Cheap Meat

I have been struggling with vegetarianism for thirty years. Neither of my parents looked favorably on vegetarianism. Meat meant protein, and protein meant health. And that was that.

I never experienced the revulsion to killing an animal that many vegetarians report as preceding their conversion experience, my attraction to forgoing meat was motivated by other concerns. First, the fact that most of the world's people subsist on vegetable proteins mostly drawn from the legumes, seeds, and nuts. The information that we could solve world hunger if we feed the soy beans that the U.S feeds to cattle to people was shocking information. I tried vegetarianism for several years in keeping with diet for a starving planet. When I remarried ten years ago, my spouse had also tried vegetarianism, and had been advised by dietitian to eat some fish occasionally - so we became almost vegetarians with a little seafood.

When I began to explore Native American spirituality I began to develop an ethic relative to animal food that made sense to me. I will eat fish if it has been caught by fishing the high seas, but I would strive to avoid factory farmed fished. I have gone fishing and eat what I caught as well. I have never had an opportunity or desire to engage in the hunt, but I have less moral objections to hunting than I do the meat and poultry industry. I do experience the whole idea of factory farming as morally reprehensible. But I have also thought that such meat and poultry was unhealthy. Now I read an article that reports that factory farm raised meat and poultry creates a serious health risk.

Abid Aslam writes "Crowded, inhumane, and unhygienic conditions on factory farms can sicken animals . . . Additionally, factory farmed meat and fish contain ''an arsenal of unnatural ingredients'' including chemical and other pollutants, arsenic, and hormones.

World beef prices have fallen roughly 25 percent over the past 30 years, Nierenberg says, and meat consumption is rising fastest not in the West but in the developing world.

From the early 1970s to the mid-90s, meat consumption in developing countries grew by 70 million tons, nearly triple the rise in industrial nations.

Some might see that as good news, an indication that people in poor countries are eating more protein. Nierenberg, however, says that ''as developing countries continue their climb up the protein ladder, the genetic stock of their livestock is eroding as higher-producing industrial breeds crowd out indigenous varieties.''
The less diverse the herds, the more susceptible they are to the diseases that stalk the feed lots, scientists have said."

Within a generation we might see a revolution in how we eat and we will look on our present meat based diet in the same way we now look on smoking tobacco.