I recently read Jonathan Safron Foer's Eating Animals the only book that inspired me to try tofu. Unreal! It deals with the complicatedness and destructiveness of being an omnivore in the 21st Century. Basically factory-farms are pumping their birds, pigs, and cattle with so much estrogen and pharmaceuticals that these poor creatures eek out a living on the equivalent of "Fat Elvis" with an untimely demise to match. These are creatures who live 12 years or so and then get slaughtered for mass consumption. They can't even fuck for babies! They have to be artificially inseminated. Just think: you are what you eat.
"Slaughtered" is putting it sweetly, there is nothing humane about the way in which these creatures are killed, from beatings with lead pipes and other odd cruelties by people (I guess you can call them people) in the slaughterhouse. The problem here is, is that it isn't exactly everyone--at least you can't prove it. These places are locked up tighter than Fort Knox. It is a multi-billion dollar industry built on the fat of the land--literally. It's a dangerous business because if something should go wrong, anything at all, their economies would bust like a birthday balloon.
Needless to say, I spent a week unable to eat a normal diet. I'm still having a hard time swallowing chicken or pork. I think I'm ready to forego bacon for a while. Eggs too. I'm slowly waning into finding alternative sources of protein. What's weird is that this isn't a new problem. I came across a video from 1990 with Lisa Bonet, River Phoenix, and Raul Julia from a daytime talk show, and they were talking about the same sort of problems, with vaccinations and breast feeding added in for good measure. They were talking about a book by John Robbins called Diet for a New America. This is in 1990. I was five years old then. Eating Happy Meals with gusto. Now eating fast food makes me want to hurl. Seriously, try not eating the stuff for a few months--then go stop in for a quick burger and fries combo--tell me your insides don't hate you.
Here's the link. It's in 5 parts so set aside some time and enjoy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6r2wMB6o9w
It's 2012 now, for those of you keeping score at home, that's 22 years ago. That's 22 years of me eating like a blind idiot, ravenous of everything at the same time. Now--no more! I must be conscientious. Perhaps that is part of adulthood--coming to grips with the faults and bad habits instilled in you by parents, teachers, and friends that need to be broken, addressed, shifted, doubted, and reconsidered--at the very least winced at. Plato said Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living!" Don't you want to lead a life worth living instead of succumbing to rigor mortis before you're 30? 40? 60? In a tomb--or torched to dust and ash?
The funny thing is, now, after reading Eating Animals I've started to notice more places where what Americans eat--and all the bad habits we have here--have been coming up in all the books I'm reading and articles and news casts. I was reading Eating Animals when the news was breaking about "pink slime" in meat. A week later it was deduced that the stuff was neither good nor bad. I wonder how much it cost to run that ad for cheap meat. I was reading Tom Robbins novel Still Life with Woodpecker and he talked about shitting eating habits in there. I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's Fates Worse Than Death and he was talking about America's fascination with bombs and how we'd killed Muammar Gaddafi's adopted baby daughter in an air raid back in the 80s. No wonder the dude was such a mental case. His newly adopted daughter was bombed to death by the free world. If that happened to me I'd start to wonder what kind of free world this was anyways--and what business it had killing innocent people.
In looking at my reading choices recently I can see how someone could look at me and immediately think, "Fucking Hipster." And yes, I own the Garden State soundtrack, sandals, flannel, more than my fair share of Vonnegut on my shelf, Converse, and the Tao Te Ching under my Bible with Buddha near by, most likely to order a PBR, shaggy hair, and now possible vegan tendencies. To all of it, I shrug. I am only searching for the way.
I like to read and write and I gravitate to what is comfortable.
Not really sure what the purpose of this blog was--possibly something to do with guilt for eating so many cows and wasting so much. Choose wisely and remember your three "R"'s: reduce, reuse, recycle.
