I have a draft saved up that is about depression and I was going to post that today, but it needs to be tweaked; besides, it's gloriously sunny out and I'm sitting in the sunroom contentedly drinking my earl grey tea sweetened with local honey (picturesque and hippie-rific, isn't it?). I have no reason to truly think about depression right now.
I watched the documentary Food Inc., last night and I have to admit that it was at least a hair eye-opening. I'm not going to blindly follow all of the facts like a lemming and end up aggressively ranting at politicians. Idiots do that. Nothing in this world is as black and white as any of us would ever love it to be.
It's not pleasant for most people to think about - in fact, most people don't nowadays - but we are evolved killers. Somewhere along the lines of our distant past, an ape-like relative of ours looked at another animal and decided that it was fit for consumption. We can still eat vegetables and fruits and grains, but there is a part of us, however small (evident in our canines and sheering teeth) that is dedicated to ripping the flesh off of another animal. Our greatest advantage is not just simply our brains, but that we're also the best long-distance runners in the animal kingdom. That is, when we bother working out any more. We would presumably use this gift of ours to not only know how the animals would run, but we would be able to outrun them, driving them to exhaustion and then taking them down. Almost a case of "slow and steady wins the race".
Meat, at one point in our history, was a treasure. Lots of effort and manpower (hush up, I'm not being sexist) went into tracking deer or elk and then killing one. The easiest thing for our body to burn through is sugars (carbohydrates break down into sugars), shortly followed by proteins, and then the last thing for us to break apart is fat. When you eat vegetables, fruits, or grains your body gets valuable carbohydrates, fibers, sugars, and vitamins out of them. Only a fair amount of protein is avaiable in nuts and beans. Fat is an extremely minor portion of this part of our diet. ENTER meat. Though most of our four-legged and finned meals were lean in the past (fish are still lean, in case you're wondering XD) , they still had higher percentages of fat and protein than anything we encountered growing off of bushes and out of the ground. If you stockpiled meat or consumed lots of it, your body... for lack of anything better to say, ate it up. There are studies of nutrition that have revealed that our bodies LOVE fat when given the opportunity to consume it. Think french fries or burgers or even a steak. The amount of fat and protein in that food is what makes it a delicious thing to eat. You're thinking "hey, french fries aren't meat!". Good job on you for paying attention, this is where frying food in fats and then serving them helps make them delicious.
I give our distant relatives a real thumbs up for figuring out domestication of livestock. I do. It's a tribute to our ingenuinty to be able to take a critter and over time, turn it into a readily available food source. Who wants to run for days and risk substantial injury to kill anything if they don't have to? (If you're a freak like me - and a few other actual athletes out there - you want to take the risk) Domesication was the very first step, but now, we're adding a whole new layer to this supposed foundation.
In the last several decades, we've genetically-modified, vaccinated, antibiotic-ed, and all around altered our animals to suit us. I understand it, I totally do. Or at least, I understand the drive to do this. If you could have a chicken that was fast, hard to catch and small....or one that was HUGE and easy to catch...which would you prefer?
To view laziness as a horrible and nasty thing is to be a little harsh on ourselves.
99.9% of all life on this planet, from bacteria to plants to animals (yes, that includes us), do everything possible to make life easy on themselves and hell on everything else that tries to get in their way. Opportunistic infections take place when it is "comfortable" for the bacteria and hell on your body, likewise your body in tip-top shape, makes it virtually impossible for anything to set up anywhere unless it benefits you (e.g, our relationship with benign E. coli). To look at the production of food and see "they are just abusing the animals to get better profit" and nothing else, is to do the whole system an injustice. You can very, very easily take that stance and stand with it, but one must also think about what has been done for centuries and centuries before us. Even before people truly understood Mendellian inheritance, they knew that if you bred a muscular bull with a beefy cow, you'd get potentially more meat in that next generation. Repeat this process over and over and you can modify the animal to suit what is needed. This very same process was used to create high-yielding and bug-resistant crops. What has happened now, is the very same thing that is happening with communications and medicine...exponential leaps in what could be called developement.
I say "exponential leaps in development" and mean it in a purely technical sense, not to create some sort of illusion as to how amazing we are as a species. I like to think of us as a very clever way to answer the problems that all other species face. In cellular technology, it's easy to not get upset so long as the batteries last and none of the parts of the cell phone can somehow cause cancer. With computers it's very easy to do the exact same thing. Medicine... "hey, it may be expensive, but it saves your life". I have my own particular loathing for the medical system, but I'll leave that for another day. With animals, the biggest difference is that it is another organism that we can see moving and we can hear its cries when distressed. The microorganisms we carefully alter in labs can't squeal like a pig can. Nor can the computer's whirring hard drive really bother us. In certain parts of the world, chickens retain their sleek physique and ability to fly. Yes, chickens used to fly. But the ones that exist in farms have been bred and altered so that they can barely walk under the weight of their own developing flesh. We sympathize with this because we have an imagination that allows us to "feel" the amount of pain that they're in.
So stepping back from that and trying to avoid emotional language, as any species, we do what we can to avoid expending a lot of effort for a little bit of product.
Not one thing in this world is good or evil - in a theological sense. Good and Evil do not exist and no act on this world is inherently composed of either.
There is "what feels good" and "what feels bad". It may be preprogrammed into our genetics (I know, cop out) to have some sort of varying moral code. BUT I used the term "moral code" in reference to a program that lets us know "what feels good" and "what feels bad". We aren't the only creatures in this world that can feel pain, nor are we the only ones that mourn the loss of a relative or pack/pride/troup member.
When we lose a vital bond or a connection to another, we not only lose a source of emotional support, but we lose a very valuable resource.
We aren't even the only critters capable of sympathy. You know of at least one person that has had a pet (cat, dog, or otherwise) that was able to sense when their owner was down and did what they could in their own way, to fix it. This sounds like an idealistic sort of animal-lover thought. For some of you it could be, but for me, it's paying attention to the abilities of another species in comparison to us. We may have answered our problems with a developed brain and walking upright, but big cats answered the same problem with fangs and group hunting. We aren't that different.
I've kind of meandered a little, but what I was attempting to get it at is that the only reason why mass animal slaughter and modification bothers any of us, is 100% pure sympathy. Sympathy that may very well be programmed into us at a genetic level, but ignored or programmed out with societal demands.
I have considered, in the last several weeks, becoming a vegetarian. With consideration and some thoughtfulness, I've come to the decision that I could never fully embrace that lifestyle. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, but for me, it is something that just won't work with that I know about myself and what I know about biology. I'd say that I believe I am intended to be an omnivore, but that would infer some sort of lack of knowledge and to simply base my dietary concerns on faith.
Despite not transitioning completely over to vegetarianism, I am going to put forth genuine effort into consuming more fruits and vegetables and consume less meat, though when I do, I'll attempt to purchase organic meat. I'm not naive when it comes to even "organic" meat though, I know better than to assume a picturesque farm with animals roaming freely - though I'd love to hope for that.
Hmmm... anything else?
Nah, I'm going to just call it done. I have to brew some more tea anyways.
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