Less Ignorant But More Angry

These readings brought to my attention facts about the food that our society is producing and what I am eating.  I can’t say that knowing these facts is a good thing.  Sometimes it’s better to be ignorant and able to enjoy Big Macs.  Even so, knowing this information won’t stop me from eating meat.  I’m not the type of person that will change my actions drastically upon knowing about some atrocity.  It would take having a window in my house that looked in on a slaughterhouse to get me to stop eating meat.  That said, I don’t like the system I’m living in.  It’s not just the way we raise animals and produce meat, it’s America’s entire relationship with food that is the problem.  If tomatoes don’t grow well in Florida, why are we growing tomatoes in Florida?  American culture has created some pretty cool stuff but the cases where it fails are disgusting.  If you go into a European market in the summer, the tomatoes you find look nothing like the product we have in our supermarkets.  They don’t even look like the organic tomatoes we have.  They are a completely different product and there is no arguing the fact that they are superior.  Americans have obsessed with appearance to the point everything else important has been lost.  Foods most important aspect is flavor but on a subway sandwich you can’t taste anything besides the mayo or other dressing heaped on.  Using the word bland for our produce is an understatement.  Our tomatoes literally don’t taste like anything, probably because their red color is a sham and they aren’t ripe.

Reading Pollan address Singer’s book, I was blown away.  Singer’s argument, which he rephrases, is so spot on.  Pollan is right in saying that there isn’t much to argue back; he lays it all out there.  The question is whether animals can suffer and knowing that the can, disregarding that fact and purposefully placing them in conditions that make them suffer is immoral.  Its appalling to think we have gotten to the point of genetically modifying chickens to have bigger breasts and more meat while not being able to walk more than a few steps.  No other species has inflicted these pains on another.  It’s a good defense for a meat eater to say that eating animals is just apart of the food chain.  I’ve even used that defense in the past but I realized that even if eating them is a normal process, the way we are raising and producing them is not and it is immoral.