I just finished reading the book Eating Animals, and I don’t want to eat meat anymore. My new guru persuades me that it wasn’t good for me. I already have an history with this kind of changing mind reading: Allen Carr convinced me, at least for a while, to quit smoking. My new hobby is to hunt, if I may say, the meat produced industrially.
I’ve already started to think about it in France, a few months ago. I’d been starting avoiding meat, because of my company restaurant, which served awful meat. Chicken, pork, and also salmon and panga (this strange new kind of fish) were my hatred targets. The more I avoid meat, the less I wanted to eat some again. But I can’t say to myself that meat and myself, we were definitely over.
When I moved to the US, I noticed at the supermarket that it was written on some meat pack « No antibiotics », which worried me, because it induced that other packs had antibiotics! We bought meat more expensive, with a lady farmer pic on it, as it was a quality insurance… In the book, the author talks about false tags, and denounces some such as organic, free range or cage free (for eggs). It was already difficult to figure out what was good or not in France, and here, I don’t know what to trust. If nothing is reliable, do I have to eat only the worst? Or do I have to really become veggie?
The most chocking part of the book is that the author says that 98 % of the US meat is produced industrially. I couldn’t guess it was so much automatic, which implies mistreated and ill animals, in almost every cases. They are stuffed with medicines to grow up quickly and be killed sooner. While we eat this kind of “degenerated” meat, we also absorb these medicines.
You can tell me: “nothing’s new, we already know that, so what ? As human beings, we won’t stop eating meat, we are omnivorous.” I don’t like these arguments, such as these:
- If we start looking in our plates, we won’t eat anything.
- I like meat too much to get rid of it.
- When it’s on my plate, I don’t even think of what it was before.
- It’s just a trend.
I think it’s hard to ignore the producing way of meat, and to keep eating it, as if everything was perfect. “It’s good”, or “it’s like that” don’t work on me.
Don’t panic, I won’t try to convince anybody, I’m already working to convince myself. I told Manu about the book, and he decides by himself to get rid of some ‘grilled pork skin’ he bought and hid in the kitchen, he also ordered a veggie sandwich, just once. But he will keep his usual diet, as an amateur of tripe and fine deli (and since we live here, of beef jerky).
I can already hear sigh and see raised eyebrows, because, yes, it’s a pain in the ass to share a meal with somebody under a special diet. I prefer being the good friend who eat and drink everything, and not the one who orders soups at the restaurant while everybody wants a burger.
Paradoxically, I’m as disgusted by meat as I love deli. All my ethical standards are shaking in front of a good French saucisson (salami).
There’s luckily a lot of solutions to eat as I want here. Restaurants must offer at least one veggie dish in their menu. And there’s also veggie places.
Veggy Galaxy, Central Square, Cambridge ; there’s no smell of grilled bacon here.
