January 31- Book Review: Eating Animals

You can take the title either way, as verb then noun, or adjective then noun. Both work. I'm only sixty pages in, and already wondering about some of my grocery store choices. Maybe Paul McCartney's not crazy to be singing of "meat-free Mondays".(check it out on Youtube- you'll laugh your beef off!)

I grew up on a farm, a really small one. We had names for most of the cows, grew the grain we fed to the them, milked whatever cow we thought wouldn't kick us too much, drank the milk raw, sold rabbits to a group of Italian men who came to hunt our land summer weekends, and even raised a few sheep (stupid, stupid creatures!).

And once it a while, we would take a young heifer or steer or pig over to Jerry in Stayner, who ran the abbatoir. A week later, we'd bring all the laundry baskets and milk crates in the house to pick up the roasts and hamburger and sausages and tongue and heart and soup bones, labelled and wrapped up in brown paper.

I never questioned it.

We knew where our animals came from, we knew what they were for, but we also had a relationship with them. We cared for them, we knew which way they would run if they got out of the pasture, and whether waving our hands and shouting would be enough to send them back to the barn. If they were sick or hurt, we looked after them.
If I knew the meat I was getting was raised the way my childhood food was raised, I would not think twice about continuing to eat meat with every meal.

But eating animals is changing my mind. Those chickens at the big Club store, at 18 bucks for three, they were only 42 days old when they were dragged through a conveyor belt of death. Before that, they were scared and crowded and sick and genetically engineered, and I'm no longer sure I can eat them.

Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Farmers aren't farmers, and and some food isn't food.
In some cases, what we're sold as food seems to be a byproduct of the vertical integration of a huge chemical company. If I finish this book, I might just have to get off the gravy train, or at least get some of my farm friends to sell me their beasties, after I get to know them, of course.