Meet Your Meat
In Part 2 of my ‘FarmAiding My Family’ series of posts, I [un]covered the egregious greens that GMOs have created in the soils across our land. Now its time to look at and the meat we choose to consume and the horror stories surrounding these proteins, which is a little more difficult to portray.
This side of the dinner plate has been challenging for me to grasp. What I first had to understand is that this is more of a double-edged sword scenario. In the interest of retaining my genuine prose, let me first say that I am very young in this process of coming to terms with my carnal desire to eat meat, and have more questions than answers at this point in time. Lets begin.
The first step to realizing the errors of America’s primal food consumption is to understand the animals that we depend upon for our nourishment. ‘Nourishment’ being the operative word here. Let us look to beef as a prime example (no pun intended). A cow is anatomically designed, by our Maker, to gain sustenance in the grasses that he can graze upon. An animal that should be pastured. A cow is also a cloven animal, which means he lacks fingers and is not able to manipulate his food by any means other than by way of mouth. So you might understand my confusion when our farming practices have somehow re-written the rules of nature to make corn and soybean a fixture in this animal’s diet. Had this been commonplace over the many thousands of years of the animal’s evolution, would we not see a cow’s neck raise at an ascending angle to reach an ear of corn?
The human component has altered the biological way of life for this animal. Where the feed pale or the trough was once considered a brilliant new technology, mankind had introduced a variable that was not intended, and thus has introduced that which is unnatural.
Here’s the double-edged sword… remember Part 2 of my blog series? How about the list of row crops that Monsanto had introduced into our country’s agriculture with an alarmingly rampant effect? Let me refresh: alfalfa, canola, corn, cotton, sorghum, wheat, and of course, soybean.
Uh oh.
Mark that a second giant red flag.
So here we have an unnatural diet converging with the dangers of genetically modified organisms coming from our earth’s soil, all wrapped into one great looking 12oz cut of good ol’ red meat, or in that drive-through dollar-menu hamburger… or that— You know what? You should be getting this by now.
Lets talk about feedlots. The cows I described above are the kind that you might see when driving through the heartland, the private farms that romanticize the dream of ‘living off the fat of the land.’ With feedlots, and the subsequent slaughterhouses, the farming vernacular gives way to ‘industry’, which, when detailing our food practices, is more accurately depicted as disease-ridden death camps for God’s creations. I won’t get into the gory imagery of it all, you can look that up for yourselves if you can stomach it.
Tucked away off any beaten path through America are these feedlots; where cattle are born and raised for the sole purpose of being murdered for our convenience. They stand, not roam, pinned up by the hundreds; and in some unregulated lots, wade ankle-deep in their own feces. Of course, they are fed only the finest [un]natural diets Monsanto can offer, before they meet their end in a brutal high-stress method of slaughter designed to maximize production efficiency. Is this form of life justifiable? Is this what was intended from the Higher Being?
All told, an unnatural diet packed full of poisonous chemicals leads to disease that plagues the AP news wire on a regular basis, yet we turn a blind eye. E Coli, mad cow, the list goes on. These bacteria are produced in a cow’s stomach simply because we, as a society, have failed to respect nature and its due course; the end result leading to possible death by tainted meat that makes its way into your body via the convenience of a drive-thru window, or the lack of attention being paid to packaging labels at the grocery store.
These diseased animals, then, set off a chain reaction that forces us to consider not only the individual’s own well-being, but also the carbon footprint of our hamburgers. Once laid out, it is quite clear that the variables involved in such a study deem the beef industry as a primary culprit in the case of our earth’s rapid destruction [because, remember, eating well isn’t just for the benefit of our earthly bodies, but our earth].
Consider, for a moment, the unnatural process of raising cattle. We begin by raising those GMO-laden corns, soy and even the grasses that we feed to these animals. Once grown, these crops must be harvested, and energy used to do so. Now the Monsanto farmer needs to grow more of said crop, which leads to more fertilization and tainting of the soil. Then, said crops must be transported to feed lots… more energy used. Now that we’re finally to the point where cows are ingesting these poisons, and developing possible disease, feedlots must use more energy to collect fecal matter and; expending more energy and subsequent pollution, ship the quarantined manure elsewhere so as to keep it away from the animals to avoid its inherent dangers, while also polluting whichever plot of land the manure finds itself. Not only is this process unnatural, but a crime against our planet in more ways than we think; and a correlation of the American society’s lack of respect for Mother Earth.
Now let us consider the natural process of raising beef. Pastured grass is eaten straight from its earthly form, which means that it is naturally harvested by the animal that it is intended. When fecal matter exists, it acts as a natural fertilizer for the field and when the harvest is complete, the growth process starts over again while the cows are moved to an adjacent field for grazing; one that has already been through this process in a different season. Its not only less complicated, it is a process that is less damning to the world. Its no coincidence that natural process and earth-friendliness go hand-in-hand.
The consequences of ‘playing God’ in such an unguarded practice are immense and become magnified once you scale the problem to a wider spectrum. In fact, America’s meat industry, one can argue, directly effects many of the philanthropic wars waged by the American public through so many charitable avenues. I won’t delve into all of them, perhaps I will speak more about them in later postings, but here is a brief list:
Government corruption and anti-trust movements; corporations gaining legal immunity unjustly while tightening the vice on government regulation for
Certification of Healthy Food Choices, which leads to higher-prices on the good foods, expanding the
Poverty line, which is affected by
Laborer Rights issues, an off-shoot of poor working conditions in the food industry, specifically related to
Immigration reform and
Hunger (and just imagine all the GMOs we give away in our cities’ food banks in all of those canned goods)
Obesity is also a part of this, for obvious reasons, but also in people below the poverty line, because the bad food is cheap, which leads to
Diseases, cancers, and a growing rate of conditions that, more and more, are making their way into our children’s immune systems by an expanding age demographic
And of course, the numerous efforts in renewable energy and clean air initiatives
This is just a small list of some of the ‘big picture’ problems our food choices affect. Everything is intertwined, and can be traced back to this porous industry, all of which persists in a vicious cycle that constantly deepens the hole we are digging and kills our planet at a more accelerated rate.
So there’s a further look at our meat industry; which was only discussed here by looking at a single example [beef] and opening it out into a broader scale. A scraping of the surface, if you will. It only gets more frightening the further you look into each specific case of the animals that we eat; be it chickens that are grown twice as large in half the amount of time that they were 50 years ago [and never see the light of day], or the pigs that are butchered on an assembly line [after horrible treatment and conditions] by immigrant laborers that are sacrificed to border patrol agents as pawns for big businesses to meet immigration regulation quotas, in order to stay ‘right with the government’, after being recruited by their very employers.
Its not just the animals that these companies are mistreating… but the consumers as well. The implications run deep. They don’t care who gets harmed, or worse, killed, so long as they are making money, and our government lets it happen.
So why not become vegetarian? Well, I have some thoughts on that, as well as some over-arching questions that continue to burn their way into my consciousness. In the conclusion of my ‘FarmAiding My Family’ series, Part 4 will address these struggles and my search to find understanding in my personal discovery of the subject.
I hope you are inspired to ask the same questions.
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