Why I Don't Eat Meat Or: I Am Tired of Applying to Jobs and Hearing Nothing Back So, Let's Make Doc Feel Bad About Eating Meat

Operation: Make Doc Feel Bad About Meat Eating

Doc sent me an article from some weight lifting nut who said that people who say meat is bad for you are just spewing out bullshit that vegetarians made up. This article cited no sources and just went on to say things based on conjecture. I have done research on this topic several times and would like to state here, for Doc specifically, the reasons why I do not eat meat. For the record, I am not a strict vegetarian. I do eat fish. This is because I like the way it tastes and have yet been able to give it up. Fish may be the least problematic animal protein, but it still has problems nonetheless. Let me also clearly state that I do not care much about the animals in question. If I did, I would not eat fish. My rationale for not eating meat is selfish. I am selfish about what goes in my body and do not want anything that could harm me being digested. I think many people forget that what you eat is actually delivered to the cells in your body to keep them healthy. High fructose corn syrup, for the record, does not help your cells remain healthy.

Again, I am not against eating meat itself, I am against eating it in the current incarnation that we find it in our supermarket and restaurants. The meat industry's goal is not that complicated. They want to raise an animal which can produce the most amount of meat on the least amount of feed. This way they can make meat as cheap as possible and sell more of it. From 1930 to 1995, the average weight of a broiler chicken has increased 65% and the average feed requirements has dropped 57%. This is comparable for other animals. Due to the success of this one type of chicken, there is only one type of chicken that we eat anymore. There used to be a time when there were many types of chicken, all which tasted different. The sole broiler chicken that is left has many health defects that help it survive on less food. It can not walk normally, jump, flu or have sex. This includes antibiotic free, free range, organic, and kosher birds. They are all the same bird and are all artificially inseminated. It is hard to believe that eating a unhealthy bird could be healthy for the consumer.

Probably having a bigger impact on our health are downers. A downer is a farming term for is an animal that collapses from poor health, but must be left with the others as they would be too costly to separate and help or euthanize.All animals have to go through a USDA quality check. However, due to the fact that there are just so many animals being produced, they only have two seconds to look at each animal. That is some 25,000 birds a day. This means that millions of animals that pass this test have been leaking yellow puss, stained by feces, contaminated by bacteria, having tumors or having heart or lung infections. Furthermore, these animals are communally cooled together. When they are slaughtered the carcasses become so hot that they must be cooled immediately. The cheapest way to do this is to cool them together. This results in a sort of fecal soup that gets absorbed into the other animals. 6 billion animals are prepared this way in the European Union, 9 billion in the USA and 50 billion world wide. 99% of all animals eaten or used in the USA are factory farmed this way.

All of this impacts the nutritional value of our meat. Skinless white meat chicken has lost 51.6% of its Vitamin A content and 39% of its potassium. However, it has gained 32.6% fat and 20.3% sodium. Most non-organic meat also contains sodium nitrate now, which is a carcinogen that is needed to prevent the meat from look grey and colorless. This could also be accomplished by freezing, but freezing all of this meat would be more expensive than putting some Sodium Nitrate on it.

There are other issues at hand beyond just our nutrition. The two biggest ones are the impact of the meat we eat on disease and world issues. Let's start with disease. All influenza originates in birds and the closeness of birds and man can produce more virulent forms of the flu. A specific fear is the creation of a H5N1 flu which can impact humans, pigs and birds and could cause millions of deaths. Furthermore, 83% of chicken meat is infected with disease at the time of purchase and 67% of factory farm works have some job related health issue. There is also the fear of antibiotic resistance as animals are fed antibiotics to prevent more from becoming downers that already do. Livestock are given 17.8 million pounds of antibiotics every year, while humans only receive 3 million pounds.

On to a quick look at the global impact of the meat we eat. I am assuming Doc cares the least about this, but I thought it would be worth a mention. There is the issue of world hunger as much feed that is given to the animals raised to be protein could be given to the hungry people around the world. However, the clearer issue here has to do with manure. The typical pig factory produces 7.2 million pounds of manure annually. The broiler farm has 6.6 million and the cattle farm has 344 million. This means that factory farmed animals account for making 130 times as much was as humans, 87,000 pounds per second. There are just a lot of animals being slaughtered, one company, Smithfield Farms, annually kills more hogs than the human populations of 19 cities in the United States. Due to these feces, animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation, it is the number one cause of climate change. These feces pollute the air, and make children who live near it sick. Furthermore, sometimes the waste is so much that the farms must resort to dumping them in fields, which eventually run off to water supplies.

Well, there you have it. Have I overstepped the purpose of the blog by producing real information? Perhaps. I do not know what Doc's reaction will be. Only time will tell for that. However, I am happy to have my rational for not eating meat on the blog. At the very least, I think I made Doc feel a little bad. Mission accomplished.

Sources
Foer, Jonathan Safran Eating Animals (New York: Back Bay Books: Little, Brown and Company, 2009)
Pawlick, Thomas F. The End of Food: How The Food Industry Is Destroying Our Food Supply – And What You Can Do About It (Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 2006)
“Your Health” Christian Vegetarian Association Retrieved at http://www.all-creatures.org/cva/vegbenefits.htm 3/31/11“Would Jesus Eat Meat Today?” Christian Vegetarian Association Retrieved at http://www.all-creatures.org/cva/honoring.htm 3/31/11