Anger, sadness, frustration, compassion, knowledge.

I'm sure, or at least I hope that you have seen or heard of the massive recall of beef.

Pertaining to the story, I'm not pissed off because I'm shocked and newly appalled, not at all. I've known that this type of thing REALLY goes on, and that these dispicable practices with animals has been going on for years.

(But I bet you didn't know that animals being farmed for meat, get to eat dead cats and dogs from animal shelters.)

But back on topic, I made a decision a few years ago, to move my brain away from denial avenue, and start taking some accountability for what I put in my mouth.I realize that some people are carnivores, they know what they are eating, they believe that animals what put on this earth for food, and have no plans to change.

However, there are people that have grown up eating meat and can't see anything wrong, selfish or unusual in the consumption of flesh because that's the way they were brought up. (Tha'ts how I was brought up too.)
So in having been one of those people for a very long time, I realized that during my meat eating days (hamburgers and steaks were my favorite) I did something to remove myself from acknowledging what I was putting into my mouth everytime I ate a chicken nugget, a hamburger, a steak, or a piece of veal.

I detached.

Most people don't even realize they are detaching because it comes so natural. Think about it, we call carrots, carrots, lettuce, lettuce, potatoes that have been mashed are mashed potatoes. But with our most popular and consumed meats, we don't do that at all. With chicken being a weird exeption, we call cows, BEEF, steak, hamburger etc. We call Pig, PORK, bacon, and chitterlins.I know that when I was growing up, as a curious child, I would have asked alot of questions if what I was eating was called just what it was.

"Come to dinner Charlotte, we're having pieces of a chicken chopped and covered in breading."

I have spoken to SO many people who say that they love or like to eat meat, but admit that they try not to think about what it is or else they wouldn't be able to eat it.

Why? Why if it is so natural to consume the flesh of animals do we give it euphanisms and mentally detatch from what is that we're chewing on?

Why?

If its so good and so natural, why do we try our hardest not to remember that what lays in between our slices of bread was once a living, breathing creature that had to be slaughtered, that had to bleed and die, so that we could have the satisfaction of eating it? It just seems so selfish to take part in the breeding, birth, and life of a creature soley for it to be murdered, dismembered, processed, and shelfed for a yummy dinner.
And why do we put so much good faith and trust in goverment agencies, farms and markets that in their practices they will be sanitary and humane?

I understand that people will probably consume meat until the end of time, but why is meat such a priority? Our world's meat consumption has gone up five-fold since the 1950s. With all the negative facts related to meat consumption and production, why aren't Americans more concious? With so much information, Americans constantly turn a blind eye to anything inconvienent.
Most American families have meat with every meal, every day. That's 3 meals a day, 7 days a week.

On another topic, many people don't realize that no two vegetarians are the same. There are moral vegetarians and health vegetarians. But what's interesting is, according to statistics once practicing the lifestyle, the vegetarian almost always becomes a vegetarian with moral and health arguments.

Facing the reality of what meat is, and opening your eyes to what goes on to turn a living creature into a slab on your plate is something that everyone should know about; and those who don't want to know, are being irresponsible because they are refusing to make informed decisions. In another words, if you like it and want it, find out what is is, what it does, what it took to get it there, and if you still like it, you've made a decision that's best for you and your beliefs... but if you're not doing that, what are you doing?
I believe that if you want to eat meat, love meat, and are strong in your stance, then go ahead and watch something or read something about moral and health issues pertaining to meat.

Besides, why wouldn't you? Are you afraid its going to make you not want to eat meat?Food for thought.

If you haven't figured it out already, I began my journey as a vegetarian because of moral issues. It actually pained me to continue to eat certain types of meat after I became aware of the treatment of animals. I first cut out beef, and wasn't worried about what to eat, because I had already had the opportunity to try meat alternatives and knew which ones were great, and to be honest, after alot of reflection, I reliazed that I liked many of the products more than the meat I'd been eating my whole life!

But over time, just like statistics show, I also became a health vegetarian, and tried to impart those messages to my family and loved ones. There are so many reasons why meat products are and can be threatening to human health, but that I'll save for another time. Keep in mind, I don't pass these messages on for people to promptly become passionate vegetarians, I pass them on so maybe people can realize meat doesn't have to be, and shouldn't be a headliner at every meal.

After learning more and digging below the surface to learn more about the all-around impacts of eating meat, I began to find that there are also economical and ENVIORNMENTAL issues and repercussions associated with eating meat. Below I'm going to paste an excerpt from www.worldwatch.org that talks about the long term envrionmental impact of eating meat.

But before I paste that, I will say that many people have rebutted me by saying, "that's what animals are here for, its natural."
Mass prodcution, THE MASS PRODUCTION of living creatures, kept in horrible conditions, over -bred, fed filth, beaten and kicked for being ill and shot with drugs, is the farthest thing from natural. Its more like creating your own freakish version nature.

The excerpt...
Americans are eating more meat than ever before-the average American consumes nearly twice his or her weight in meat each year. As Americans throw more hamburgers, hotdogs and chicken wings on the grill, they lead the way in a global trend towards increased meat consumption.
The growing consumption of meat-particularly large quantities of high-fat meat, dairy products and eggs-is spurring a global epidemic of lifestyle diseases, such as heart attacks, strokes and cancers, as well as creating new pressures on land and water resources, contributing to water pollution and exacerbating global warming.
World meat production has surged nearly fivefold since 1950, growing from 44 million tons to 211 million tons in 1997. Per capita meat production stands at 36 kg, more than double the 1950 level.

Today, people share the Earth's natural resources with nearly 1 billion pigs, 1.3 billion cows, 1.8 billion sheep and goats, and 13.5 billion chickens-over two chickens for each man, woman and child on the planet. (See Table 1.)

Charlotte says: and it gets better... cont'd

This boom in meat consumption has been accompanied by increased intake of all animal products, such as dairy products and eggs, as well as seafood. Per capita consumption of milk, cheese, yogurt, ice cream and eggs have climbed to all-time highs. The world fish harvest has soared from 21 million tons to 120 million tons since mid-century, tripling the per capita consumption of seafood.

In a world where an estimated one in every six people goes hungry each day, the politics of meat consumption are increasingly heated, since meat production is an inefficient use of grain-the grain is used more efficiently when consumed directly by humans. Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat eaters and the world's poor.
Global meat consumption is highly concentrated, dominated by only a few nations. The United States and China, which contain 25 percent of the world's population, combine to consume 35 percent of the world's beef, over half of the world's poultry, and 65 percent of the world's pork. If Brazil and the European Union are included, this group consumes over 60 percent of the world's beef, over 70 percent of the world's poultry, and over 80 percent of the world's pork.
While pork and beef once vied for the lead in global meat production, pork has emerged in the past two decades as the uncontested leader, largely due to production increases in China, the nation that produces and consumes half the world's pork. At 85 million tons, pork production last year was easily a third higher than beef and poultry production. (Poultry production surpassed beef production in 1996.) Mutton, including sheep and goats, is a distant fourth in the global meat hierarchy.
While meat consumption is on the rise everywhere, the type of meat consumed varies widely across cultures, with most nations focusing on a single type of meat. For example, pork dominates meat intake in many European nations and China. Beef reigns in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil. In South Africa and various East Asian nations, chicken tops meat consumption. Mutton provides the meat for diets in countries such as Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. And in Australia, New Zealand and Ireland, mutton rivals beef as the principal source of meat. Only the United States ranks high for all three major meats: beef, pork and chicken. (See Table 2.)
Worldwide, the production of beef and mutton depends heavily on a natural system-rangelands. Since these lands are too arid or too steeply sloping to be plowed, meat production is the only option for generating food from these ecosystems. But as overgrazing becomes the norm in much of the world, rangelands are being pushed to their limits and beyond.
The fragile state of the world's rangelands-which cover roughly twice the area of the world's cropland-is of concern because these ecosystems are the source of nearly one-quarter of the world's meat. In addition, hundreds of millions depend on these lands not only for food, but also for their livelihood. In areas as distant and diverse as southern Africa, the Middle East, Mongolia and Central Asia, the livelihood of herder populations-and cultures that revolve around animal husbandry-is threatened by the escalating demands on the world's rangelands.
Once rangelands are fully exploited, substantial future gains in beef production can come only from feedlots. At that point, the competition with pork and poultry for feed grain will intensify. Beef production requires nearly twice as much grain as pork and nearly four times as much grain as poultry. (It takes 7 kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef: the conversion is 4 to 1 for pork and 2 to 1 for chicken.) Since they are less grain-intensive, chicken and pork are more cost-effective choices. As a result, while beef production has stagnated in recent years, pork and chicken production have surged ahead.
Each kilo of meat represents several kilos of grain, either corn or wheat, that could be consumed directly by humans. If the 670 million tons of the world's grain used for feed were reduced by just 10 percent, this would free up 67 million tons of grain, enough to sustain 225 million people or keep up with world population growth for the next three years. If each American reduced his or her meat consumption by only 5 percent, roughly equivalent to eating one less dish of meat each weak, 7.5 million tons of grain would be saved, enough to feed 25 million people-roughly the number estimated to go hungry in the United States each day.
Meat production also has a growing impact on nations facing water scarcity, from the North China Plain to the Middle East, from sub-Saharan Africa to northern India. For example, shifting from pork to chicken requires half the grain, and hence half as much water.

The massive quantities of waste produced by livestock and poultry threaten rivers, lakes and other waterways. In the United States, where the waste generated by livestock is 130 times that produced by humans, livestock wastes are implicated in waterway pollution, toxic algal blooms and massive fishkills. And livestock farms are getting larger throughout the world: one 50,000-acre hog farm under construction in Utah will produce more waste than the city of Los Angeles.
According to EPA, the world's livestock herds account for roughly 25 percent of anthropogenic emissions of methane-a potent greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Moreover, the stagnant waste lagoons of factory-farm operations emit an additional 5 percent of human-induced methane, making livestock production the largest source of anthropogenic methane emissions.

If moral and human issues don't get you going after the recent news, and environmental issues somehow leave you with little or no reaction, then let's go to an area where, according to the news most people are concerned with.
Sanitation.
According to the book fast food nation, here is what you get to put in your body.
"Far from their natural habitat, the cattle in feedlots become prone to all sorts of illnesses. And what they are being fed often contributes to the spread of disease"......"about 75% of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed livestock wastes - the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle - until August of 1997. They were also fed millions of dead cats and dead dogs every year, purchased from animal shelters....responsible for mad cow disease". "Nevertheless, current FDA regulations allow dead pigs and dead horses to be rendered into cattle feed, along with dead poultry". And in another chapter: A 1996 USDA study found that "78.6 percent of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily through fecal material"......."the medical literature on the causes of food poisoning is full of euphemisms and dry scientific terms"....."behind them lies a simple explanation for why eating a hamburger can now make you seriously ill: There is sh_t in the meat".
Wow huh?I'll be writing more.Thanks for reading,Charlotte.