Im taking a break after reading page 398 of a 600 page, badly-written document, and glancing through the blogs.
Devra led me over to a new blog called LivingSmall (a name I suspiciously link to the frugality porn I see practiced on the West Side of L.A.), which turns out to have a damn good post on eating meat, and the farming economy. She links to Wendell Barry, too, so I think I like Charlotte.
The problem for me is not whether one should eat meat, but how to eat meat without supporting factory farming. Here in Montana, several of my neighbors accomplish this by only eating wild meat, which aside from raising your own animals, does seem to like one of the least hypocritical paths out there. When it’s a deer, or elk, or antelope one has killed and butchered oneself, there’s no denying that death is an integral part of the cycle, nor that we can eat meat and retain our innocence of this fact. It’s been years since I’ve eaten a factory farmed chicken, but it’s taken longer to wean myself from supermarket meat. Call it denial, call it convenience, I fudged that issue for a long time by claiming to myself that I don’t really eat that much meat anyway. Somehow though, I’ve hit the point of no return. I can’t buy meat in the supermarket any more (don’t even get me started about those terrifying five-pound tubes of ground beef that seem popular up here). It all looks sad to me now, and when I see those Hormel stickers slathered all over the pork case, I can’t help but feel implicated in the terrible lives not only of those factory pigs, but of those farmers who have been convinced to build factory pig sheds that they must know, deep in their souls, are just wrong (but the kids need clothes and the mortgage has to be paid, and it’s hard just to stay on the land), and for the workers in the abbatoirs and packing houses, all those Mexican immigrants who have migrated to central Iowa where they’re, as usual, doing the work none of us want to do. It just looks ugly to me, and I can’t buy it any more.
Hmmm. I’ve thought of ‘organic, free-range’ meat as an affectation…I need to think about that now.
C’mon – animals do not have little people inside them! Factory farming chickens is no different from factory farming lettuces – treat them right and they’ll prosper and the’ll sell well. Maybe some limits are required – pate de foie gras is a bit beyond the pale – so direct infliction of distress is cruelty to animals and illegal. Avoiding meat because the animal could have been made a pet is anthropomorphism rampant.
Bill