Eating Animals

I'm currently making my way through Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Eating Animals. Because he usually writes fiction, I find his book to be much more enjoyable than other books I have read on the topic of food choices. There is a voice. There are also, however, facts. Facts upon facts upon facts.
The most important point and the one that I have not seen addressed nearly as clearly and as well in other books covering similar topics is this:

The forgetting that people must do in order to eat meat.
People must purposely avoid the knowledge of what happens to their food before it becomes food in order to continue justifying it to themselves (or to avoid confronting the issue all together). This includes my best friends, my parents, and most of the people I respect. Most people refuse to read/watch/listen to things that will tell them about their food because they know that if they knew, then making the conscious decision to continue eating meat would go against their ideas of what is right and moral.
It tastes good and it is familiar. To know, and to be forced to consciously confront the issue of what that taste and familiarity costs, would be inconvenient. To face the idea that your food used to feel and think and suffer (as it certainly did. 99% of the meat consumed in the US is produced on factory farms. Every single animal on those farms suffers every day) in a real and honest way makes most people extremely uncomfortable.

Here’s the rub- if you are knowingly evading the knowledge, then you are knowingly choosing to participate in something that you think is wrong. If you felt good about the choice, you wouldn’t have to protect yourself from the reality of it.

If you're not willing to think about that- think about this:

Antibiotics.

We have to get prescriptions for antibiotics from our doctors because if people used them too much, then we'd build up a resistance too quickly. The idea is to only give them to the people that really need them so that we can use them longer.
Factory farming necessitates that animals be fed antibiotics preemptively, routinely. The conditions are so terrible and the animals have been bred/genetically modified into such distortions of their natural selves that they CANNOT survive without a constant stream of antibiotics. And then we eat them. Human resistance to antibiotics is skyrocketing because of this practice.

Epidemics.

If you’re still reading at this point, then maybe you’re willing to think about this a little more. Get a hold of this book. Read the chapter called Influence/Speechlessness. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Seriously.

Shitwater flavored Chicken

Part of processing 99% of the chicken you eat (the chicken they sell to you at Red Robin and the chicken your grandma makes you for dinner) is to cool the dead chicken after processing by submerging it in water. ‘Farms’ use this practice (despite how gross I’m about to tell you it is) because it allows the carcass to absorb water, therefore making it heavier and increasing the profit.
Fun Fact: Feces are considered a ‘cosmetic blemish’ by USDA health inspectors. So, when the machines used to slaughter and dismember your dinner hit the bird’s intestines and feces are released into the inside of the bird, the health inspector sends it on down the line and into the cooling tank. It’s fine, the damage is only cosmetic. The water in these tanks has been deemed ‘fecal soup’ because of all of the filth that comes off of the chickens and floats around in the water. This is the water that the farmers want absorbed so that they can get higher prices. Afterwards, they will douse the bird in chlorine in hopes if disinfecting it and then inject it with MORE liquid- usually broth or flavoring- to make it taste the way you expect it to and to further inflate the weight and therefore the cost of the chicken.

Done preaching for now. I’m not going to sass you if we go to a restaurant and you order a fatty cheeseburger. I’m not perfect. I’m just saying that if you’re willing to eat it you should be willing to at least know about it.