Soul food

1280: 

Why are you still eating animals?  This, you may find, is a surprising question which you might answer by saying: “But they have no souls so it’s okay”.  Or, “They don’t feel things as we do”.  Or, “They can’t reflect on their situation or see what’s in store for them”.

Whether ethical or unethical, the fact is that eating the body parts and secretions of animals, all of whom are executed in horrendous ways, is not good for us.  (And not good for our soul).  We have enough information today to suggest, with certain specific and important precautions, that it’s safe to eat solely plant-based foods.  But health and humanity are still not sufficient persuaders.  People have been brain washed into an easy agreement with what they’ve been told - that animals have no souls and that meat and cow's milk is good for you.  Added to this is the main fall-back position: “We’ve been eating meat for two million years, so why stop now?”

But the wild animal, the untampered-with animal, is not the animal that’s being eaten.  The chickens and fish and cattle we eat are unhealthy creatures themselves, eating either contaminated foods or foods containing harmful chemicals.

In many positive ways, food production has improved today. There are healthy foods available, chemical-free and organic fruits and vegetables, whole foods like brown rice and wholemeal flours.  We don't need to use empty foods.  Perhaps it’s timely to be more careful about the quality of the foods we buy and to stop this unnecessary ‘carnivore-ism’, not only because we know we can survive safely without animal food but also because we’ve been shown how cruel the system is towards animals.

When the human is making money, beware!  Especially when they’re making it from producing certain foods.  If you play your cards right, it’s easy pickings in the animal-based food business.  But wherever, anywhere in the world, this business is thriving it is nevertheless up against fierce competition, which encourages the producer to lower standards, in order to undercut the competitors.  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 (rearing animals) to stay ahead in the world of 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.  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, the customer, need.  They, the producer, 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 way of brazen temptation and misinformation.  Subtly and subliminally, they secure our loyalty to their products – we, the customer, support 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 dollars out of 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.  They realised how legislation could be passed to protect their businesses.  And most importantly, they cast moral values aside in order to no longer worry about being thoroughly 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 it from them).  We don’t fully realise how dangerous our shopping habits are.  We are their playthings, and 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.  And they won’t usually act openly against the interests of humans, because they wouldn’t want 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 more than they're told.  They know the customer is willing NOT to notice, or even care about what’s being done to ‘non-humans’, as long as the good times keep rolling.