was nothing nice. I changed the channel as quickly as I could.
I recently wrote a blog entry on my Tired Girls blog about the cost of eating well. We've been cash-pinched lately, and it's very difficult to buy inexpensive food that's actually healthy. In our case, beef is temporarily unaffordable, so chicken and fish are the only "meats" we can buy, and they're certainly not organic or free-range if they're cheap.
Hey leigh-ann. We recently ran into the same thing with "alternative energy." We wanted to do the right thing, so signed up knowing it might cost us a bit more, and our electric bill this month was over $600 ($300 higher than normal). Not only are we paying the new company, for some reason our old company is charging us $190. I don't know if we'll be able to afford to keep this up. We are stuck with it for this year, and are now in serious conservation mode. Trying to "do right" costs money, and sometimes it's money people don't have.
Wow, that's a bill! What a bad surprise! I'd love to go solar (it's the desert, why not?), but the fee to switch the house to solar power is around $35000. It would be acceptable if we could get ahead and then try an equity loan, but the housing market here is horrible right now and I'm sure we're upside-down in our mortgage as it is.
As for meat, I'm quite fond of all the faux-meat products like the ones by Morningstar Farms (although there's one school of thought which says growing/manufacturing soy is bad for the environment, too). They're another example of something pretty expensive, however. I've dabbled in vegetarianism in the past, but it's always when I have enough cash to buy whatever I want to eat.
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