When I was a kid growing up in Illinois, six nights a week my Mom served us delicious dinners of chicken, pork, beef roasts, and hamburgers. She met meat, loved it, and passed on the love to my siblings and me. She’d grown up around farm animals; her dad---my gramps---had been a dairy farmer. Never did she question whether she should skip the pleasure of eating meat; she'd seen how well gramps treated his animals whose life’s purpose was to provide milk and beef for his big family, and his customers’ families. His herd never stood in mud and piles of manure in a feedlot. If he were still living, I know he’d struggle to understand why feedlots are allowed to exist. Gramps would have been an activist, for sure…a meat-eating activist.
The organic food movement caught up with me about 10 years ago. I found a nearby source for organically grown fruits and veggies and grains, and called it a day with meat, believing that was the trade-off for going organic.
That’s the huge misconception about eating naturally occurring, organically grown good food. Going meatless, it turns out, affected us in a couple of ways. Our energy levels sagged, and our overall health suffered. Fortunately, the food co-op we belong to sells meat. Let me tell you that biting into a real hamburger re-ignited that Mother-given love affair with meat. It was a bit of bliss, and life was good again.
I have undergone one very important change about my choice to eat meat: how very much I deplore everything about the factory farm system. Like my gramps, I eat meat that comes from animals raised in a humane environment. For me, that translates into the only logical source---organic grassfed beef, and free-range chickens and turkeys.
I’m more aware than ever about the Big Eat-Meat Debate. I don’t feel guilty because I prefer to bite into a real burger instead of a non-meat burger that tastes like crap to me.
A part of our society does have a problem with meat-eating people like me. Reasons vary. Mostly, the people who choose not to eat animal protein tell me it’s because they strongly oppose how the animals are raised. Surely, they can’t mean cattle that graze the land for their food. Probing a little further, I usually learn it’s the ‘factory farm’ meat they object to. It’s a point we agree on: Feedlot cattle live (if you can call it that) a miserable, inhumane existence. For that reason and several others, I’ll never help support the continuation of the corporate meat industry.
Because the debate sits in my head---purely because I want to know how and why others feel as they do---I recently checked out a book at the public library whose title grabbed me by my tastebuds: “The Compassionate Carnivore, Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat.” Catherine Friend wrote the book that may just grab you, too.
I haven’t finished reading the book yet. I like what I’ve read so far, though. You see, Catherine knows both sides of the Big Eat-Meat Debate: She’s a meat-lover, and her partner and she own a sheep farm. Thanks to her willingness to share her mixed feelings about meat food, and her experience as a farmer, I’m able to climb into her head throughout the 259 pages of text to get a better handle on just why I don’t feel guilty about being a carnivore.
Comments
As a vegetarian of some 22 years, I appreciate your choice to only eat humanely reared animals. I have read the points made above, and appreciate them. However, not everyone is a vegetarian, and sees the issues as we do. Cut Natallie some slack for at least insisting her meat is organic!
Adam, it still goes back to the right to choose. I respect your choice to not eat meat; I expect you to respect my choice to eat organic grassfed meat humanely raised. Sorry you have a problem with the word 'humane.' I should think the bigger issue would be the inhumanely raised cattle that exist in unhealthy conditions in factory farm feedlots.
Adam, insulting a fellow Examiner in her own column just because its views are different from yours is quite unprofessional and does nothing but bring your own credibility down.
Natalie, when you take the issue "back" to choice, you are removing the right of animals from the equation completely. I could say that it is just for an individual to kidnap individuals because this is far more humane of a practice than those who kidnap and torture their victims. Indeed, the prior is technically less harmful. So the issue comes down to choice. You should just respect my views that I support kidnapping without torture, isn't that the larger issue?
So the spider must be a horrible inhumane killer, as it 'kidnaps' its prey in its web before eating it.
Or the antlion that digs a slippery pit in the sand for its prey to fall into with no hope of escaping. Murderous antlions!
Adam, you must be confused about what subject you're commenting on, as Natalie's whole spin on her column is about beef that is raised WITHOUT cages and hormones and mass slaughterings.
Adam, I still find it very unprofessional for you to speak out against Natalie's column.
I write about cars... environmental Examiners don't come leaving comments on my column about how cars are the bane of Earth's existence.
In closing, I understand that arguments like this never end. I've put in my two cents, so we'll leave it at that.
Natalie, you're doing an excellent job, and I will refer to your articles in the future for any tips on eating organic food.
Mike, thanks for weighing in. You're right in saying the subject will never end. Broadening the subject makes it impossible to come to a consensus. Thanks for the compliment!
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