Some things about Meat

I do not eat meat because of an anxiety disorder - I have "carnophobia", or an irrational fear of consuming meat. However, here are some interesting facts about meat that others might wish to cite in favour of Vegetarianism:

• Turkeys bred for consumption cannot reproduce naturally - cannot, in fact, have sex - due to the grossly unnatural size of their breasts. That's right, big boobs = no turkey sex. All turkey sold in American supermarkets has been artificially inseminated, even the "Free range" and "natural" branded stuff. I have no idea what the turkey situation is like here in Australia. Do you?
  
  
• To be branded as "free range" in America, chickens need to have "access to the outdoors" which, on further analysis, proves to be meaningless. As many authors (eg Singer, Saffran Foer) have discovered, "free range" chickens still have less than 1 A4 sheet of paper on which to stand, are packed into barns with no places to perch, and their access to the outdoors may be for a few hours of daylight a few days of a few months every year. They are still bred to grow so fat so quickly that their bones do not develop properly, and they often cannot walk properly. They still have their beaks seared off to stop them pecking each other. They still stand or kneel in thick piles of their own shit, causing all kinds of sores and infections, including blindness and respiratory problems. As Jonathon Saffran Foer eloquently says in his book Eating Animals: "One can reliably assume that most 'free-range' (or 'cage-free') laying hens are debeaked, drugged, and cruelly slaughtered once 'spent'. I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range."
  
  
• Singer, in his book the Ethics of What we Eat mentions that debeaking is "common practice" in Australia, as well. Chicken's beaks are like our fingers. Imagine having your child's fingers sawn off with a hot blade, with no anaesthetic. Then imagine that child living out their existence in artificial light, shoulder to shoulder with other fingerless children, up to their knees in excrement, for the rest of their lives - luckily, though, their lives are only 39-42 days. At this stage they will be plump and delicious and ready to slaughter. Assuming they have lived this long, of course.
  
  
• Now, in Australia, it is possible that there are egg sellers who use the term "Free Range" in the sense that we would assume it is meant, and that their birds are not debeaked or put through other factory-farm suffering. But how can you tell? If "free range" apparently means nothing, which eggs do you buy? I personally would opt to buy eggs off a neighbour who owns her own hens. Wouldn't you?
  
  
• Did you know that the chickens that produce our eggs and the chickens that produce our meat are no longer the same chickens? I found this fascinating. You see, they are bred to be extra specially good at what they do: which means fast growing chubby chooks (broilers) for our dinner plates, and over-laying ladies to pop out 300 eggs in their first year (before being sold for pet food, as it becomes economically unsavoury to house hens who have dropped 50% in productivity by year 2). Which raises the question, what happens to male "layers"? Well, they're pretty useless, actually. They grow too slowly and don't get fat enough to eat, and, shame for them, they can't lay eggs. I won't post the links, because that would be gratuitous, but there are photos all over the internet of baby male layers being thrown into dumpsters to suffocate, or into machines that are effectively wood chippers for live chicks. Chick Chippers, if you will. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? VeganPeace.com has some photos if you really must upset yourself further.
  
  
• The suffering of the vast number of pigs farmed by factory methods aside, let's talk a little more about shit. I can do no better than to summarise Saffran Foer's explanation of the several hundred 120,000 square feet shit "lagoons" that surround each hog farm: "If you were to fall into one, you would die... just as you would die of asphyxiation, within minutes, if the power went out while you were in one of the hog sheds."
  

This topic is endlessly fascinating to me, but I think it's time for a recipe.

Dinner

• Take some fresh vegetables
• Add some herbs and spices
• Apply heat according to your methodology of choice
• Serve atop your favourite carbohydrate, cooked in whichever manner you fancy

Delicious. If you're still hungry, however, Jonathan, again in "Eating Animals", offers a mouth watering recipe for Filipino Stewed Dog ("wedding style", apparently). Presumably it could apply just as deliciously to cats, if you're not really a dog person.