Ethics

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the ethics regarding meat eating. Since my conversion almost 3 years ago, I have been convinced that eating meat is unethical. Bruce Friedrich is the expert regarding animal ethics. I watched a video of a debate on animal ethics at Harvard university. His knowledge and insight regarding the unethical behavior of meat eating is, in my opinion, impossible to refute.

If you care about the environment.

If you care about world hunger.

If you care about animal suffering.

If you claim to care about any of the three things above, eating meat is not an option. Plain and simple. It is unethical to eat meat.

I think that is where the disconnect happens for so many people. The violence, the environemental distruction, the world hunger that is fueled by our current food culture, is to most poeple, invislble, or to use Bourdiue's sociological term, an aspect of symbolic violence. We have been so ingrained to accept the status quo without questioning whose interests are being served. Special interst groups invest millions of dollars to ensure they control what ideology is fed onto our society. And most people blindly accept it. Stories are told to us and we just assume that we are powerless to question the way things are. We tell stories about the ham on Christmas, or the Chicken Noodle soup when we were sick, turkey on Thanksgiving. It is time to rewrite our stories to exclude dead animals. I hope my kids tell their kids stories about the tofurkey on thanksgiving, and the veggie burgers on 4th of July.

We are in need of critical thinkers. Our everyday behaviors are reinforcing a status quo that is detrimental to our society. Global warming, antibiotic resistance, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, all running rampant in our society. Children today are the first generation in years who are predicted to have shorter life span than their parents. The status quo is unacceptable. It is unethical. Everytime you sit at your table to eat, or in our society zip through a drive thru, you are expressing to the world what you are choosing to support. Just because you arent doing the cutting, does not mean you aren't responsible. It is unethical to eat meat.

To anyone who takes the time to read this and is saying to themselves that is just not an option to cut meat totally out of their diet, I understand. My suggestion is to go meatless one meal a week, then maybe one day a week. Take it slow. Statistics show that if everyone took meat out of thier diet for one meal a week, it would be equivalent to the removal of 5000 cars off the road. Staggering isnt' it? Think about it.

We have been spoonfed an ideology fueled by speicial interst groups who try desperately to shield you from the truth. They do this because the more people that know the truth, the less they will be inclined to buy their products. Slaugtherhouses are nearly impossible to penetrate by the public without an undercover operation. The operators of these facilities know that if the public even stepped onto the property, and smelled the blood and burning flesh, meat consumption would decrease. Isn't it amazing that no one questions where our food comes from? Start questioning.

People may think they are being philanthropic by writing a check to a charity every month. I don't think that is what philanthropy is. Philanthropy means engaging in a level of conscoiusness concerning the suffering and emerging climate problems our chidren are set to inherit. Eating meat is unethical.

Vote with your fork, what do you support?