Another Reminder Why I am a Vegan

Today I heard on the radio about the largest recall of beef in US history.  I have embedded the video that exposed the treatment of  “downed cattle” as they are moved into the meat processing plant.  Evidently a meat processing plant can not process animals that can not walk to their own death. WARNING – IT IS ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE AND YOU WILL NEVER LOOK AT A NON ORGANIC PIECE OF MEAT THE SAME.

But let me take a step back.  This weekend I was thinking as I gave a piece of organic “hamburger” to my baby girl that it was part of the problem that we did not actually call the food by what it is.  So I started saying “cow” instead of hamburger.  Just as I would say “pear” or “rice” when I gave her one of those.  I am not so much of a fanatic that I would try and raise my baby girl on a vegan diet – I do not know enough to say whether that would be good for her or not.  We default to the way humans have been raised for many centuries and put into the mix (or I should say her mother does most of the food prep and research) an influence of organic fruits and vegetables and organic vegetarian diet fed fairly treated animals.  Not unlike how my grandparents were raised on their childhood farms in Kansas - all natural and seasonal diet of plants and animals.

So while I am not in the position to advocate for a vegan diet for her, I do feel strongly that Raine is raised to understand what she is eating and why.  There is no such thing as a "hamburger" so why would I tell her it is a hamburger as if there is some tree in a green pasture in Germany where little round slabs of tasty flesh are grown, waiting to be plucked and cooked up on a grill.  That burger was a cow, and it was conceived so that a human being could eat it.  The proper response to anything that gives its life for you is one of recognition and thanks.  

I think maybe the best form of recognition for the animals we eat is to know where they came from.  Depending on where that cow came from it lived a great life with one bad day or it lived in squalor disease and misery, eating other cows and living in its own waste – or most likely somewhere in between.

Needless to say that my guess is that if we got more connected to what we were eating, behaviors like what we see on this video would not happen because very few of us would voluntarily eat something this sick.

I find two things in this whole situation as being incredibly sad.  The first is that the biggest amount of beef that is being recalled (a close runner up is beef being served at fast food restaurants) seems to be coming back from schools.  This means that someone in our government has actually visited this place and felt it was ok to feed this stuff to kids – or worse they have not visited this place and are blindly feeding children throughout our country. 

The second is that all of these cows lives are now wasted.  They spent their whole lives in misery and anguish and torture for nothing.  What happens to all this flesh – does it get dumped in a giant beef recall landfill?  With a little poking around I found a few sites that provide some info.  The first is a Q and A site for the USDA about this specific recall http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_1OB?contentidonly=true&contentid=2008/02/0048.xml .  The long and short of it is that it goes into landfill, gets incinerated or is shipped somewhere to be processed for not human consumption uses.

Along those lines - the second is a something I found after reading on wikipedia about a phrase I found on the usda site – “inedible rendering”.  Inedible rendering is a process that turns this flesh into meat meal.  Meat meal is used in low grade pet foods and as a fuel source for things like cement factories.  The UK did a lot of pioneering around using recalled beef as a fuel source after all of their mad cow disease recalls not too long ago.

Anyhow – I wasn’t trying to create a definitive report on this event – just sharing some of the digging I did while eating my breakfast – which consisted of all organic, vegan ingredients – hulled hemp seeds, raw almonds and cashews, grapefruit, orange, banana and apple.

I just needed to vent a little bit.  This is such a hard pill to swallow – so much waste on this planet and this sort of abuse and simplified view of “low cost” is such a horrifying indictment of our society.  I dare you to make a part of your reality the connection of this video and the treatment of these animals with hamburgers being served to children at our schools.  Or even more importantly – connect it to your own purchase decisions the next time you purchase a “beef” product by asking where the cow lived and died.  If the place doesn’t know, well then it might be from a place like this.