Food Revolution

This week I've had food on my mind quite a lot.  My friend Riana's sister Novella Carpenter wrote a great book called "Farm City" about her adventure turning a city lot into a mini farm and a huge part of her food education was learning to raise and kill her own meat.  She started with birds, then added rabbits, and finally raised two pigs from piglet to slaughter.  Being a  vegetarian doesn't stop me from appreciating the fact that people were designed by nature to be omnivores and I found the section about the pigs to be the most fascinating part of the book.

What I admired about Novella's storytelling is her humor, sensitivity, and honesty.  She makes it clear that killing your own meat is not a light endeavor without some emotional challenge.  Very few Americans have ever killed their own beef or pork.  Novella gives this aspect of her adventure all its due weight, yet at the end of the day it's all about sitting down to the best food a human can have which is the soul of life.  My very favorite part was where she learns from a master to cure the meat of the pigs she raised.

She has a blog and on that blog she posts about raising rabbits, growing food, and eating...and she has been getting some hate comments from "animal activists" about raising rabbits for food.  I am going to link to the post in which she got such nasty comments (the comments are now closed on this post):  Winter Bunnies 

These people made me very angry.  They are also ridiculously irrational.  I think it's fine for anyone to not eat meat (like myself) for whatever reason they choose, but nothing changes the fact that eating meat is natural for human beings and, in fact, most notably when said human beings kill the meat themselves.  Our origins are as hunter-gatherers.  People have ceased to hunt because we now raise meat on parcels of land.  If you aren't out there hunting your own meat from field or stream, the next most natural arrangement is to raise some stock yourself, feed it well, then kill it yourself.

You know what's not at all natural?  Buying hunks of dead flesh sandwiched between Styrofoam and plastic wrap.  What's not at all natural is to forget that if you buy a piece of beef or a cut of pork you are buying part of an animal that was slaughtered.  What's shameful is to allow yourself to push out of your mind the life of the animal you are eating and to never ask how that animal lived its life before coming to your table.  It's shameful to eat animals and not ask how they were treated, what they were fed, and whether or not they got to walk and run and sleep in stalls that have been cleaned out.

If you eat meat you should be able to look at a lamb and say "One day I might eat you." and be comfortable with it.  There's nothing wrong with it, after all.  Eating meat is natural and no person should have shame about looking an animal in the eye and recognizing that what they put on their plate once stood on hooves, or feet, and had blood pumping through their bodies, just as we do.

The important thing, as far as I'm concerned is that people become more honest eaters.  That people demand that the animals they eat live a good life before slaughter.  The important thing is to stop supporting a meat industry that allows birds to sit in cages from the time they're hatched to the time they die without getting to (at a minimum) walk around and breath fresh air.

I think about the dairy I eat and where it comes from and the eggs I buy when my hens aren't laying enough and how those hens are being treated.  It isn't always easy and it's certainly more expensive but I refuse to buy eggs that aren't free-ranged or at least "cage free".  This doesn't always feel good enough to me.  Cage free doesn't automatically mean that the hens are actually living a good life, just a better one than battery hens.  But it is the line I draw.  I will never again buy eggs that aren't at least raised out of cages.

I understand my place as an omnivore*.  I understand where my food comes from and that when I'm eating eggs, when I'm stealing them from my hens- I'm stealing their potential babies.  I'm comfortable with that.  In exchange I give them a comfortable life with lots of weeds, bugs, and kitchen scraps that make them coo and flutter with contentment.

Not that anyone has asked me my opinion, but I happen to think pigs and cows are adorable.  I still think humans have a right to eat them but I never could personally do it. 

These rabbit activists seem to base their whole argument for not eating rabbits on the fact that some people in this country keep them as pets and therefore they are wrong to eat.  This is a terrifically weak argument.  They accuse Novella of being cruel.  They seem to think that the only way a human should get their meat is from the grocery store.  What cowardice!  What disconnection from reality!

As cute as rabbits are (and I do think they are awfully cute), they are one of the most sustainable meats to raise on the planet.  The Italians and the French depended on them during the wars and according to Riana the Italians are the largest rabbit consumers in the world.  Americans typically worship Italian food- but I guess it's easy to take what it comfortable and discard what is not.  The point is: the main reason for having rabbits is to eat them.