Again on meat. Again on guilt.

Or ignorance. (Ce. Michael Pollan) -

Many of the species have evolved expressly to gratify our desires, in the intricate dance of domestication that has allowed us and them to prosper together as we never could have prospered apart. But our relationships with the wild species we eat -- from the mushroom, we pick in the forests to the yeasts that leaven our bread -- are no less compelling, and far more mysterious. Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us.

What is perhaps most troubling and most sad about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections. To go from chicken (Gallus Gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal's pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.

Eating Animals

I can't remember the last time I was so rattled by one book.
I'm not going to go as far as to say Jonathan Safran Foer is the Upton Sinclair of 2009, but well ... maybe he is.
Eating Animals raises some serious questions with American agriculture. From the excruciating passages on livestock slaughter to the downright nasty descriptions of how animals are kept and fed, JSF does a good job of making you pretty damn depressed.
And you should be depressed. Factory Farms account for 99 percent of all our food. Animals raised on these farms consume somewhere in the range of 17 million tons of antibiotics per year. (By contrast humans consume around 3 million) One river waste spill at a typical factory farm in North Carolina eclipsed the amount of oil spilled during Exxon-Valdez. And there's virtually no infrastructure to handle the massive amounts of shit that these farms produce everyday.
Is ignoring the reality tantamount to accepting it? Does buying meat at the supermarket make me complicit in some sort of meta-social sin?
I don't know. And the question of eating animals can't be painted in starkly moral terms. There's a ton of social aspects to the issue. Am I really willing to redefine my identity and how others view me because I won't eat their food? Can my ego handle that? Am I comfortable rejecting offers of table kinship -- our most ancient ground for social exchange -- simply because I refuse to eat a factory-farmed egg?
I don't know.
But Eating Animals did help me make one choice. I'm giving up chicken. And I'm giving up eggs. Granted, I never really loved either. It's a small step, but since chickens are probably the most oppressed (and most chemically overtreated) animals out there, it's a good start.
Will I give up meat entirely? Only time can tell. But wrestling with the issue is, if nothing else, a beginning.
Right?