If You Still Eat Meat From Factories
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Dr. Andrew Weil writes:
Almost certainly, you have heard something about the terrible ways that we now treat farm animals in America, and you didn’t like what you heard.
But if you still eat meat from factories — and, [Jonathan Safran] Foer reports, 99 percent of meat eaten in the U.S. is raised and/or processed in factory operations — you have not, by definition, absorbed the reality of factory farms. If you truly understood the nightmarish brutality of what happens inside these windowless animal jails and abattoirs that dot the American ruralscape, you simply would not eat this meat. Foer makes it clear that factory farming is the exceptional human activity that debases and destroys everything it touches: land, people, communities, and most of all, the innocents at the nexus, animals.
If you protest that factory farming’s saving grace is that it is produces abundant, cheap meat, consider that American meat is almost certainly too abundant and too cheap. In 2003, the average American ate 273 pounds of meat. Okinawans eat less than half as much and are the world’s longest-lived people, healthier by virtually every measure. Eating more plant protein directly — rather than inefficiently converting it via animal feed into meat — would free up millions of acres of American farmland, boosting the healthfulness of the American diet while lowering its cost.
Read more at: HuffPo
What’s so absolutely insane with this scenario of factory farming is that our gov continues to subsidize the building of more of them… Even in economic terms – for now – the industry is flooded with “excess product”… Yet tax dollars are funneled to “farmers” to encourage making even more. It’s just totally irresponsible when you follow where OUR money goes and what we’re forced to support!
.-= Bea Elliott´s last blog ..Tell Your Vegan Story – World Vegan Day – Nov 1st =-.