Why would anyone become a vegetarian or, even worse, a vegan? Who in their right mind would ever cut out a nice juicy hunk of carcass from the diet? Well, I would and have, for several reasons, including the tree-hugging, animal-loving ones as well as the health arguments. It’s interesting the first time you tell someone that you’re vegetarian; it’s as if you just told them something inherently disturbing about yourself that no one else should ever know, all simply because you have stopped dining on slaughtered animal. I personally went vegetarian for several reasons, many of which have to do with loving on animals but most of which have to do with the atrocious conditions of the meat industry.
Coincidentally, as I write this I have become aware of the recent ban placed on Canadian beef, but why would America stop importing precious Canadian meat? Maybe it’s due to the resurfacing of the brain-eating bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as Mad Cow Disease, which has plagued Canadian as well as French cattle for years now. This horrid disease is due to the conditions under which the cattle are raised and plumped up.
According to Howard Lyman, a fourth generation dairy farmer and cattle rancher, “About 75 percent of the ninety million beef cattle in America are routinely given feed that has been ‘enriched, with rendered animal parts.'” The meaning of “enriched with rendered animal parts” is surprisingly interesting. Rendering is a 2.4 billion dollar a year business that renders (a.k.a. grinds up) several billion pounds of dead animal a year; this includes road kill, euthanized pets, and of course livestock (only the cows that died of sicknesses that were too bad to obtain meat from though.)
Hmm, does that mean that a majority of the cattle that you eat was fattened by the eating of other cattle? No, not necessarily. The FDA put a ban on the feeding of ruminant (cud chewing) animals to other ruminants late in the year in 1997, yet this still doesn’t stop the cattle from being fed the rest of the protein packed goodness, a.k.a. horse, dog, cat, pig, chicken, and turkey along with whatever the animal had eaten the day of their death.
Mmm. Cows that eat other animals and feces. Mmmm.
Cattle fattening doesn’t stop there, however. The beasts are further fattened with steroids and growth hormones, causing them to pass from calf to cow in a quarter of the time that Mother Nature intended. These chemicals aren’t eradicated with the death of the animal either; they carry on to the consumer, only they have been magnified from their storage in the fatty tissue of the cow.
Now when the folks of carnivorous nature munch down and swallow, they too are becoming part of the chemical lineage of steroids and hormones, many of which have been known to be cancer causing agents in humans.
I do, however, understand that many of you can’t stand the thought of a world without meat, which is understandable. I personally don’t like the taste of meat or its quality, which made it exceptionally easy for me to convert. For those of you unlike myself, however, there is an alternative. In Cincinnati alone there are several farms that raise cattle organically, which means they feed them grass and grain, not carcass and poo, eliminating the horrid notion of eating an animal raised under such atrocious conditions.
If you don’t want to take my word on the subject, get on the net and play around, or pick up Mad Cowboy or The Jungle, both of which are excellent sources of information on the state of meat production.
Bon apetit.