Why Have We Declared War on Farm Animals?

I've finished reading Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet, and let me tell you, this girl is anything but clueless. She has this incredible way of summarizing every single reason why going vegan is the best thing for you to do and for the planet (and I don't even believe in global warming, but I do believe factory farmed food is doing lots of harm to it and our animals.) Unless you have the heart to slaughter your own cow, I don't think you should be eating one. And yet the U.S. slaughters more than 90,000 cows a day. 90,000 divided by 24 hours equals by the time you have finished that hamburger and washed it down with a coke, 3,750 cows were mercilessly murdered to appease our ceaseless, misdirected hunger.  By the time you take a few bites of hamburger in one minute, about 63 cows get hanged. As Jonathan Safran Foer says in Eating Animals, that's war. We have declared war on all cows, pigs, chickens, and fish everywhere.



They have no defense, no say, and for some reason cats and dogs are spared. Why don't we eat our dogs?  Foer and Silverstone challenge. (Actually, euthanized dogs and cats get converted into livestock feed. Didn't know that, did you? Those cats and dogs are being eaten by cows, so we are pretty much eating euthanized cats and dogs if you want to be technical about it.) So please, if you don't think you could kill the animals you eat yourself, then you probably shouldn't have any business eating them. Oh, but they're so healthy for you, our government proclaims. You gotta have meat and drink milk to be strong. That's hogwash, though, and it only takes a little digging to find out the truth. The establishment uses fear-mongering to make us worry about how much protein we're getting. We're all so obsessed about where our protein is going to come from. If you don't eat meat or dairy, then how can you get your protein? Well, as Silverstone brilliantly points out, the official term for the clinical disease of protein deficiency is called kwashiorkor. Never heard of it? That's because it's obviously not a danger. As The China Study clearly points out, what is a danger is the exact opposite: having too much protein in the system is what can kill us and does kill us daily. While my dad was visiting us here, he perused the book and was convinced. He was worried about having too-low of a cholesterol, but after reading The China Study he saw there was no reason to worry and that eating eggs and dairy was also a lose-lose proposition.



Forks Over Knives just came out in theaters and covers all of this as well. The evidence about the dangers of eating animal protein is irrefutable. Even if animal protein was good for you, declaring war on these animals is our modern-day, post-war tragedy. Don't think for one minute that an animal before slaughter does not feel any fear. And that very fear stays right there in the meat. Cortisol levels get jacked up just before slaughter, and then we eat them. It's scary meat. We are eating fear. There are much better things we can eat, many more kind foods out there. Please take the time to learn about them so you can make the right choice at the dinner table.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy