I’m not a vegetarian, but I don’t eat meat. “Not even chicken?” a lot of people ask me, as if a hen was not made of meat. I don’t suppose they really believe a hen is not an animal made of meat, at least I hope not. I guess it’s just the kind of inane response that increasingly passes for conversation for some.
A few years back I once sat down to lunch in Jakarta with a family of people from West Sumatra, who took us to a nearby restaurant serving their local food. “Why do you deny yourself the pleasures of life?”, the son accused when my partner and I declined the meat dishes. The only reason he could conceive that we didn’t want to eat meat was some self-imposed tabu against pleasure. Before I got warmed up and was about to tell him in detail that, on the contrary, I had a great appetite for pleasure and....... my partner gently explained we weren’t denying ourselves anything but actually did not enjoy the taste of meat.
Not so long ago the British glossy “Harpers & Queen”, in the days when once in a while an article that was actually well-observed and funny could break through the stultifying clutter of celeb-worship and aspirant lifestyle, carried a piece comparing a group of well-known literary males in English society who ate meat with a similar group, who did not. What tickled me most was the photo of each group. The carnivores all looked like Evelyn Waugh in pinstripes at his most dyspeptic and sanguinary best. Ruddy-faced to a man, they were stout, had split-veined cheeks, their jawlines long gone, with that face-flattened look that comes with middle age and over-indulgence. The browsers on the other hand all looked long and thin, tended to wear glasses, were peaky-featured and pale-countenanced, often bald or receded, rather wooly and wearing ill-fitting tweeds. They all looked, in other words, a bit like Lord Longford.
“ We’ll all have to have fish......”
A while back, when invited to dinner if you didn’t eat meat and owned up to it you often as not presented a real problem to your hostess, who could get really cross with you, if not actively start to dislike you, for presenting her with such a huge problem and ruining her evening. “I suppose we’ll ALL have to have fish”, she’d say accusingly. It was amazing the tizzy such people could be thrown into. If only they could disinvite you, everybody could be happy. But that’s not how it worked. “Oh! don’t worry, I’ll just eat the vegetables and go big on the pud”, didn’t do it and in fact added flames to the fire. Partially fed guests at the perfect hostess’ table? No way! No, the only honourable thing to do was not to mention it, take as little meat as possible and play around with it on your plate, cut it up and pray that your hostess didn’t notice or had the wit to understand and let it go. God help you if she thought you thought there was something wrong with it. Then you’d have to admit to not eating meat. “Oh! Why didn’t you say?” she’d shriek and start the whole performance.
Fortunately the world has moved on. Very few people affect the Edwardian table in the 21st century and middle class British women no longer have quite the same compulsion to stage bad impressions of Nancy Mitford, if indeed they remember who she was. And thankfully, not eating meat is not quite as weird as it once was. More to the point, not having lived in England for many a year I’m not exposed to such nonsense, if it still exists.
My Very First Abbatoir
I didn’t see my first abbatoir until I came to Asia.
In Europe one knew such places existed and ultimately what went on inside them but they were decently tucked away out of sight. Bit like concentration camps in Nazi Germany you could say. In Asia they may not eat anything like as much meat as Western man but they certainly have no sentimentality about animals.
Having been reared in the countryside mostly, I am used to animals and like them. I knew we ate some of them and that every so often some would be taken off “to market”. As a young man I loved red meat, the rarer the better, and the rich food and drink that went with it. I don’t think I ever ate junk food and I certainly had my fair share of fresh fruit & veg. The food was all good, but there was just too much of it and so much of life revolved around it all. In any event, I have always felt a profound distaste at the industrial raising and killing of animals and progressively, as I realised the scope of it, I simply lost my taste for eating their meat. It just trailed away until eventually I could no longer stomach it.
In America alone they kill upward of 6 billion animals every year. That is something like 750,000 animals killed every hour. Most of them cruelly and in full knowledge of what’s about to happen to them. That is a lot of fear, a lot of death and a lot of blood. And just because we don’t see it we are not affected?
I don’t think so. If you know anything about animals, particularly the higher mammals, you’ll know they are pretty much like us. They feel pain and pleasure just like us. They have the same full range of emotions that we have. The only thing different is that not so long ago, probably no more than 250,000 years, our brains enlarged and we developed a sense of consciousness and self that animals do not have. Until 10,000 years ago we lived in a free relationship with animals. Only if you deny this reality can you justify what’s going on, and perhaps not even then. For the rest of us, as we allow ourselves to let in the sheer immensity of the slaughter, we know we have to change things.
Licensed to Kill....?
I’ve actually nothing against other people eating meat. However, I think those of us that do need to take responsibility for it. By which I mean they should have to hunt it, kill it and butcher the animal they want to eat themselves. If we are to survive as a species we need to become a lot more conscious of what we do. A guy I know tells the story of taking some bad gang kids into the wilderness. Some of these young men had almost certainly already killed people and the rest were primed and ready to go. Seated by the campfire one night, loving the experience, they get a little hungry and ask my friend “Hey, when’s dinner?”. “It’s over there”, he says, gesturing at a tethered sheep and offering a knife. They had to get a lot hungrier before any of them would do what needed to be done. Whatever became of those kids, they at least had the knowledge of what it is to kill a living creature, rather than to just “blow” it away.
Alternatively, I reckon people who want to eat animals and don’t want to kill them themselves should have to pay an awful lot for someone else to do it for them. Maybe there should be a meat eaters license for which we have to qualify and apply at the abbatoir every year so we earn the right to consume meat. The animals themselves must be organic and raised free range. That’d put the price up and that’s good.
It would also do a lot else that would be good.
Eating too much meat is bad for us anyway. Eating the kind of meat that is sold to us in shops is trebly bad for us. In fact it’s positively dangerous, full of pesticides and hormones. 55% of the pesticide residues (Dioxin, DDT, etc.) in the US diet are found in meat. It is just 6%, 4% and 1% in vegetables, fruit and grains respectively. Just to put it in perspective for you, 1 oz of dioxin can kill 10 million folks. The sperm count of the average American male is 30% down on what it was 30 years ago. Of all the antibiotics used in the US today 55% is fed to livestock. Some people don’t know all this, but now you do.
3.5 Trillion Tons & What do you Get?
Running cattle all over the land is a terribly inefficient way of doing things. Industrial farming of animals is in fact killing the land. Have you ever thought what happens to all the waste produced by cows, hogs, sheep and poultry and how much of the stuff there is? Well, let me give you some idea.
The total human excrement produced by the population in the US is 12,000 lbs per second. The production of livestock excrement in the feedlots of America today is 250,000 lbs per second. That’s a whole heap a’ doo doo, 3.5 trillion tons, no less.
In the cities there are sewers, in the feedlots there are not. It goes onto the land, into the rivers and the water tables. We are drowning in the stuff but we don’t even know it. If you think Dubya’s just full of it, you might be interested to know that one of the worst affected parts of the US is in the vicinity of Dubya’s ranch in Texas, where there is massive hog and poultry farming going on. In case you think I’m full of it too, it’s not just me that’s saying this, it’s not even EarthSave, it’s the Wall Street Journal.
Just think, if all the land currently being misallocated to the raising and killing of animals was released for other purposes. And even greater than that, if all the land that is given over to growing grain to feed, not us, but to feed the animals we eat was freed up too. What would that do to our world?
Lots more people need not starve for starters. They tell us that 60 million people die from starvation or malnutrition every year. If Americans alone reduced their meat intake by just 10%, enough grain would be saved to feed 60 million people. Next, an awful lot of world could become wilderness again. We actually need very little land to feed us all, if only we ate a reasonable and healthy diet.
Bring Back the Wilderness!
Now isn’t that a wonderful idea! To have our wild places back again.
Places where animals might eat us, not us just eating them. That would give us back a healthy respect for nature and the animal kingdom. If I view with some equanimity the prospect of a few thousand people being killed or eaten by animals every year as something we should all look forward to I hope you will not think I prefer animals to human beings, though in many cases it’s true, I do. I don’t recall any other species except us, who routinely consigns its fellow creatures, including ourselves, to the slaughterhouse or the killing fields. And it really isn’t getting any better is it? The way things are, just how long do you think it will be before there is a mushroom cloud over a major city somewhere? Five years, ten, twenty? The odds are not good.
I just feel there are far too many of us humans for our own good. That does not mean I would like to see millions of us perish to cleanse the world of sin, as I suspect certain of the eco-elect secretly feel. No, I just feel we have put way too much importance on ourselves. We may be the highest form of consciousness we know of on this planet at this moment, but why on earth should that give us the absurd notion that we can do what we want around here and not pay the price? Consciousness exists whether we do or not, and this particular experiment can very easily flow somewhere else if we blow it. And if that is a novel concept to you, I suggest you get used to the idea.
Soft or Hard Landing......?
That things cannot go on indefinitely as they are should be clear to all but the most stupid or stubborn of us. The question is, as the economists might put it, are we going to have a soft or a hard landing? Can we through trial and error over the next 200 years work our way to something new and sustainable, a life that would be worth living for the vast majority of people everywhere? That would really be something. But if that is to happen I venture to suggest we need to work on it with a greater sense of urgency than appears to be the case right now. If not, sooner or later, I fear we are in for a hard landing which will massively reduce our numbers and throw us back into the stone age. Which incidentally, is no bad place to be, however painful the getting back may be.
In those days they did not fight wars, they hunted and gathered no more than 2 to 3 hours a day. The rest of the time they hung out, looked after themselves and each other, procreated, taught their young, created art and related to the planet through ritual. And gazed at the stars at night by the campfire.....
And that’s pretty much what we need to do. And it doesn’t really matter how we do that. If you want to go all gooey over Gaia and Mother Earth, that’s just great. If you want to do it scientifically and work out if we don’t look after Planet Earth it’s all academic anyway and we’re history, that’s good too. In fact it’s the same thing. But while we’re about it, why don’t we get a steer from the aboriginal folks still with us on various parts of this earth. They exist in both worlds and are far better fitted than we are for either the hard or soft landing. What is a distant memory for us, still lives for them. We need to consult these guys. That is, if they’ll talk to us.
ParacelsusAsia
Comments or queries
ParacelsusAsia@yahoo.com
INSERT QUOTE:
“ ....they kill upward of 6 billion animals a year. That’s 750,000 animals every hour. Most of them cruelly and in the full knowledge of what is about to happen to them. That’s a lot of Fear, a lot of Death, and a lot of Blood. And because you don’t see it, you think you are not affected?” “....they kill upward of 6 billion animals a year. That’s 750,000 animals every hour. Most of them cruelly and in the full knowledge of what is about to happen to them. That’s a lot of Fear, a lot of Death, and a lot of Blood. And because you don’t see it, you think you are not affected?”
