Final Food Assignment

This whole animal unit has really had an affect on me. From the videos we have watched (Our Daily Bread, VROOM - Farming for Kids, Meatrix), to the words we have read (Omnivores Dilemma, Cows With Guns). I feel somewhat trapped in this world, where no body knows the true meaning of...anything! How can we live in a place that slaughters animals, just so we can be full? How can we live on an earth that is raped by expensive and polluting machines, just so we can tell ourselves that we're being healthy by eating vegetables? Since watching the movie "Our Daily Bread", I have not been comfortable eating any kind of meat, but when I try to tell people about what the animals go through, they feel bad but then shake it off. It gets me frustrated when people go on with life not even caring. I don't know how I could make people really understand what they're doing, but people have gone by in life for generations before me so they obviously know some secrets.

I feel like this food unit has just wrapped up the whole year. People go through life, not knowing shit. Not even what goes into their body. People poison their bodies with alcohol, drugs, and dead corpses, not even knowing what they're doing. In an earlier post I said that some people take Animal Cruelty as a joke, but maybe that’s what we need to do more of. It can raise awareness in people and maybe they will actually WANT to do something about it. For example, in the song "Cows With Guns" by Dana White, one of the lines is "But then he [the cow] was captured, stuffed into a crate, Loaded onto a truck, where he rode to his fate...Cows are bummed". It kind of made me laugh at first, but when I thought about it, it's pretty fucked up. It's true that cows are literally stuffed into a small area, where they are uncomfortably taking a ride to their painful death. If more people took the time out to think about things, maybe listen to some songs, read some books, or watch some films about strong subjects, they would be aware of what they are doing, and could even stop.

If people just understood that Animals are living on the same earth that we are, they have families just like us, and their lives are very similar, maybe even better. In A Mother's Tale, by James Agee, the author shows us that Cows live the same way that we do. They have families and friends. They have curious minds and probing thoughts. They're just like us, yet we're not the ones being slaughtered by the thousands, the cows are. In “A Mothers Tale”, One cow survives the long painful trip to his death, and actually comes back to the farm where they lived, where he explained the trip; “the men had gotten just as many of us as they could into the car he was in, so that their sides pressed tightly together and nobody could lie down, they slid the door shut with a startling rattle and a bang, and then there was a sudden jerk, so strong they might have fallen except that they were packed so closely together… They never let them [The Cows] out. And they never gave them food or water. They never even cleaned up under them. They had to stand in their manure and in the water they made.” Back in the 1940’s, the Holocaust was in full affect. Thousands of Jews were killed, in the same fashion that the animals were killed. But the resemblance to the holocaust, and the animal cruelty of today, is scary.” The [Jews] were packed [into a train car]... sometimes up to 150 occupants. No food or water was provided, while the freight cars were only provided with a bucket latrine.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_train). This is almost the exact same thing that the cows go through today. If we put a stop to it 70 years ago, why can’t we do it today?

People now a days are so selfish, they only care about issues right in front of their face. In an article that Andy read to us called "The Singer solution to world poverty", Peter Singer offers a scenario. “Bob is close to retirement. He has invested most of his savings in a very rare and valuable old car, a Bugatti, which he has not been able to insure. The Bugatti is his pride and joy. In addition to the pleasure he gets from driving and caring for his car, Bob knows that its rising market value means that he will always be able to sell it and live comfortably after retirement. One day when Bob is out for a drive, he parks the Bugatti near the end of a railway siding and goes for a walk up the track. As he does so, he sees that a runaway train, with no one aboard, is running down the railway track. Looking farther down the track, he sees the small figure of a child very likely to be killed by the runaway train. He can't stop the train and the child is too far away to warn of the danger, but he can throw a switch that will divert the train down the siding where his Bugatti is parked. Then nobody will be killed —but the train will destroy his Bugatti.” He now has to make a decision. Save a kid that he has never met, or save his life’s saving. When this issue is presented right in front of you, it forces you to do something about it. The majority of the world does not donate to charity, or send money over seas to save a kid. Most of us don't even give a couple of cents to the homeless. But if more people were presented with the issue right in front of their face, by videos, literature, or just talking to a friend about it, I know that it would make a difference.