Dear People and Other Life Forms Reading This,
In my last blog post about 3 months ago I said I was going to get back into updating this blog on a more regular basis, which in Lady Stabson-speak means I will do the exact opposite.
I had good intentions though like I do every year. All I can see at the start of every January is my life floating through a big magical cloud of becoming AWESOME in EVERYTHING. However, like every January - March, my reality slobbers inside a big fart cloud of storing fat and hibernating and then I spend April - December hating myself for not being AWESOME but it’s OK I’ll be awesome next year.
But there was one blip of change that occurred somewhere between hiding in a sack of carbs and hiding under a mountain of blankets: I got off the pot and decided to become a vegetarian. I’ve spent the past 20 years or so wearing dietary flip-flops; I was vegetarian then flexitarian then omnivore then baretarian (strictly Slim Fast and Cliff bars) then around again. And again. But now I’ve decided to fully commit to being a vegetarian. Even if I’m drunk and it’s 2am and I’m outside Jim’s Steaks on South Street.
Since I’ve made this decision, I’ve been getting asked “why don’t you eat meat anymore?” a lot to which I really want to just answer “Because” because I’m a super lazy bastard. But apparently that is not good enough so I’ve written this post here so the next time I’m asked that question I can just say, “Go read my blog” because I’m a super lazy bastard that can also type words.
So here it is, 4 reasons I just say no to bacon, burgers, chicken nuggets and fish sticks:
1. Nothing cunt punches Mother Earth harder than eating animals.
All the hybrid car driving, plastic water bottle recycling, composting, and LED lightbulbs in the world is not going to save the planet because farm animals are just going to shit all over it.
Typically...
- Just 1 pig factory farm produces 7.2 million pounds of shit a year.
- Just 1 chicken factory facility produces 6.6 million pounds of shit a year.
- Just 1 cow feedlot produces 344 million pounds of shit a year.
In the US alone, the factory farming industry produces 87,000 POUNDS OF SHIT PER SECOND. 1 pork farm, Smithfield, makes enough pig shit as the entire human population of both California and Texas.
So imagine you are in California or Texas and everyone’s toilet disappeared and everyone had to shit and piss in a huge pit all day, every day, for all of time. Doesn’t that sound appetizing?
But you might be asking yourself, so what? Poop is great, it’s natural waste; it can be used as fertilizer! Well perhaps that was the case over 50 years ago, but since then our hunger for animals and desire not to pay a lot for it kicked that fact in the shithole.
Basically, the demand for meat + desire for low prices = farmers perpetually cramming large numbers of animals in tiny spaces. Which leads to assloads of toxic waste.
Factory farms typically store animal poop in huge, open-air lagoons, often as big as several football fields, which are prone to leaks and spills. It’s like a giant un-flushed toilet in a big open dirt hole filled with ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide, nitrous oxide, and phosphorus. (That’s why it’s called SHIT, people). And it’s so toxic to every living thing around it because these animals are typically fed cheap, genetically modified grains that their bodies don’t digest so well. Think about the toxic cloud of ass fumes you’ve emitted after that trip to Taco Bell.
And according to PETA, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide together cause the vast majority of global warming. Producing a little more than 2 pounds of beef causes more greenhouse-gas emissions than driving a car for three hours and uses up more energy than leaving your house lights on for the same period of time.
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| If you jumped into this you would die...if the gasses from the manure didn’t cause asphyxiation first. |
Producing 1 pound of beef takes an estimated 1,581 gallons of water, which is roughly as much as the average American uses in 100 showers.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has estimated that 70% of land formerly supporting Amazon rainforests has been turned over to chicken grazing.
About 75% of the antibiotics fed to farm animals end up undigested in their piss and shit. Through this waste, the antibiotics may contaminate crops and waterways and ultimately be ingested by humans….which leads me to my next point….
2. I don't want give my body and wallet over to the United States healthcare system.
I don’t believe any country’s healthcare system is without its drawbacks, but the US system as it stands today is mostly comprised of drawbacks. From my own perspective and based on my own access to the healthcare (employer-based coverage now, then Medicare when I get really old and body parts rot), I have absolutely no desire now or in the future to get anywhere NEAR that hot mess if I can help it. It’s expensive, it’s time consuming, oh and being sick is pretty shitty.
So there are several strategies I employ to help me avoid getting sucked into the Health System Vortex of Hell:
- Avoid eating animals
- Avoid cigarettes
- Avoid food-like substances (e.g., “processed” foods that contain made-up bullshit ingredients and fuck with your cells)
- Binge on black coffee
- Binge on wine
- Begrudgingly force myself to exercise
- Begrudgingly force myself to eat less sugar
- Fill my body with as many whole grains, fruits, and vegetables as possible
I do all of these things in the hopes it will all morph my body into an impenetrable shield against hospital gowns, medical bills, and vomiting for other reasons than bullet point 5.
I’m pretty sure most people understand the health benefits of all of those points above, except for maybe the “avoid eating animals” one. I can hear it now — "Don’t you need protein? And iron? Isn’t meat a part of a balanced diet?” Well, yes you need protein and iron and all kinds of vitamins and minerals and shit like that in your diet but it can be very well balanced without the meat. Understand that when you eat an animal, you are eating so much more than its flesh: animals bred for food in factory farms (which represent 99% of all animals bred for food) are genetically mutated shadows of their ancestors--pumped full of antibiotics, covered in feces, and when they are ultimately slaughtered after a “life” of the most unnatural circumstances you can think of, their flesh is further processed for your eating pleasure. Chickens and turkeys are injected with salt and water solutions (“broths”) to give them what we believe to be that “real chicken/turkey taste” and given chlorine baths (remember the feces part?) Cow and pig meat are slathered in ammonia and bleach to make sure you don’t get e coli.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like the OPPOSITE of “nourishment" and extremely disgusting and the last thing I want in my gut and in my cells. I will pass on this grilled piece of chemically-induced bad Juju that will likely make me resistant to antibiotics when I’m 60, please---I've got enough problems already. I am sure my fair Eastern European descent skin that has been sunburned more times than I can count and my family histories of disease will likely betray me into that Healthcare Vortex, but if I have the chance to lower my risk any way I can I'll take it.
There’s loads of data out there on the health benefits of being a vegetarian, but because I assume you are a lazy bastard like me and don’t feel like looking it up, here are a few from the American Dietetic Association (ADA):
According to the ADA, vegetarians are at lower risk for developing these jerk-off conditions that will keep your body and wallet tied to the doctor’s office:
- Heart disease
- Colorectal, ovarian, and breast cancers
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Hypertension
3. Because I have a nervous-system I don’t like being hurt or tortured so I assume neither do animals.
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| AWWWWWWWW SO ADORBS!!!!!!!!!! |
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| Oh, well that sucks. |
My compassion and concern for the well-being of dogs, cats, ferrets and the Great American Bald Eagle does not differ from pigs, cows, chicken, and fish. It doesn’t make sense to me say that dogs and cats deserve to be treated better than pigs and cows. Just because I choose not to have a chicken, cow, pig or tunafish live with me in my house doesn’t mean it deserves any less of my compassion than my dopey dog that eats popcorn with me on the couch.
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| This is my greyhound Dora. She was exploited for 4 years in the racing industry, living in a tiny cage 23 hours a day before she was rescued by me and is now forced to sleep on a couch 23 hours a day and run free in a yard while I pick up her poop. |
(See what I did there?)
All creatures, even us asshat human-types, should be able live a good life. And when I say "good" I mean "good" within the natural life of that species, not what humans think is good for themselves in a self-serving kind of way. That's the whole fucking point of being alive for fucks sake. It just came down to one question for me: why do we love one kind of animal but eat another?
Eating animals always weighed on my conscience and it wasn’t until I started doing more research into how animals are turned into food that I realized the emotional disturbance I had about it was centered on an attempt to suppress the emotional connection humans have with animals by re-naming animals once they become food (or conversely, forget they were living, intelligent creatures with feelings in the first place). We don't eat cows and pigs, we eat steak and bacon. But for me, I can’t ignorantly hide behind the semantics anymore even though I've tried the delightfully sounding and tasting "veal" and "seafood.”
It's a wonderful thing for me now to look at an animal and have that clear conscience.* Definitely leaves a better taste in my mouth.
At this point I thought about posting 1 of the thousands of videos showing animal abuse and exploitation on factory farms but decided on this clip from the Daily Show instead so you can laugh WHILE you look animal abuse.
And at this point I’d like to point out that most animals that are turned into food are smarter than your pet (or at least my pet who eats her own poop):
- Pigs can demonstrate the capacity for abstract representation— in one study, pigs were successfully trained to play video games with their snouts. They are also smarter than 3 year old humans.
- Chickens have sophisticated memories, and can pass information generationally. They also know how to deceive one another and have the ability to delay satisfaction in order to receive larger rewards. I would argue this also makes them smarter than a 3 year old human.
- Fish form monogamous relationships, recognize one another as individuals, have very good long-term memories, and have “cultural traditions” for feeding, schooling, resting, and mating.
4. I believe this awesome planet was created by a God who would like us not act like a bunch of selfish twats that live in a fucking frat house.
As a daughter of Eve and a friend in Jesus, I believe we are all responsible for being stewards of this world (see point 1) and all life contained within it, including animals (see point 3). And today I believe the way animals are turned into food does not honor the gift of this world and the sanctity of life itself. For example, more than 1 BILLION PEOPLE in the world do not have enough to eat. Meanwhile, McDonalds opens about 5 new restaurants a day. FACT: It takes 6-26 calories of grain to make 1 calorie of animal flesh. You don’t need a degree in mathematics to figure out that the more grain that is fed to animals, the less there is left to feed people. In 2000, the United Nations Commission on Nutrition Challenges of the 21st Century said that unless there are some big-ass changes made, 1 BILLION CHILDREN will be permanently handicapped over the next 20 years due to not getting enough calories. According to the commission, the 1st step to avoiding this situation is to encourage more a more sustainable diet of grains, fruits, and vegetables. Based on what I know about Jesus he would be pretty pissed-off half the world was unnecessarily going hungry and sick because the other half of the world wants a $.99 cheeseburger.
But I don’t believe that religious beliefs or lack thereof is an excuse for being douche-nozzles to animals and turning our ecosystem into a shit-stain--whether you believe it was all created by God, a ball of gas, space aliens, or a mystical orb named Bob doesn't fucking matter. What you DO while you are here matters so much more than what you believe. But I’m not here to judge or tell you what to do, of course. ("The one who eats everything must not treat with
contempt the one who does not, and the one who does not eat everything must not
judge the one who does, for God has accepted them.” —Romans 14:3)
So here’s what I’ve concluded about eating animals:
I looked at my plate. I thought about it. I asked questions. I found answers. I made a choice.
Bon Appetit,
Lady Stabson
*except for snakes. When I look at those scary motherfuckers I want to run away.
By the way, I didn’t pull all these fancy facts out of my asshole — unless otherwise cited, they are all from 2 really great books you should read immediately: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (2009; Back Bay Books) and The Food Revolution by John Robbins (2011, Conari Press).
