Soul food

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Eating animals: “But they have no souls so it’s okay”. “They don’t feel things as we do”. “They can’t reflect on their situation or see up ahead to what’s in store for them”.
Whether any of that’s true or not, does it matter? New information today says that it’s safe to eat solely plant-based foods, so why not simply do just that? In our world of misinformation people concur with what they’ve been told - that animals have no souls and that meat is good for you. Their main fall back position is a powerful one: “We’ve been eating meat for two million years so why stop now?”
But now we’ve moved on in so many ways. We are not Neanderthals. We are reconstructed humans, and perhaps it’s timely to stop this unnecessary ‘carnivorism’, not only because we know we can survive safely without animal food but also because we’ve shown how cruel the human system is towards animals. When the human is making money, beware – especially when they’re profiting from producing certain foods. It’s such easy pickings that everybody’s doing it all round the world and that spells competition and the danger of lowering standards to undercut you competitor. Just look at what hell holes the factory farms are. They aren’t designed as punishment camps they are merely the cheapest way of growing the product to stay in business.
We no longer chase and hunt animals to kill them for food. Instead we keep them captive and treat them like machines. Since the early part of last century the wealthy Animal Industries have been intensifying animal husbandry, and quoting from J.S. Foer’s Animal Eating, he says,
“Modern industrial agriculture has asked what hog farming might look like if one considered only profitability – literally designing multitier farms from multistorey office blocks …”.
The ruthlessness of these designs reflects the worst imaginable outcome for the animals themselves. The customer has ‘just gone along with it’ and doesn’t want to know too much detail. They’ve allowed agribusiness to wield the same powers as, in the past, the lords of the manor once did, weaving their minions into an inescapable maze - we need and they provide; we shop, they profit.
The Animal Industries have been successful at cementing-in our shopping habits, by giving us what we want whilst messing with our minds at the same time. They effectively do our choosing for us, do it by brazen temptation and misinformation. Subtly and subliminally they secure our loyalty to their products – we, the customer, support them (the Animal Industries) in order to serve our own best interests. Apart from vegans, has anyone noticed anyone routinely NOT wearing animal skins somewhere on their body or NOT eating abattoir-derived foods? And you don’t need to look too closely to see that most adults over 40 are already ill from their life-long use of these food products (ever seen The Biggest Loser on television?)
By using misinformation to persuade the spending dollar from peoples’ pockets the Animal Industries also succeed in screwing up the future of the planet at the same time. And we must ask how did they ever get so much power? It might be that they made it their business to know the way their customers think ... and not giving a stuff about being wicked.
They operate on a set of values (to do with the exploitation of resources) which most of us could never accept. We take what they give us (by buying). We don’t fully realise how dangerous our shopping habits are, since we are their playthings - they’ll do whatever it takes to keep their advantage. They’ll always conserve what they have. They’ll always act within the law. They’ll always protect themselves by never seeming to be directly accountable for what’s being done. They won’t usually act openly against the interests of humans … they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves in that way. But for all their stealth and careful image-making, they know their customers don’t really care to know too much. They know they won’t notice, or even care about, what’s being done to ‘non-humans’, as long as the good times keep rolling.