If you’ve heard from me recently, you’ll know that I no longer buy my mcnuggets and kfcs “original-please”. I’m not yet vegetarian or vegan (only vegetables, no dairy)- I just don’t eat poultry and other meat from the furry variety that get farmed and slaughtered. I try to avoid traces of meat (i.e in soups, desserts) and I try to have soy milk instead of full-cream milk from cow udders. *Edit: And I sometimes fail. But I won’t stop trying* And I do not preach. Ever. This will be my first attempt.
There are reasons why I have not tried. A few months ago when I first wrote this entry, I was uncomfortable with my ethical reasons for not eating meat. It striked me as hypocritical and contradictory, half hearted at best: I was sheepish about picking non-meat ingredients off meat dishes. I was adamant about dairy- insisting to myself that a conscientious eater should not be punished by being deprived of omelettes, god forbid- hot chocolate. So when my housemate who’s a conscientious vegetarian got on my case about eggs or milk, she made me went bonkers- because I thought: Don’t persecute me! Go stand at KFCs and glare at them for a start! I’m trying!!! What am I to do about all the excessive material leather wants? I was embarassed at my half-hearted attempts and never said a word to people, nor tried to defend my views.
“I guess I feel like a ‘less-than’. If there was a moral scale, sure, I’d be slightly holier than the meat eaters, but I’d perhaps be dissed by the greens-only brigade of PETA warriors.”
Perhaps. But that was a few months back. I’ve set up camp by now, and I’m a lot more comfortable with how I choose my food and what it says about me. Its no longer difficult to look out for organic eggs, or skip yummy meat-flavoured dishes. I do what I can, when I can- and it does get easier. All I do is make sure I don’t backslide- and eventually I will be all-zen, sitting under my Bodhi tree like the Buddha once did, needing no meat at all.
The ethical dilemmas confronted me last year when I spoke to a self-confessed puritan vegan whose disdain for meat eaters is still etched deeply in my mind. He is quietly less-than-impressed with meat-eaters and spoke modestly about how he was trying to live his life. I couldn’t touch meat for two weeks after that, because I was haunted for example, by the manner of life and death a farmed chicken would endure before reaching my plate.
Sir Paul McCartney, your celebrity vegan once said that if half the people who ate meat knew how their meat came about, they’d retch. But in our urbanized, non-agricultural world where we are deliberately made unaware of the ways in which our meats are farmed, where we de-sensitize ourselves by refusing connections between pigs and pork, cows and beef- instead gladly confronting them in their gravied glory, the reality is fine-dining only at the expense of our pockets, not gourmet-munching at the gastronomical expense of other living beings.
People dislike extremists and that is how we have come to view vegetarians and vegans. They are monolithic fanatical animal lovers. This is how my curiousity piqued as well- me, an indifferent bystander whose only concern about my meat was whether or not it came with fat and skin. I watched animal rights activists and hard-core vegetarians with curiosity, like I would watch animals in a zoo- why were they so concerned, did they have no-one else better to be concerned for, what makes them tick, why were they so mad, in all senses of the word? As it had always been for me, I trusted the Big Brothers, I ate what everyone ate. Almost blindly. GM, hormone-injected, whatever extra artificial chemicals or preservatives always remained safely in the small print under ‘Ingredients’, overriden by the slightly bigger ‘Nutrition Facts’ table stating all the goodness I was consuming. In any case, it tasted good and it hadn’t killed me. We think we are hardy like that.
Ignorance. Becomes this happy bubble you walk around in. Until I interviewed a vegetarian, saw horrible pictures and actually let it sunk that I was actually indirectly responsible for a whole conglomerate of cruelty, my bubble was burst- typical- but not too late.
Because never in my naive imagination have I been told that for every egg I had, it is part of a massive extermination exercise, wherein the remains of male chicks are crushed to fertilize vegetables, the bones are boiled to make your Maggi stock cubes. Until I saw on a humble phamplet, a double-paged spread of a chicken shed in a modern poultry farm- no larger than two badminton courts, crammed full of hundreds of thousands of chickens, pissing and shitting and dying in the same area they bred, de-beaked without anaesthetic and lamed from their overly-pumped and oversized breasts, I never really actually saw beyond chicken stew and fluffy scrambled eggs.
Below left: Chicken sheds, below right: male chicks dumped incinerated because they can’t lay eggs.
Below left:egg-laying chicken dies gets neck caught on feeding belt, below right: chickens de-beaked so they don’t peck each other’s flesh in insanity
This is what typically happens in your non-organic, non free-range gotten chicken and eggs.
Before this, I knew I was eating an animal, true. I knew it had to be killed in a certain way that might be unpleasant, true. But I had no concept of how processed an animal’s life was for my sake. I can never declare that I ordered all these acts of cruelty, and yet I do order my chicken curry. Is there a difference? The ordinary lifespan of a chicken is drastically shortened- bred and dead by a fortnight to meet profit margins. And these are only the chickens. What about cows, pigs and ducks? I asked myself whether it was possible that animals were bred purely for our nourishment. You know how you squirm when you see zookeepers toss a mouse at a python- or grimace in that Jurassic scene when live goats are thrown into the enclosures? Can it be possible that we are no different?
I only dare ask questions, not provide answers. It is difficult to be fully self righteous in today’s world and it would be in vain to try to do everything right. I try to be logical, and I want to be non-extremist. I rationalise that it is not exactly animal-killing for food that I violently disagree with. I would eat animals if I lived on a farm and they led proper full lives before they come to be on my plate. It is the mechanical and unnatural ways in which they are raised and killed that revolt me. It is not whether or not they can comprehend their deaths that should make things alright, but the fact that I ordered a grossly-treated life, paid mega corporations to pay peanuts to their depraved de-sensitized workers to torture my meat for seven bucks on a menu that disturbs me.
Do I crave meat? Definitely. But do I want to eat it? Not at that cost.
If you are reading this, I urge you to let what I’ve written sit for a bit. I will be one happy camper. I am by no means extreme or overly emotional. Be it for ethical or health reasons, meat can be avoided. Try not ordering meat once in a while. There are areas of grey I believe where we can stand, without sacrificing much. There are things we can do at little cost to us that will help. Even if you cut down meat to once a day, or every other day, it makes a difference. Because you know what? Half-hearted is still heart.
