This is a photo of some cattle i saw in Dorrigo, I feel like this is the idea we have of the meat industry, they look content right, they have lots of room to roam around. This is unfortunately becoming rarer. One day it looks as though this property will be sold off to become a factory farm.
Recently I was having a "discussion" about these relatively new (first factory farm was accidently created in 1930s, see 'Eating Animals' Jonathan Safran Foer) farms, via a facebook post. It was a video showing inhumane factory farming practices. see link. This was probably not a great place to talk about this topic but it did stir up some interesting thoughts on the matter. I couldnt have realised that people would go so far to continue to make themselves feel okay about eating meat, even with all the evidence showing that it is destructive in many ways, always inhumane and detremental to our own survival. It was mind boggling, but what I realised is that I have now formed my own views on my choices surrounding food.
It astounded me that a person believed that eating meat created in a lab was a brilliant solution. They phrased it as though it were an idea for the future, maybe not realising that our foods are created in labs? Most of our food now is genetically engineered, it takes up almost everything on our supermarket shelves. How did this happen? The companies not genetically modifying, and not adding unnatural chemicals had to label the things that were normal. Shouldnt we be labelling the things that are bad for us from the start. How is it that we are allowed to sell poisonous substances easily until someone stands up to you, and then generations on, it may become withdrawn and labelled as a poisonous substance.
Like on coke zero cans it should read. Coke Zero -Brain cells when you reach puberty if you drink this regularly. Or Coke - Zero chance of your child recovering from a brain hemhorrage because you carry the PKU gene.
Or just about everything on the shelves:
Contains Palm oil and causes Orangutans to be endangered in third world countries. Thousands of hectares of Forests are being smashed and burnt to make way for more palms on small islands of the Pacific.
Then we came to the population issue. Thats why we couldnt keep giving livestock reasonable sized areas to live in, because it would take up space we were living in.
Adam writes "You could give a cow 200 square kilometers of space to roam around, yes. Or, you could give it 1 square kilometer and use the other 199 square kilometers for better, more economically productive use."
Do you mean one cow surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other cows in a 1 square kilometer yard that has fences all the way through it to divide the cows so they cant access the full km2. Or atleast something along those lines.
That is the reality in factory farming, which is over 90% of all meat production in the US and as we follow suit with everything the US does we are getting there. Farmers kids are not taking on properties, they are getting sold off to factory farms. the new giant business's pack ridiculous numbers of animals into pens, they never get to leave until they get their neck slit and have to die slowly in a cold lifeless building.
NEWSFLASH: there is not really a POPULATION problem. The meat industry takes up more space on our planet than humans have houses. There is much more space dedicated to a few varieties of 3 selected species of animals. Pigs, Poultry, Cattle. If we lived on the land they were on we would have more than double the space for everyone on the planet. We select a few foods to eat and then make a ginormous business out of it. If we just ate a large variety of foods, we could fit all the plants that create them into our double the size of now neighbourhoods. We would have more land to have our comfort buffer that we need so much more here in the western world ofcourse, and we would be eating awesome food that kept our minds and bodily systems excited every meal with the different things we get to experiment with.
God i am so excited every day just to cook to see what kind of amazing mouth/tongue/tastegasms I can experience. I have set up barely any stupid distractions so I can focus on all the great things about life and food is, well the only thing that could threaten my life if i didnt have it. It is life itself.
If i didnt care about my food choices I wouldnt feel like I particularly care about my life. I would hate to think that thats what other people feel when the eat things that are totally shit for them. We can feel so worthless so we turn to food because it is the constant necessity. Then we sit down at the tv to be entertained to take up time before we have to go to that job that we hate, that doesnt make us feel like we are doing things we like, we litteraly would not be there if we werent getting paid out of it. An ad comes on and it sells us food. We totally want it cos we are a sucker, and it reminds us of better times, being a kid and being free. Having our meals made for us like we are too young to know how to pick some vegetables from a garden we grew, break it up into pieces and mix it with some other flavours and grains.
We missed out on that somehow as kids, how to fend for ourselves in the real world. People rely on this system too much to give us everything we need, and they continually make it hard for the people who dont want to be spoonfed still.
Is food important enough to look into what it is we are eating? What we not only put in our bodies but what we put in our kids, and what we surround our family members and our friends with day to day, meal by meal.
Thank god food is such a communal thing in our society still. Eating food is the only survival thing that is left for us. Our society has blanketed us and fed us for our security. We forgot how to do anything to keep us alive. Its crazy for anyone to go into wilderness and live that way again. Its unsafe. But how unsafe could it be? Humans have destroyed the world, humans have killed every single species on the face of the planet. Some have killed a small ammount of us. Some. Its so threatening to us that 1 human to every million or more other creatures gets even the slightest bit hurt by them.
We sit down with people, we tell each other things, and we eat food together. We not only eating animals, but we are eating, animals. animals that eat. Theres no other animal that the majority does a bunch of unnecessary tasks all day and then to survive, just eats. not gather or grow or store food or hunt. mostly we dont prepare, and collect ingredients that are suitable together and experiment with what might taste good together. We just eat. we learn nothing, we work, we buy, we eat. not we learn, we experiment, we create, we eat.
Food choices? yeah i think its important.
What i really feel is that they just didnt know, and its okay not to know. I dont know lots of things, and i bet there are tons of things that you know about, that i know very little. I also know a lot of things that are fairly useless in my opinion. I can usually instantly associate a brand name with a logo without barely thinking about it. If a car is coming toward me I can almost instantly tell you what kind of brand of car it is. But if i went to native bush, it would take me a bit of time to tell you what types of plants are around. I know that a massive amount of people died in pointless wars, "wars for peace". I know how my ancestors came to this island and decided to stay and start destroying it regardless of what the people living here thought about that. But I know nothing of the people who lived on the land my ancestors came from.
I guess its all just about learning, communication in anyway will provide us with this, exciting skill.
Thanks for reading.
Stitch
