Sparingly

So today my younger sister reminded me of something rather mean I had done to her when she was much younger and more gullible.
I told her that chicken nuggets and patties and tenders all came from a special place.
I told her they came from a boneless chicken farm--you know, where they raise boneless chickens?

The best part is, she believed me.

On a side note though, I think that this is an interesting commentary on modern food consumerism. Everything we eat is so over processed and modified to the point where the final products are often totally unrecognizable as something that once occurred naturally.
Even organic products like grapes and watermelons have been modified through genetic selection to be seedless.
Another evidence of human tampering: bananas are so inbred and genetically homogenous that your common yellow banana is unable to evolve any resistance to disease because they are all basically clones. If one got sick, they would all get sick. If any new diseases were to emerge that affected banana trees, that would be the end. We would have no more bananas.

The processing of meat is another story entirely and goes far beyond centuries of genetic selection. By the time it reaches your plate, it has been so altered that it is hard to imagine that it was ever moving, flexing, blood pumping muscle in a living creature. Bludgeoned, butchered (skin stripped off, muscles ripped and tendons sliced, bones broken) blood drained, then ground up into a red mush, shrink wrapped in plastic and styrofoam, thrown on a searing hot grill and then slapped between two sesame seed buns for your convenient consumption--you'd have a hard time ever imagining your burger peacefully grazing in a meadow.
Do you think people would eat so many hamburgers if they had to kill and butcher the animals themselves?

On a personal note, my mom read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle when she was in high school and became a vegetarian for a while as a result of the graphic descriptions of butchery and meatpacking.
To this day she will still not eat red meat in any form--but she does enjoy fish and poultry.

Due to her warranted disgust with red meat, the only sources of protein in the house while growing up were canned tuna and turkey hot dogs. Even as I write this, there is a 24 pack of the lowest priced turkey hot dogs sitting in the bottom drawer of my mother's fridge. They are disgusting. The first item listed on the ingredients is "mechanically separated turkey". I'm not sure exactly what that entails, but I am sure that I don't ever want to know and that "mechanically separated anything" makes me just a little bit queasy.
(I think I'll stick with the boneless chicken--at least that's natural!)

Not to mention that eating meat is maybe one of the most environmentally unfriendly and intensely wasteful things you could do--in many ways it's worse than driving a car. Consider the following:

Animals fed on grain and those which rely on grazing need more water than grain crops ^[6]. According to the USDA, growing crops for farm animals requires nearly half of the U.S. water supply and 80% of its agricultural land. Animals raised for food in the U.S. consume
90% of the soy crop
80% of the corn crop and
70% of its grain. ^[7].
In tracking food animal production from the feed through to the dinner table, the inefficiencies of meat, milk and egg production range from a 4:1 energy input to protein output ratio up to 54:1. ^[8] The result is that producing animal-based food is typically much less efficient than the harvesting of grains, vegetables, legumes, seeds and fruits. (Wikipedia)

Think about it: Driving your car probably isn't causing people to starve to death, but by eating meat you could potentially be depriving another man of his meal.

That's really the kicker for me. Imagine if we took all that soy and corn and grain that we are using to feed pigs and cows for meat and fed people instead? You could feed a lot more people! This isn't hypothetical either--people need food! People are dying! They are starving to death because we are feeding pigs instead of them!

So while I'm not really morally opposed to the use of animals as a food source, I am opposed to the poor treatment of animals and poor management of limited resources.

Food for thought (pun intended) and all the more reason to follow good advice and eat meat only sparingly--if at all.