Meat Is Suicide?

I guess while I'm not a rabidly green person, I do try.  I'm growing my own vegetables, have worms and ducks and rabbits for manure, use only trickle or hand watering for that, recycle as many things as I can (including washing machine grey water now) and I try and make as many things in-house as I can, like bread and yoghurt and cheeses and preserves.

But I'm sure where I stand on the topic of meat.  It's been a part of our diet, and it needs to remain a part of our diet.  I find sites like this one, and organisations like PETA, to be pretty laughable.  Sorry, all of you, but no-one can convince me otherwise.  I eat meat a few times a week, not because I hate animals, not because I think meat comes on styrofoam trays (believe me, I've grown up on farms, I know that life is short and the end of life is brutal and messy,) but because I understand my body biochemistry.

You can tell me that I can get my zinc and proteins and so forth from other sources, but you won't convince me. You can get the equivalent of a carbohydrate by eating a pile of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms - same building blocks end up in your body, after all - but I'll say that the person who ate the spelt wheat will not have as many burn marks on their trachea and stomach as the person that had the liquid oxygen...

In other words, the form and the molecules of our food are important to our bodies, and to do otherwise will leave you in a lesser state of health.  Yes there is vitamin D you can take as a supplement, but your body has actually been fine tuned by evolution to expect to find vitamin D in certain fish, or certain animal offal, or from mushrooms that have been exposed to the sun for an hour.  Taking the tablet just plain confuses your metabolism.

I could go on.  I generally do.  And so, this time, I'll leave it there.  Back to the suicidefood blog.  Ridiculing it won't make it go away, Bucko...  Lampooning it doesn't mean everyone will stop. Picketing local supermarkets and large multinational chain stores, on the other hand...

You know the drill.  Big Store is in it for the money.  As long as they are getting $25 a kilo for steak, they will turn a blind eye to how that steak was carved from a carcass, how that carcass was derived from a cow, how that cow consumed as much energy and resources as a small village.

Far better to inform and educate people, so that they realise that there are more meats than just beef, that there are more parts to an animal than prime rib and ground flank.  To use the entire animal, not just eat the best bits and let the rest go to waste. And most importantly, to use meat as though something had to die in order for you to enjoy it.  (Some people would SO benefit from going to see their steak slaughtered...)

So I'll keep valuing the meat I do eat, buy it locally where possible and not just the best cuts, and remember where it came from.

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