The coincidence of finding the same kind of story in two completely different parts of the world on the same day seems uncanny. Or is it far more common than we care to know? On the same day, I found two news stories surface, one about a river of pig blood coming from a slaughterhouse in a small town in Poland called Koscierzyna and the other, about pig blood flowing down a river in Dallas, TX.
If you are an animal advocate or just someone who is concerned with animal issues, the first most important task we have is to find creative ways to get people to bear witness to the suffering of animals for food and other uses. You can’t have a meaningful conversation with someone who has not yet been exposed to the reality you too have witnessed. The act of witnessing forms the basis of a constructive dialogue about our impact on animals and what we can do about it.
Martha Stewart denounces factory farming in a new video recorded by Farm Sanctuary. The interesting thing here is that the focus is only on factory farming which is simply the result of a mindset that views certain animals as commodities to satisfy human pleasures. She does not denounce eating animals on principle because doing so reduces their value to mere commodities. And yet it is precisely this belief—that animals are here for our use—that is the justification and catalyst behind a system of food production that uses animals as resources on a scale of mass production that we have come to know as factory farming. Therefore, to denounce factory farming without providing a solution, leaves her audience wondering, what should I do? Look for humane products? Go vegetarian, vegan? The answer is unclear.
At least once per week I come across a story in the Huffington Post Food section about how to raise or hunt and kill your own animals for food. One week it was a story about how to salvage road kill and turn it into a tasty meal. Another week it was an amateur urban chicken “farmer” intent on having her first chicken slaughter experience but didn’t have the heart to kill her own hens so she went out and found a wandering hen who had escaped from a live market which she brought home and slaughtered for a meal. The stories of these so called “conscious” people who are taking the journey to trace where their food comes from seems to have an endless stream of variations on the same theme. Yet the underlying premise of all of them are predictably consistent: these animals are here for our use, for us to raise, kill and eat as we see fit, because they have no other value or meaning in life other than to be our food.
Researcher and scholar Jamie Hecht has been involved in an ongoing research study of former vegans and vegetarians with the goal of better understanding their motivations for “defecting,” that is, going back to eating meat. We reported on her latest discoveries from a study group that identified the top 6 reasons why people give up being vegetarian and vegan. Interestingly enough, non of the top 6 reasons had anything to do with health concerns or health conditions. ALL of them were connected to social pressures—from family, friends, popular culture and even ethnic cultural traditions.
UK Author Joseph D’Lacey has taken the literary world by storm with his recent novel, MEAT: You Are What You Eat. The transformative power of this book and the creative ways it has been marketed have together made it a phenomenon in Europe. And in 2011 it will be released in the US. MEAT has been translated into German, French, Hungarian, Russian and Turkish and was optioned for film in ’08. MEAT also secured him the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer in 2009. After numerous press appearances and 30,000 books sold, D’Lacey shares with us the fascinating background story and ideas that led to the writing of this profound work of fiction.