Our Relationship with Meat
As always I tend to spend most of my time blogging about my farmly pursuits over at Happy Panda Rainbow Farm. But I do like to come back here to my main blog when I get the chance… which tends to be never!
October. So far it’s consisted of an awesome event (Beau’s Oktoberfest) and another awesome event (Laura and Devon’s wedding). I fused them together and captured it in this picture. The flowers are officially gone and done, their death was quick but I enjoyed their beauty and smell for the days they were with us. And yes this is the bride’s bouquet which means I officially have one bride’s bouquet credit karmically speaking. Here’s hoping something comes of that.
I took Frankie and Ruby to the slaughterhouse. Here is his last picture, being rowdy as always. The two also met some very nice pigs in their final home. Frankie is delicious, only a mild flavour of lamb, replaced by the memories of a delicious and soft beef. Ruby needs a bit more tender cooking to find her peak of deliciousness but we’ll get there.
Both of their hides are upstairs in my barn, being worked on for further use down the road.
I feel so much greater of a person for having raised animals that now provide my meals. At the same time I find it very interesting seeing the variety of people’s reactions to this fact. They range the gamut from passionately supporting (such as wanting to get right into the act of slaughtering or birthing) through to absolute repulsion (such as admonishing me for eating “a pet”). What I find interesting is that so far the most negative/critical feedback has come not from vegetarians or vegans who already oppose animal use, the folks I figured would get riled up, but regular old people who buy regular old meat in the grocery store, traditional consumers. At first I was puzzled – how can they think what I am doing is in any way wrong or bad when they too eat meat? I respect if not exceed all laws regarding animal welfare, I give them a great life.
Thinking on this point actually lead me to a revelation about this topic: it is precisely because I am giving a face and name and a great life to what was previously thought of as a final product, I am re-instilling that relationship between meat and animals that had been all but eliminated from grocery stores, and in doing so I am allowing people to re-evaluate their purchased meat and consider what kind of a life that animal had. Sure it might be awkward at first to meet and pet a live animal knowing that it will end up as your dinner, but it becomes easier once one understands that these animals aren’t pets like dogs and cats, they are livestock whose existence revolves around an exchange of some kind. For some animals that exchange can be done while leaving the animal alive and intact, such as shearing wool, milking a cow or goat, or collecting eggs. For others the animals give us their largest item of value, their bodies, and with it their lives. In return we ensure those animals have indeed the best life, free of trouble and disease, left to roam with their own kind and eat the green grass under the warm sun.
To me, this is much more fair than the way most meat is actually produced, which is to say, produce as much meat as possible with as little financial costs as possible, viewing the animal as a meat factory instead of a creature that is deserving of some form of freedom.
I’ll take a moment out here to express the fact that while I agree with the ethical treatment of animals, I do NOT in any way support the organization PETA, who IMO are a group of lying hypocrites who strangely value animal rights over women’s rights. They are just one example of how you cannot trust any name or label. An ‘organic’ lamb might be made to suffer with a heavy wormload instead of being given a chemical de-wormer to alleviate the burden. A ‘free range’ chicken only has to be provided with access to the outdoors, it doesn’t have to actually use it.
Similarly I don’t believe becoming a vegetarian or vegan is the solution to animal mistreatment. All that does is leave your ration of product available for the next mainstream food eater, of which there are many. By choosing to support ethically raised animals, and by telling your friend when they eventually inquire as to why you’re not buying the grocery store’s discounted meat of the week, you vote with your dollar; that’s the only thing that modern industrial agriculture cares about. But purchase wisely, don’t rely on a misleading label on a container, go out and find a local farm where you can see for yourself how the animals are treated.
Eventually, as I continue to establish and grow my farming business, I want to move towards a policy of complete disclosure regarding how my animals and crops are raised. It is not enough to want to claim your product is organic/free-range/nonGMO/whatever other trendy label is popular this week, because that doesn’t mean it is the best for the animal or crop! I want to let you make that evaluation for yourself, with your own two eyes, because I respect that you are wise enough to make that decision. If I give an animal a chemical treatment, I will tell you that. I mean I can tell you these things anytime, but I want to make this sharing of information a key tenet in my food production.
Ultimately the success of my non-industrial farming relies on educating consumers about the food they eat, where it comes from, how it was made, how it was treated, and how it got to be on your dinner plate. In that sense it is sort of like The Food Matrix: the vast majority of people are willfully ignorant of their food sources nowadays, being unplugged can come as a shock to many and an unpleasant one at that, but ultimately I believe it is more important to see the way the world really is than to live your life in a shrouded imagined world. That way you know you are actually living true to life instead of living in a false and unsustainable dream.
It’s amazing that we as first world humans are at this point. Industry has done such a great job at disassociating meat from animals and culture has advanced so quickly in a century that it’s actually a challenge to try and recollect a time when the majority of humans farmed in some way or another. As I’ve mused before, I can understand why a farming family would want to send their children into the city for a bigger and better future, and I can understand why our civilization is ultimately more effective in its modern distributed format, I appreciate these things. But nothing comes without a cost, and I have a large suspicion that the cost in abandoning agriculture (whether large or small) is related to things like an increase in obesity and depression rates, an increase in food waste rates, a decrease in spending power, etc. And of course an increase in people who can’t recognize a bean bush growing in the ground.
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