Fortunately for me an interesting topic was twirling in my mind recently that I thought interesting enough to write something about. But I have to warn you....
THE FOLLOWING POST WILL TALK ABOUT A SUBJECT THAT SOME WILL FIND SHOCKING AND DISGUSTING ....
THE REASONS FOR YOUR DISGUST IS THE VERY TOPIC I AM TALKING ABOUT HERE.... ESPECIALLY IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE BRITISH
I HAVE WARNED YOU ALREADY.
IF YOU STILL WANT TO BROWSE THE WEB WITHOUT READING ANYTHING CONTROVERSIAL AND CHALLENGING
READ SOMETHING ELSE NOW!
If you are someone who has no trouble reading such blog posts, continue reading....
(You are the audience I am after here.)
But for those (who some call "snow flakes") who are still continuing reading this wondering what is the subject of this post.... let me start it with an imaginary scenario....
Imagine that you are a Pokémon trainer who owns an Eevee.... who has gotten lost in the mountains during wintery conditions. You find a cave as shelter and managed to make a fire.
You are hungry.
It's been days since you last had any food.
Because of conditions there is no forms of editable plant available.
You got a knife and fire.
You must have worked it out by now (from the title and the long extended "trigger warning" alone).
If not, let me put it in words I will not like to say to someone at all....
In a life-or-death situation ...
are you willing to kill something if not doing so meant certain death for you?
In other words, are you willing to eat Eevee?
Yelp, this post is about the activity of consuming the flesh from dead animals in the form of (what we call linguistically to separate it from its bloody origins so that we are not thinking about it when eating said flesh) "meat."
The subject entered my mind recently because of a recently released documentary called Carnage: Swallowing The Past. It is a documentary made in a peaceful future, where veganism has become universal, that looks back to the meat-eating habits of 20th and 21st century, and how this future came to be. It is a great film to watch, if you don't mind the occasional slaughter scene that PETA has an endless supply of.
And it got me thinking about the subject of meat. Familiar readers will know that I have a thing for human ingenuity. How we have turned raw materials from the Earth into useful tools. And food is one of those "useful tools." So I do have the knowledge to know how all the components that make a up a McDonald's Happy Meal (including the toy and the cardboard box it comes in) are made and put together in the form of a corporate-sponsored childhood memory (and what memories those giveaways were to me, including a few of those gold-plated Pokémon cards from Burger King (Take that Mc! I am not a sheep who goes tot he same place for substance again ad again. It depends on where I am when its lunch time, suckers.)).
In short, I know where burgers come from. I don't need to taught by a preacher to megaphone it down my ears how gruesome the process is. And let, I still eat a burger anyway (I was in KFC yesterday, if you were going to ask.). So why do I still eat meat, despite knowing of the suffering the animals that made it go through (in their final moments, if you consider the "free range" variety)?
I can narrow it down to three things.....
- The distance from slaughterhouse to burger joint.
- The cultural habits of the western lifestyle.
- Autistic people tend to be "fussy eaters" due to there overacting senses.
That last one only applies to a small number of people. (And I bet many "meat is murder" preachers aren't aware of this small number of "fussy eaters." They may be aware of autism, but not the "fussy eating" bit.)
But the rest can apply to most meat eaters worldwide. Now, the distance from sight of slaughter isn't the biggest problem when it comes to converting carnivores. They are places in the world where people do regularly go out and hunt for food or raise animals for personal slaughter later. Yes, they are people in isolated places that still regularly do the same thing our cavemen ancestors once did a long time ago before farming was invented, allowing us to distant ourselves from the providers of food, blinding us form the process. These people have no qualms about it because they are use to it, after doing it a million times. So, I'm afraid to say that (in a world where we are accustomed to seeing people been shot in the head in movies (and on the news)) showing footage of a cow been shot in the head won't convert many TV viewers.
The real reason that vegetarianism (let alone veganism) has been a fringe lifestyle is because the practise of eating meat has been so the norm in the west that most people don't second-think about it. It seems to have always been that way, to them. And it doesn't help that meat happens to be very rich form of nutrients (especially when cooked).
Also we have culturally segregated the animal kingdom. Because we see ourselves as "intelligent" over the rest of the "dumb" animals we see ourselves as separate from nature, so therefore free to do whatever we like it it and her fellow inhabitants. We can determine the fate of species just by calling it a "pet" or "meat" (a game which should make a thought-provoking arcade machine) And, as I said in this previous post, I think it's an "idea that has truly done more damage to Earth than any other manmade invention."
And burgers are more damaging to Earth than just that. According to this article a single cheese burger has the carbon footprint of somewhere between 3.6-6.1 kg (gases have mass remember). Doesn't sound much, until you remember how many burgers are eaten around the world.That same article suggests that if every American stopped eating burgers for one year, the US can remove the equivalent of (at least) 6.5 million Hummer H3s off their collective carbon footprint. So, if cheese burgers alone can do that amount of damage, imagine what all those hot dogs, buffalo wings, KFC buckets, steaks and Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys are doing too.
Some may be wondering why burgers create such large amounts of CO2 (apart from the methane coming off the cows)? The basic reason for the high environmental cost is simple ... raising an animal requires a lot of resources. According to this article, producing one pound of beef requires 1,799 gallons of water. The same weight in wheat (in comparison) only requires 132 gallons. In other words, the amount of water used in the growing and making the bun (and some salad) in the burger is chicken feed compared to the amount used to raise the cow to make the lump of grilled mince in the middle... And that figure doubles if you consider dairy cows, so the situation gets worse if you decide to have it served with a slice of solidified gone-off milk. (Yelp, that's what cheese is.)
With so much resources needed to make it, its no wonder meat has become a big factor to consider in the fate of the future of the Earth.
In hindsight, 2013 was a significant year in our relationship with meat. A relationship that is changing for the better. Three things happened that year that'll have huge significance historically in the future.
1. Traces of horse flesh were found in meat products marketed as "beef."
This food scare caused a stir in Europe, especially to the British, who love horses so much that the idea of eating one was so appalling that one woman I heard phone in on the radio at the time saying that she would rather move to another country than live in a Britain that did allow it. I'm amazed that Carnage didn't reference this incident. But it did reference BSE, so I can forgive Simon Amstell for that.
2. The first burger made of meat grown in a lab was cooked.
This is very promising idea. I do hope it takes off in the future, otherwise the transition to a post-meat world is going to be much harder.
3. That year's Oktoberfest offered vegan dishes for the first time.
The fact that a festival famous for displaying and consuming large amounts of meat has done that is a sign of big trend that is happening right now.... the rise of veganism.
This increase in interest in veganism is a coming together of multiple cultural forces mostly relating to the environment. For one thing the price of meat is increasing. Would this make many reduce their meat-eating habit? Probably, if this trend continues. But a much bigger factor would be this - in 2015 the World Heath Organisation declared processed meats as a carcinogen. If history is to go by, 50 years from now the sight of someone eating a hot-dog in a cinema will be looked at in the same way we now look at that same cinema patron smoking a cigar. 50 years earlier that same guy would have been a normal unquestionable sight in cinemas. No one then thought inhaling the smoke from burnt leaves was an alien thing for humans to do. And then the reports came in linking it to lung cancer and (slowly) the sight of tobacco smoke disappeared in public spaces. Could the sight of eating meat follow the same fate? To be honest, I don't know. Unlike cigarettes, the eating of animal flesh is normal in nature. Maybe the eating of meat may become an occasional treat in the future. Or maybe we will dodge it altogether with lab-grown meat (unless that proves to cause cancer too).
Whatever happens, the future depicted in Carnage definitely looks like a future worth living for. Maybe veganism may be a key to making the world depicted in Pokémon possible (except for the possible genetic engineer).
But the question remains - In a life-or-death situation would you eat an Eevee?
In fact, would you eat a Magikarp?
Or any listed in this video?
In fact, any Pokémon that is made of flesh.
(come on, who would be able to eat a Geodude? Chuck Norris?)
In fact, what if this happened in the real world.
What if the future turned out bad. Mad-Maxy.
All the supermarkets have been ransacked. And so has all the food depots and the farms.
You are alone in the wild lands with a knife (a survivor's best friend).
You are hungry. You not eaten for days.
You see a horse wondering about on a clearing.
It may be wild or it ran away from his former owner. Who knows.
But one thing is certain, you are hungry.
