To be honest I have been having trouble eating animals lately. This has been bothering me most notably since mid-August when we returned to Catalonia. Anyway, to start off I realized it was too hard for me to just give up meat... err... cold turkey... so I started by avoiding mammals. Now, I just eat outside my taxonomical class. To tell you the truth, chicken doesn't do it for me anymore either... but so far, I still haven't switched to tofurkey.

My recent ruminations (so to speak) on eating animals have really be the result of wanting to eat and live more sustainably, not per se for any particular moral rejection of eating them. It's much harder here in Spain than it North America, I would say. Here, if you don't eat "meat", they serve you "lamb"... ;) When it comes down to it, I would much prefer to eat a hunted wild animal than one that has been mass produced like a cheap piece of plastic or fabric. That's the essence of factory farming... bottom line. As Jonathan Safran Foer's recent book taught me, when it comes to eating animals, we'd do good to ask the question where it's all coming from, and in Western society at least, the majority of beef, poultry and fish is in fact factory farmed. What does that mean? Isn't "Factory Farm" a contradiction in terms? Yes. If you look at how meat is marketed, it still portrays the utopian farm life, with your typical grazing animals and chicken coops. But, in reality this is not so. It is far far from the truth. In reality animals are herded into massive abattoirs, or, in the case of chickens, either left on floors together by the 10's of thousands in their own filth, pumped with steroids, hormones and antibiotics to technologically fix the diseases that results from their abnormal lives or for "broilers", (chickens you eat, as opposed to just their eggs), in cages too small to turn around. Cows are fed a diet of corn, even though their stomachs have evolved to only digest grass. This also means we need to technologically fix them. Rather than working with nature, we again oppose it.

This leads me to the book I am currently reading, "The Omnivore's Dilemma", another great book by Michael Pollan. Pollan follows the food of the typical American diet from seed to plate, in three different ways, the industrial, the pastoral and the hunter/gatherer. He rightly decries fast food in favor of slow food, he suggests avoiding any advertised food and as a rule of thumb trying to avoid buying food with more than 5 ingredients. It's harder than you think.

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”.

Pollan's treatise on "Organic" in which he notes does not mean what you think... if you think it means, "no synthetic chemicals" or "peacefully grazing animals". At least in the US (and I can only imagine from the artificially cheap price, the same in Europe), animals are only required "access to the outdoors", a seemingly deliberately vague statement that allows manufacturers the liberty to determine when and if their animals live natural lives.

Simply stated, Organic doesn't necessarily mean "Sustainable" (another overused and often misused word), especially if you happen to buy a 70 calorie Organic lettuce produced 4000 miles away... it consuming in the meantime some 4600 calories of petroleum to get on your plate (shipping, refrigeration, etc...). In any case, the true definition of "organic" is any member of a large class of chemical compounds whose molecules contain carbon. But, it's meaning has come to mean something different in terms of Organic Food.

All I advocate in most of these blogs is to focus on the local, because whether we like it or not, our age of cheap oil, when all this unsustainability was possible, is coming to an end in the coming years and decades. It's up to you to ensure that you local realm of control is in check.

In the words of Hughes Mearns:

As I was sitting in my chair,

I knew the bottom wasn't there,

Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,

Ignoring little things like that.

Peace,

Grant