Too Big to Fail: The Meat and Dairy Industry

I just saw an ad in EW about an HBO special called Too Big To Fail. The tagline is "Main street took the fall. Wall Street got the check." I think a more accurate tagline would be "Main street paid the bill. Wall Street got the check." But it's splitting hairs. The point is "we" got screwed. But let's not always take the victim status, shall we? Let's also remind ourselves that "we" screwed ourselves. And we continue to do so, daily. Especially when it comes to what we shovel in our mouths. So how about this. Let's all remind ourselves, or call attention to what's really too big to fail: the meat and dairy industry that is profiting from our sickness.

Last night, as I was performing the uber-important duty of background performer on a film shoot, I noticed this book lying on the table in the North Atlantic War Room: Daniel Goleman's Ecological Intelligence. Since the owner of said book seemed to be nowhere about I covertly picked up the book and started to read. I was especially intrigued by the title of one chapter, "The Amygdala Goes Shopping." I had no idea what an amygdala was (an almond-shaped mass of nuclei somewhere deep in the temporal lobe of the brain--either that or the name of a character in George R. R. Martin's next book, A Dance with Dragons.) But it sounded intriguing. It wasn't what I expected. It was all about the crap that's in our shampoo. I knew that. There's lots of crap in our food, too. Don't forget, it's the Luciferian Bling-Bling!

Without going into too much detail, and I can't really since I wasn't able to read the entire book anyway, I'll just say that the main message of the book is that we vote with our dollars and sense. Nothing too earth-shattering, I know, we've heard this before. But I don't know how many of us really understand it or are conscious of it. We also just don't want to know. We want to float through our lives living happily ever after. We don't want to know all the harm we're doing, to ourselves and others, to cows, chickens, and pigs. I wonder where we got such an idea...

I used to love the website Alternet.org, but I have a big problem with it now: the hypocrisy of indicting big industry and big business while simultaneously loading their page full of ads, telling us to buy all of this shit. I am reading an article on Alternet about how much big industry is screwing us but I should click on the ad of French's Mustard. But maybe Alternet is not being hypocritical at all. Maybe they are just trying to use the system of profit to send a message that a profit-powered system is screwing us. We make a documentary about how profits lead to war, but we profit from the ticket sales of said movie because it's still butts in seats. So Ecological Intelligence seems to address this conflict. But Goleman wants us to understand it's up to us as to what we buy. And food is personal. And therefore, untouchable.

"All you read and wear or see on tv is a product begging for your fat-ass dirty dollar, so shut up and buy my new record. F-you, buddy."

Sound familiar? Tool, Aenima. "Hooker with a Penis." Great song, great message. But who really gets it? Of course, we vote with our dollars. We buy the I-Tunes, we empower Apple. We buy the Nike shirts, we empower Nike. It's as simple as that. And many of us are getting it. Many of us are changing what we buy. But one thing still seems to be quite untouchable: our food. Hands off the food, don't tell me how to eat. When it comes to food, we are not just empowering the big food industry. We are not just making the Big Pharm bigger, the doctors who hook us on the Big Pharm richer.

We actually de-power ourselves by shoveling shit into our bodies. Subway actually has shit in their bread, they use fertilizer as a bread leavening. What is fertilizer? Shit, manure. Casein in milk and cheese in actually addictive, we get a high from eating it, literally. We are killing ourselves by the way we eat. The meat and dairy industry is too big to fail because we are all invested in their prosperity. But can you really blame us? After all, it is the American, North American, and soon to be Global, way. And an idea can't fail so...we need to change the idea. We are not the victims. At least we don't have to be. We can be responsible for what we learn. We can be responsible for what we eat.

The meat and dairy industry is not too big to fail. The Big Pharms, the Pig Pharms, they do not have to keep growing like Jack's Beanstalk. We can chop it down if we want to and grow our own magical beans. Our happily-ever-after depends on it.