Not Proud

[poliphilo]

I've started eating meat. It's France that's to blame. You scour the menu for the vegetarian option and all they've got is crudites- you know, raw carrot and zucchini and stuff- so I made a decision before we went-  for the next five days I'm a carnivore.

What I hadn't been prepared for was how my energy levels went up. 

But I'm going to insist we buy meat that's been raised ethically. That's my quarrel with meat-eating- not that I'm sentimental about animals, because I'm not- but that industrial farming is disgusting. 

Last night we had lamb steaks- in a mushroom sauce- with mashed potato. 

I'd forgotten food could be such fun.

Comments

[oakmouse]

Like many of the others here, I was a vegetarian for a time (although in my case due to poverty --- we had two people and a cat to feed on a budget of $10/week, equivalent to about $25 or $30/week now). I ended up going back to eating meat when I could afford to do so, but made the same choice about ethically raised meat. Neither my husband nor I can properly assimilate certain nutrients from vegetable sources, he because of an inherited digestive defect, me because I have malabsorption syndrome plus allergies to dairy and the entire wheat family of grains. When we were vegetarians, I used to get "cheeseburger dreams" in which I ate one hamburger or cheeseburger after another. I learned from experience that it was my body asking for iron, which I can only assimilate properly from red meat.

Now we eat meat about four or five meals a week, but we eat ethically raised meat when we have any choice. We also try to eat organic where possible, although the budget has the last word there more often than I would like. Counsels of perfection aside, we figure that since all life feeds on other lives, the best we can do ethically is to eat plants and animals who had a good quality of life and received decent treatment. As a pagan, I don't differentiate qualitatively between the animal and the vegetable; they're all alive and all deserve respect and gratitude for feeding us.

I agree with Ailz about chickens --- nasty little brutes! I feel no compunction about eating them, so long as they were decently treated in life. Which is more than they do to one another!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

In all my time as a vegetarian I have never wanted meat. I'll admit I find vegetarian food a little boring, but I'd have been happy to put up with that indefinitely if I hadn't discovered that meat does me good.

It's strange how we can't live without killing things. What an odd way to run a universe.