I’m with Erica. I grew up around farm animals. I saw my first pig slaughtered when I was six or seven. And then we ate the pig. It was delicious. I do have some concerns over eating meat, but they stem from the environmental impact of raising large numbers of domestic animals and the unnecessarily terrible conditions of the commercial meat industry, not the simple fact that I’m eating something that used to be alive. Sometimes I think people overrate the value of visceral epiphany over facts when trying to convince people to be vegetarian.
“What we know about eating animals is that we don’t want to know.”- Elizabeth Kolbert on Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book “Eating Animals”*The idea of not knowing what exactly we are eating is a uniquely American phenomenon. Because I grew up eating a lot of chinese food, I’ve known for a while that chicken is chicken (chicken feet were a common snack) and fish is fish (my favorite part of the fish is the eyeball). Despite this, I still love and eat meat. My dietary choices, then, are more complex than Safran Foer gives me credit for.
*Quotation via inkyeagle
