Industrial Food

As I watched the animal cruelty video I couldn’t help but feel utterly guilty. I had absolutely no idea that the factory farmers treated the animals was this bad. It reminded me a lot of a concentration camp how a lot of them are confined in small areas packed together. Only difference is at least the prisoners of the concentration camp can still make it out alive. These animals have no chance what so ever. They are severely beat and mistreated, given hormones and a whole bunch of other chemicals to make them grow faster, and have no health care. In all honesty I guess if you’re killing an animal it wouldn’t matter if you mistreat it but then again you have to think about all the animals that don’t make it to the slaughter house that they end up killing so that those animals don’t ‘waste feed’. I think this is disgusting and it makes me think more about how much I’m really enjoying the food I’m eating. What the animals have to endure for merely my 5 minute pleasure. Is it worth the pain and suffering? And if people knew the truth about what was happening to the animals, would they still continue to eat it?

I think one of the reasons people don’t mind eating the food provided to us by the butchered animals is that the media doesn’t exactly make this a dominant message. When you think of bacon, eggs, steak (and other various meat), you don’t think about the animals or the way they were treated. You think about the taste of the food being brought and the quality of it. There’s no picture of a man slicing a cow while fully conscious and hanging upside down or a picture of a cow with its limbs completely broken due to its massive weight gain in a short period of time on top of meat packages or in front of milk cartons. We see happy things. Even on commercial, (not sure if you’ve seen it) but the one that advertises “Happy cows come from California”, etc where the sun shines and its beautiful weather. That’s not the case at all. In fact it almost makes it seem as if those ‘happy cows’ are willing to share themselves (or what we call food). I remember when I was younger I went to this small convention on this farm with my elementary school and we got to milk a cow. I remember how cool it was to me and how much I thought it was ok but not I realize it’s like someone taking a pregnant lady and squeezing out all her breast milk and serving people who are willing to pay for it. It’s atrocious. And the saddest part to me is that I didn’t even know this. I mean, I had an idea of what was going on but fuck. That video was brutal.

Honestly I don’t know exactly how much of my eating habits are going to change but I do know that I actually want to make that change. I wish these videos were mandated to be on front of each package of meat, eggs, in front of the milk cartons, etc. Just to remind people of what animals go through or better yet what humans put these animals through just for our satisfaction.

Also I feel like reading isn’t enough for our culture. I’m sure if I read about the mistreatment it wouldn’t affect me as much as it would if I saw it because it brings it to a more personal level. You see exactly what’s happening, without the sugar coating.

Then I went on to read about ‘Industrial Food Isn’t Cheap’ article. I learned that the money that goes into growing, ‘caring’, and slaughtering the food is a lot more expensive than we think or are shown. The amount of money we pay for the whole farmer factory people to do what they do is ridiculously higher in costs than meets the eye on receipts. Not to mention the damage we do to our society through pollution, global warming, ozone depletion, and to ourselves (health wise- through the chemicals being put into the foods we eat). Even farm workers (300,000 a year) put themselves in danger due to exposure of pesticides which cause poisonings. When I read about the loss of the farmers, it was quite ridiculous also. There were around 7 million American farmers a couple years ago. Now there’s only 2 million. And along with the vast depletion of the quantity of farmers, comes the major loss of communities. “Between 1987 and 1992, America lost an average of 32,500 farms per year”. PER YEAR ! That is quite an amazing loss. And then to find out that after all the freakin’ money we spend on this shit, most of it goes to the business owners. Not even the farmers themselves (total B.S)!

What’s crazy is that even vegetarians are secretly forced to support this through tax dollars. I mean the real cost of food is unreasonably high. “Among the most outrageous subsidies is the $659 million of taxpayer money spent each year to promote the products of industrial agriculture, including $1.6 million to McDonald's to help market Chicken McNuggets in Singapore from 1986 to 1994 and $11 million to Pillsbury to promote the Doughboy in foreign countries. Taken together these subsidies add almost $3 billion to the "hidden" cost of foods to consumers.” That’s fucking insane!
I was blown away by reading the facts. There’s so much shit we don’t know. I mean here I am thinking they kind of just raise a couple animals, take what they need and kind of just I guess let them go. I even thought they took dead animals so not to waste the ‘good’ ones. I feel like an idiot now for not doing anything. I also feel like the corporations do a very good job at hiding this information. I now feel like I semi understand why saying ‘industrial food is cheap’ is a complete understatement. We are misguided into believing our culture and societies ways are not so bad when in reality, they’re horrendous.

…and to think we’re animals to. This is what we do to our own kind? Jesus Christ.