Warning: This installment is lousy with graphic animal-rights propaganda and shameless run-on sentences.
Happy 2009, bloggers!!!
Let's all take a deep, meditative breath. Now let it out. Gooooood.
My yoga teacher tells us that we have to exhale completely in order to empty out and get rid of toxic shit and make room for newness and fresh possibility.
And that is precisely my plan for the coming year.
In yoga class, though, it would be nice if I could focus better during shivasana (meditation). I'd be so much happier if I could just lay there and control my wildly restless legs and stop the theme from "Happy Days" from threading throughout my brain on an endless loop while I'm trying to find inner peace.
(Sit on it).
It's hard though. A work in progress, anyway. Speaking of which, over the holiday break, Lily became a vegetarian.
Well, she said that she was becoming one. Because her friend Jack went veg a few months ago for reals, and she thought it sounded like a cool move.
What's funny though, is that Lily pretty much already is a vegetarian. I don't cook meat at home, and she spends 90% of her time with me. However, while visiting with Babydaddy's family over the break, my child could not resist the temptation of greasy fried bacon strips and ground pig butts in sausage casings being dangled at her lips at every turn, and thus kept pledging to 'um...become a vegetarian starting tomorrow'.
She seems sort of serious now, though, after a little help from PETA's Vegetarian Starter Kit (which we luckily happened upon in the city at a newsstand on Saturday!)
When I first went vegetarian, I joined PETA (by 'joined', I mean I think I sent them maybe a ten dollar check and then became the lucky recipient of an endless barrage of gruesome literature depicting bloody, starved dogs mistreated in Korean kennels and crazed, neurotic monkeys suffering from mange and disfigurement in labs across the world).
In any event, Mama used this as yet another opportunity to teach young'un about the ways of the world (or the world the way I see it, rather). Together we pored over high-gloss photos of beakless chickens in battery cages and broken-legged pigs stuffed in crowded stalls. Lily was apalled.
"You mean they HANG THE CHICKENS UPSIDE-DOWN, MAMA?!?!?!"
I Nodded. "Yep."
"But why?"
"Well, it's easier to cut off their heads, I guess."
I didn't go into grim detail about how how it's easier if they're upside-down because the blood flows straight into drains that way, and how the slaughterhouse guys have to wear rain boots and slickers to protect themselves from spatter. Wheeee!
Oh, there is really so much to impart.
Maybe tomorrow we'll go over that.
23 comments:
But bacon is soooo tasty!!! I would so totally go vegitarian if I could still have bacon.... and steak.... chicken is good too.... turkey Mmmmmm...... I had buffalo once and that was good too....
My jury is out. I am a meat eater. No doubt. But I am finding more and more that what I am enjoying is not so much the meat as the way I flavor it, which all sorts of sauces, including the 100,000 mg of sodium in each and every one. So I would suggest that given a viable alternative to sauce and spice, I could potentially do it. Sweet and Sour... Tofu. Buffalo... tofu. A1 steak sauce on... tofu. I dunno. Just thinking out loud.
I recommend this book, regardless of one's dietary stand: Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully.
Hey, I just did a run-on sentence!
Kris, just to let you know, if meat were to ever become economically unworkable, literally billions of animals would be slaughtered all at once and used as fertilizer for the vegetable groves and fruit orchards that will replace the feed lots and hen houses of the world.
Every converted vegetarian is a harbinger of the food animal apocalypse.
Have a nice day!
well, a slaughterhouse guy's a person in your neighborhood...
It's funny, because you're in kind of a Morrissey pose and are going on about PETA.
totally weird, dude. i took a break from butchering hogs to read your blog.
you've really given me some things to consider.
Ron, I won't argue that bacon is tasty. But, gross.
String, might wanna consider those sauces on some seitan or even just plain pasta ... just sayin...
XL, I will totally check those out. Thanks, man.
Scoot, But think of all the animals of the future who wouldn't be bred and slaughtered just for our greedy consumption. Bring on the food animal apocalypse, babe.
Jeremy, thanks for that. Really. It's just the gift that keeps on....oh, goddamn it.
Jack, Meat is murdah, the queen is dead.
Ty, tis why I'm here.
Did you know you rhymed? hog/blog...wow!
You know what they say about stray dogs around Chinese and Mexican eateries, no?
It's not all about the chix, cows and hoglettes.
Speaking of Chinese, are the baked and/or fried crickets and grasshoppers meat or veg?
Seeing all the cut off heads and claws of turkeys during thanksgiving made me turn vegetarian for a minute until I had to do my Ozzy Osbourne imitation again and rip heads off with my mouth.
Bacon is goooood.
Pork chops taste goooood.
ugh meat is so overrated, man.
no thanks listeria!
Meat is yummy. Baby likes beef, as in a juicy lean steak, but not chicken at all. I couldn't eat chicken with Sadie either. Anyway, I would become a vegetarian if I liked more vegetables. And had to slaughter my own animals. Who am I kidding, I'd end up prostituting myself for a steak someone else butchered a couple times a month if it came to that. A steak wrapped in bacon. mmmm.....
my god, you people like your meat.
It is only one book. The title is Dominion. The other stuff is the sub-title. Vegetarians like run-on sentences/book titles?
[dodges thrown lamb chop]
We like our meat hehehehe
So does this mean that I have to quit chokeing the chicken?
Booya, I think you can choke the chicken, and you can beat your meat - it's just wrong to eat it afterwards - if you go vegetarian.
Good for her! No rotting meat in her colon for 937 years.
I'm a vegan. But its because I am ridiculously socially conscious and I think animals are good people.
I call my husband "meat breath" until I can sufficiently brainwash him.
Sausage will make anyone go veg. That shit is nasty. Ground up pig butts, indeed, encased in a condom. No thanks.
However, I do like my meat. It can't be beat. Well, yes it can, but that's another story.
Your profile pic is HOT, btw.
You should read my post:
http://sagacioushillbilly.blogspot.com/2008/12/where-does-your-food-come-from.html
I feel the same way you do!
I went vegetarian for a little while last summer. It was OK for the most part, until the day after a HUGE workout with a personal trainer who kicked my ass and a hangover. I needed meat so bad I felt like I was gonna get the shakes.
So, I had a baconator. I felt horrible, but it was something I had to do. I could relate to the vampires in movies who have consciences. LOL
But when I can I make veg choices, so instead of 110 animals dying for me in a yr. maybe it's only 100 now?
MAJOR kudos to you for teaching your child about animal cruelty. If more people did what you are doing the world would be a better place.
:)
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