The Wake

You’ve seen them in restaurants, cocktail parties and at the grocery store. You’ve heard them talking in class, on the bus or at the coffee shop. You watch the skinny, unshaven guy lock up a ten-speed outside of Subway and listen to him order the veggie delight, and then it hits you. There are people that live and work in the real world that don’t eat meat. Somehow they don’t shrivel up and die and their bones don’t shatter from the impending force of gravity. They call themselves vegetarians.

I’ve been a vegetarian for a while now, and if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that being a vegetarian today in America is like trying to swim up the Mississippi with lead water wings after eating a Chipotle burrito. In other words, it’s hard. It’s not hard because meat is irresistibly delicious; it’s hard because the meat and dairy industry is so institutionalized in American culture. If you don’t believe me, just count the number of fast food restaurants the next time you drive onto the interstate.

Have you ever wondered why we eat so much meat in this county? Surely we all know about other countries in the world that certainly don’t eat meat in every meal, nor every day.

The truth of the matter as to why we eat so much meat is because our parents did, it’s easy and because we never hear the negative effects of meat from mainstream media. When was the last time that you heard a story on the news talk about the possible diseases that could develop due to factory farming? A factory farm by definition, according to Sustainabletable.org, is a large-scale industrial site where many animals are confined and treated with hormones and antibiotics to maximize growth. The animals produce much more waste than the surrounding land can handle and these operations are associated with various environmental hazards. In other words, if global warming doesn’t kill us first then animal-borne illness probably will.

As a basic principle in evolution, bacteria strands become resistant to antibiotics over time. The resistant strands of bacteria multiply until the antibiotics have no effect on the evolved strain of bacteria. Sustainabletable.org notes that, “This process happens faster when antibiotics are used very frequently, especially at low doses over long periods of time, which is common on factory farms where antibiotics are added to feed.”

A couple of months ago there was the E. coli breakout in spinach, and man, the news was all over that. Spinach can carry food borne illnesses sure, but did we ever here much about how that disease got to the spinach? Everyone pawned it off as the fertilizer used, but according to the BBC, “The FDA suggested that irrigation water contaminated with cattle feces might have been responsible for the outbreak.” American media never talked about how the runoff shit from factory farms near the spinach patch could have been the problem in contaminating Popeyes’ essence.

A family friend of mine owns a meat packing shop. There he packs 30,000 pounds of pork ribs every day. That’s close to 5,000 tons of ribs a year, and that’s just a small shop. This is going on nationwide, and no one stops to think of the problems with that. The problem is that it the unnecessary slaughtering of animals.

If everyone maintained a vegetarian diet, world hunger could be a thing of the past. According to PETA, the amount of crops fed to animals account for about 80 percent of all the crops grown in the U.S. If we had those crops for humans, common sense would indicate that there would be more than enough food to feed the entire world.

It goes back to the institutionalization of meat. The industry doesn’t want you to think about these things. They don’t want you to know that the human body can’t absorb the calcium in milk because we aren’t baby cows with five stomachs. They don’t want us to know that three quarters of all pigs have pneumonia by the time they are slaughtered. They don’t want us to know that the main source of pollution in rivers is runoff shit from animal farms, and they sure as hell don’t want us to know that we can change the habits that Americans have.

All that it takes is a little education, a bit of will power and a dash of initiative and you could help make a difference. There are options out there and they’re not hard to find. Go to Co-ops, or the organic aisle of your favorite market. Get a veggie burger or bean burrito. If more people open their eyes to the situation, the more that swim up the Mississippi will turn into a stroll down the lazy river at Valleyfair.

The great Sir Paul McCartney said it best, “if anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat…It’s staggering when you thing about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”