Now I like eating meat. But over the last few years I have really cut down, particularly on processed meat.
Diving convinced me that eating fish is unsustainable and wrong and so despite loving it I have all but cut fish out of my diet.
Now this article has made me stop and think even more about this issue.
It’s a short piece about how eating pangolins may have been the vector for CORVID-19 between bats and humans.
It is not proven but it is interesting.
https://apple.news/AKepZ8wk9TXeXupN_yrmh0w
Now I don’t eat, crunchy on the outside chewy on the inside, pangolins and I bet most people I know’s first reaction is ‘that’s just weird why would you eat that?’.
(Well my friend John would and probably relish the thought, he sees the world as a culinary adventure and seems set on eating everything and anything providing the Chef has a Michelin Star or two but that’s another story).
The point here is not to judge, as honestly, is eating pangolin any weirder than eating chicken or goat or lamb or pig or cow?
Why is one animal ok and another not?
Cat anyone?
Where’s the line?
In the UK we were horrified to find we had been fed horse. It is better for you than beef and the French are not so squeamish about it.
Our views on this are just cultural conditioning!
My question is about the practice of killing and eating pretty much anything with a face.
And this is before we even start considering the horror that is the mass farming of animals and how they are slaughtered.
The mass farming that is the perfect Petri dish for breeding disease.
Keeping and eating pigs gave us swine flu, chickens bird flu, bush meat looks likely to have been the origin of HIV/AIDs, red meat is linked to cancer, over consumption to obesity and diabetes.
Mad cow disease anyone?
Eating bats, snakes or pangolin seems to be linked to our current pandemic.
Spot the pattern?
It really should make everyone stop and think.
It has me.
Just from a farming / environmental perspective the impact of mass commercial beef alone is insane the amount of water used to produce the meat for one hamburger is enough to produce tones of plants and beef farming has led to mass deforestation in Brazil all in the name of profit. The very air we breath!
Just watch this documentary about beef if you are not sure:
I am not against beef or beef farmers I just raise it as an illustration of my point. After all we transport lamb around the world, we keep chickens in horrific conditions.
I get that in the past we hunted or husbanded animals on a small scale because we needed the protein but there was a balance.
One that clearly no longer exists.
When we used to keep animals ourselves and took responsibility for their care when we killed and butchered them ourselves and did not eat meat for every meal, maybe it was better, maybe there was more compassion.
When you raise an animal and slaughter it yourself there is a connection. A respect. One that is missing as we open the plastic wrapped packaging of generic ‘meat’.
Mass farming and the commoditisasion of meat is awful. Our all consuming meat addiction is awful.
Before you tuck into that next slab of meat pop on a video of an abattoir in action.
Watch and enjoy while you eat.
The whole habit of eating meat has been carefully sanitised to make the horror palatable.
When was the last time you got blood on your hands?
Think about it, our meat is carefully exsanguinated to ensure it does not offend our sensibilities, to remove us one more step from that realisation of what we do.
Just ask a child where there dinner came from, so many have no clue.
Many adults are just the same, many are wilfully ignorant, choosing not to think about it. In the ‘West’ we have been socially conditioned this way for years.
Most of us have become so disconnected from what meat really is. By the time meat reaches us we have been so completely, institutionally and culturally brainwashed that we don’t even think about what we are putting in our mouths.
‘I like it’ is not enough.
The argument for eating meat is untenable.
We can after all get all the protein we need from plant based foods.
Poppy went vegetarian about six months ago and managed the switch really well, I think I shall join her.
Under an Endless Sky 