A Real Conversation about Meat Consumption and Sustainablity

Learning more about food/meat/sustainability.
I am so blessed to have had the high vibe input from those of you seeing this blog post right now.

The issue is not about meat, it is about knowing where your food comes from and what impact it has on the environment. (obviously meat production is a punny and appropriate scapegoat) It is just one issue that needs to be addressed.

For me, personally, if you can ingest zero animals, be healthy and sustain the land, then this is an ideal diet #judgement.

I am still far too sensitive to ingest animals, but I would be remiss to pretend that sustainability is solved through ending meat consumption.

Shipping our food all over the planet, eating packaged and refined products, monoculture, and paying terrible wages, using pesticides, and who know where GMO’s can go, I am personally against them, but I am not against involving science in food production, why not?

I simply refuse to believe that Monsanto can create anything that I want in my world or my body. It is my belief that at the core, companies running food GMO experiments are completely void of any spiritual consciousness, and this is very dangerous. They are ‘playing God’, but in my belief, so is every person who gets to live, we are in charge of our world, through our thoughts and actions.  It is not unreasonable to believe that someone with both the technology and consciousness level could create a system to provide higher quality and more sustainable food with science, ritual, or by speaking directly to the land.

Here are some sentiments from a recent Facebook conversation.

“I eat meat because other wise I will be sick. I am already anemic and every month, against my will, blood comes pouring out if my vagina. This causes me to have even less iron. I am not even wanting to procreate. I have tried supplements, different vegetables, Chinese medicine, western medicine, nothing gives my body the same nutrition. I make sure I know where the food, especially meat, comes from. I don’t like the cycle either, but some of us would feel worse physically with out it.”

“I feel sadness that gazelles get eaten by lions, but I don’t find it morally wrong or incomprehensible. I find unsustainable farming morally wrong and so I don’t buy meat but I don’t see eating animals as such. It is part of the process of living on earth and has been for eons, and you don’t have to wrap your head around it you only need to wrap your head around your own choices. You are allowing your personal ideology to draw lines in the sand as to what is divine and what is not. No one is any less divine in the eyes of God if they choose to responsibly eat meat.”

“Disconnection and socialization.
It sounds like you’re asking this on an individual level? The choices a person makes when there’s a plate in front of them, and perhaps brings the fork (or insert other eating utensil) to mouth. This is true, as adults with access to the Internet, how can one not know?

From a systemic view, it’s a tangled complex mess. From my understanding, socialization is (if not the biggest) a predominant reason people behave and make the choices they do. A lot of them on autopilot. We are violent beings in this physical form that need to awaken our senses in order to make compassionate choices.

When I’m disconnected and desensitized, I can’t feel the harm. At least not on the surface. But my being knows. Actually, we all know. And we suffer.”

“We’ve created a culture of easily accessible food. Most people don’t have a clue what’s in their food, nor where it came from.”

“Here are some thoughts that arose in response to them. In regards to why people, turn the blind eye, people are experts at making themselves not feel bad about themselves. This is a simple case of not owning up to the reality of unpleasantries that exist in life. In ways, it is very adaptive. This type of thinking allows us to overcome adversity and psychological distress that might be otherwise crippling. I’m surprised that you would expect to eventually find some other truth other than people choose to turn a blind eye to things, when people turn blind eyes to terrible things every day.

I also notice other people using flowery language, and pseudo philosophical/spiritual rhetoric to defend why it’s okay to eat meat too. I’m sorry if this is offensive but to me all of that sounds like a bunch of self-deluding bullshit too. I’m not saying that I don’t engage in self-deluding behaviors/thinking, in fact I do it just as much as the average person I’m sure. When people call me on it, sometimes I listen, sometimes I don’t.

Regardless, I totally support your view that people should take responsibility for what they eat and face the fact that meat as it is produced and consumed today is full of atrocity and unnecessary suffering. If one can TRULY and HONESTLY look at that, process it while suspending all defense systems (with a few due exceptions, e.g medical reasons) than I think they would have a hard time eating meat ever again. I cannot say for certain what has allowed me to get to this point, but obviously I feel it is for the better. But as I stated, people are experts at not making them feel bad about themselves.”

” the manner of presenting the facts about somebody’s actions, shouldnt invalidate the actual point. just because somebody might not like the way they’re told about eating meat, or feel they’re being judged (which may or may not be true) doesnt actually invalidate the argument, or justify the actions. thats like calling out ISIS on murder and their defense is… well you shouldnt be judgemental.

“This is an open call to anyone who eats meat and talks about non judgement, love, compassion or any of that pseudo spiritual bullshit to go to a local farm, ask the farmer to kill the animal yourself, and do it with your bare hands.
Then say you were loving, compassionate, and non judgemental during the process.”

“For some reason this debate seems to be rearing its head at me lately. In fact, today I went on a first date with a vegan. This might make me look like a savage to many of you, but when it comes down to it, I love eating meat. I always have. And I am not ignorant to the implications of what eating meat means. That even when something claims to be raised in an “ethical” way, the likelihood that torture and torment existed in the process is still quite high. And still, I persist.
I crave it. The heaviness that it creates in my body. The groundedness. The feeling it creates in me that I equate with “full”.
I love to think of myself as someone that values all life… But clearly at the core of it I place much more value on human life than the animals i eat. My out of sight,out of mind reflex is amazing!
So yeah –That is sad and a spiritual dilemma for sure. I don’t like to think about myself this way, so maybe I need to look at this some more. Maybe…”

“I think it’s important for to be vigilant about the sourcing and sustainability of everything we consume, vegetables included. For me it’s all about consuming food that had the best possible life, proper nourishment/treatment, and I would feel good about being a part of me.

Plants have a type of existence so different from ours that we don’t relate but however they experience it, their life has to end for us to consume them. For me my own drastic reduction in meat consumption is based not necessarily on the protection of life itself but for respect towards it.

Choosing not to know/care where your food comes from and how it lived and died is, to me, unconscionable. Whatever we eat, we should be grateful for and respectful to every morsel, since some form of life has to change irrevocably to continue our own.”

“I am selective about the meat and dairy etc that I choose to eat–organic, free range, etc. The fruit and vegetable industries are just as fucked and wasteful. I’ve gotten to a point in life that I don’t feel the need to defend any of my life choices.”

“I’d say I eat meat mainly because it’s what I’m accumstomed to and convinience. Lately I’ve been eating significantly less beef and pork because I don’t like the idea of those animals suffering for my taste. But I still eat chicken and seafood because I feel less so about those species. Occasionally when I catch fish I tend to feel a certain reverence for them and a slight amount of regret about their deaths. But I do filet them myself and do not feel bad about this. I’m also aware of the species I’m consuming and their sustainability. If delicious vegan food were more readily available to buy prepared or I were able to prepare it for myself, I would eat it more frequently due to my conciousness of a plant-based diet being better for health and environment.”

“We need to expand the conversation to include multiple layers of abstraction and a simplistic focus on meat or no meat misses some very important factors.

Large scale mono-cultures of soy, corn, and wheat destroy entire ecosystems and habitats for animals — e.g. extinction. They also result in the direct death of innumerable individual animals. Just because you’re not eating a dead animal doesn’t mean one didn’t die to feed you. This is especially true of the highly processed vegan crap out there (I know you don’t like this stuff much either).

While broadly we may look at animal agriculture as a problem we also have to look at grain and vegetable agriculture as a problem as well. It’s an interdependent large scale system not isolated parts.”

Keep an open mind while standing firm in your convictions, life is meant to be explored, never allow stubbornness or fear to take away the exploration.