Ok Cita. I have not tumblr’d in a LONG time, but here you go:
-my vegie-ism started when i was 9 and thought it was really sad that people ate animals because my dog was an animal, and lord almighty did i LOVE that dog. And I have not really eaten meat since then. 12 years. (shit im old!) There is a way to do it in a healthy way (there is also a way to do it in an unhealthy way, which you know after living with me). If you really think about what you’re eating, keep up protein, take vitamins (obvs gummie vites count!) than you’re no worse off than the average meat eater (probably better off since you’re actually thinking about what goes in your body!)
-What I struggle with more is the moral issues. I wear leather. and suede. and all of that. and I really don’t have any qualms about it. I occasionally refer to myself as the world’s worst vegitarian. but heres the thing: from an animal rights, human rights and environmental stance, its far more effective to stop consuming meat. Overbreeding of cows produces huge amounts of nasty shit for our air. huge slaughter houses = tons of waste and pollution. and not to mention, the working conditions (Although the same can be said for veggie farmers, dairy workers, etc…see Cesar Chavez).
-But there are things to do to keep eating meat that still help. Grass fed/ free range is best from both an animal rights and health perspective. Organic meat doesnt actually say much about either the conditions of the animal or the working conditions. really just whats put in the meat post-slaughter and a bit of what the animal eats, but free-range/grass fed is way more important. and finally, eat local food whenever possible. This creates less demand for these mega slaughter houses and also cuts down on environmental damage due to transit. (obviously in DC its easier to eat local fruit than local meat, but a good thing to pay attention to)
gahh sorry if that was preachy, its just something i read a lot about. I MISS YOU and hope your bday was AMAZING
OKAY, SO LOOK—
Recently, I’ve been pretty obsessed with food. Not with eating it, but with thinking about it. (Yeah, yeah, there you go, up on your soapbox…)
It all started with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, which got me thinking about why I was okay with eating factory farmed chicken when I couldn’t even stand to watch a bull-fight back in Spain. I consider myself a fairly ethical person (insofar as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” can be considered a full set of ethics), but on this point, the logic seemed deeply inconsistent. In particular, I couldn’t get my mind off of an anecdote about Franz Kafka that Foer had recounted in the book. It goes like this. At an an aquarium in Berlin, a friend, Max Brod, sees Kafka staring at the glass of a giant fish tank. “Now at last I can look at you in peace,” he says finally. This was the time Kafka became a vegetarian. As Foer writes: “Fish for Kafka must have been the very flesh of forgetting; their lives are forgotten in a radical manner that is much less common in our thinking about farmed land animals.”
After reading the passage, I realized that even an animal I considered so thoroughly non-human could remind me of my own basic animalness—a kind of kinship I was happy to acknowledge in dogs and cats (albeit with limits), but could not fathom with fish. Foer continues:
Beyond this literal forgetting of animals by eating them, animal bodies were, for Kafka, burdened with the forgetting of all those parts of ourselves we want to forget. If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our ‘animal nature.’ We then repress or conceal that nature, and yet, as Kafka knew better than most, we sometimes wake up and find ourselves, still, only animals.
I guess this adds another layer to the Metamorphosis. Anyway. A few essays, Wikipedia pages, and documentaries later, I am still thinking about the emotional and philosophical implications of what I eat, but I am also beginning to mix in questions of nutrition. Does the nutritional benefit of eating meat outweigh the act of ending another animal’s life in support of my own? At what point, then, is an animal justly killed? What does it even mean for an animal to be justly killed? These are basic questions and I know I run the risk of sounding like a PETA pamphlet. I mean, full disclosure, I’m still eating meat, even as I try to navigate the hopeless waters of “free-range” and “organic.” My point isn’t exactly about meat, or else, it isn’t only about meat. It’s about taking full control of what you consume—pesticides, pharmaceuticals, bacterial infection, and all. I know it sounds obvious, and yet here I am, for the first time, realizing the extent of this control.
Hunger is the body’s mechanism for alerting us that we need nourishment. Okay, that much is obvious. But cravings—that is, the desire for Twizzlers or a freshly grilled burger—are not quite the same as hunger pangs. Our supermarket-driven consumerist society (choices! choices! choices!) encourages us to feed our desire for certain tastes (the taste of sour-cream and onion potato chips, of mint chip ice cream, of sun-dried tomato Boca burgers) so much that we begin to think feeding our desire for taste is the same as feeding our need for food. For my part, I never thought to curb this desire—unless calories were concerned. This type of thinking made a lot of sense when I imagined the self-control it took me to avoid going to McDonald’s for a Big Mac for lunch. But what I didn’t realize was that the same logic went a lot deeper and that I had a lot more agency than I thought. Was I only eating meat because I liked how it tasted? Certainly, with all the choices we have at the supermarket these days, becoming a vegetarian or even a vegan while still getting enough protein is pretty do-able, even if it requires some inconvenience. So eating meat purely for nutrition, for the most part, is not much of an excuse anymore.
OK, maybe all this seems obvious and maybe you’ve already given this some thought and maybe you’ve seen Food, Inc. or a Youtube of the shit that goes down in slaughterhouses in America and maybe after all that, you still put enough value in the taste and/or convenience of factory farmed meat to justify eating it, even as the ills of the factory farm (near-slave conditions for workers, easy and frequent spread of disease, use of GMOs) persist. But are you actually comfortable with the implications of this choice? I wasn’t, and I’m still not sure how to go about this whole food thing, but I think one thing is certain. I can’t purport to live an ethical life while still ignoring the implications of what I eat. And that means a pretty big change in the way I buy, eat, and think about food. Fuck.
