Consider The Meat Guzzler Analysis

Have you ever thought about the meat we eat? What is it? Where did it come from? How was is prepared? I personally never thought of these questions; my only concern was if the meat is halal or not. However after reading the articles: Consider the Lobster, The LIves of animals, The meat Guzzler, and Flesh of your Flesh I changed my whole mind. I admit have loved meat since I was a little girl, but unfortunately it took me almost 20 years to realize that eating meat is more than it just being a meal, in fact it is a relationship of honesty and humanity too.

When I look back, it’s hard to understand why it took me mylife time to realized that i was a baby serial killer. I was capable to indicate what's right and wrong about eating animals but

instead in our society we pretend that the truth doesn't exist. We believed our lies so we can hide the truth and the unpleasant fact about the meat we eat. However, when questions like “Do you know where that meat came from? or Do you know how your meat was prepared? are asked the most common answers are, I don't want to know, I don’t care, or Don’t tell me now. That makes us all baby serial killers because that means that we don’t care. Last week, I went shopping for grounded chicken, so i asked the butcher is the chicken labeled organic from a family farm and he replied, “I don’t know” Then I asked about the meat he had on display does he know where it came from. His answer again was I don't know and gave me a bad look. I was disappointed and left. As long as we choose to avoid and ignore the truth we are going to remain baby serial killers.

My earliest memories with my family are our family feast gatherings. Each year us muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha which means the "Festival of the sacrifice" it is the second of two religious holidays celebrated by Muslims worldwide each year. It honors the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his promised son, Ishmael, as an act of submission to God's command, before God then intervened to provide Abraham with a lamb to sacrifice instead. My family each year sacrifice a lamb. I once celebrated Eid Al-adha in Palestine and over there they actually slaughtered the lamp in front of me which made me not eat any beef meat ever again and its been almost three years. The meat from the sacrificed animal is preferred to be divided into three parts. The family retains one third of the share; another third is given to relatives, friends and neighbors; and the remaining third is given to the poor and needy. However, in Islam we are allowed to eat any animal except pork are long as it is slaughtered the halal way which means it means food that is permissible according to Islamic law, for a meat to be certified Halal, it cannot be a forbidden cut such as meat from hindquarters. The lamb they slaughter is usually bought from farmers who often only raise sheep and lamb. In Palestine that's often how lamb is sold from farmers who live in small villages.
There are major ethical problems with the ways animals are treated on factory farms. Factory farming is a process of which animals and products are generated as mass production. The animals don't seem to be seen as individual, rather its seen as a crowd. Therefore, as a result of factory farming its goal is to maximize production and, consequently, profit. Since the animals are seen as mere commodities, they're bred, fed, confined, and drugged to put a lot of eggs, birth a lot of offspring, and die with a lot of meat on their bones. For example, cows are fed corn which is unhealthy in order for them to grow fast. Pigs tails are cut off because the room they are held in is too small. Male piglets also have their testicles removed. Also, the workers work in an unsafe dangerous conditions. All of these examples are unethical treatments and we insist on ignoring these facts and say yes its ok by buying meat without knowing where it came from. In the story “The Lives of animals” the author J.M. Coetzee uses the main character Elizabeth Costello who plays the role of a mad lady that is against people eating meat because of their inhuman thinking of killing animals and eating them, to prove his point of view about how we should care about the animals we eat. Costello’s point of being against people eating and killing animals is that they don’t consider how the animals were treated or in what conditions the animals were in, or how we don’t care to ask and ignore the fact the animals suffer. Humans are just like animals both have the right to be treated well. “To be alive is to be a living soul. An animal-and we are all animals-are an embodied souls” (Costello). Here she means that animals are not things, animals have souls and if we are fully humans, we must be fully alive and realize what is going around us. In the article Consider the Lobster, the author David Foster Wallace alerts everyone about the issues of torturing animals just for the sake of our humanistic pleasure of eating. At his arrival at the Maine Lobster Festival, he found that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions about how animals are being killed alive his stay in the Maine Lobster Festival made him realized how cruel and unethical boiling an alive lobster is . Some people claim the lobsters don’t feel pain, but later on in the article Wallace describes how lobsters actually try to crawl out and he also mentions that lobsters are one of the most sensitive animals. We do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own (Wallace). Wallace is trying to alert and make the people to think not only humans feel pains and suffer but anything else could too, we don’t don't know and must not assume that we do. We as a society should have a healthy relationship with the animals we eat. People need to rise and see what's right and wrong about how we treat animals it took me 20 years to open my eyes, but I know now I will not close them and try to make a change.
Eating meat has a big impact on the environment.

For the past years the global demand for meat has multiplied and with that the world meat consumption is expected to double and double which is a crisis. Meat factories have consumed huge amounts of energy, contaminated water and generated lots of greenhouse gases. Therefore if you eat less meat there is less demand for it and fewer animals are killed which means less greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere. In the article Mark Bittman who is an American food journalist talks about how animals have a big effect on the environment and public health by giving an example on how cattles are fed and raised, “cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.” Here Bittman gives only one example out of millions examples on how animals are treated in an unethical way which affects our environment and our health too. In the article Flesh of your Flesh the author Elizabeth Kolbert considers many issues on how we humans live in a two face guide on how we look at animals versus meat. America consumes roughly thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, and nine billion birds and numerous more of the animals that are slaughtered annually to provide meats for American people for food (Kolbert). We americans are meat eaters. We consume a lot of meat and at the end of the day we face huge health problems such as obesity. Meat is not the only source to rely on for protein. Whoever says that eating meat means survival that is not true because of the large amount of resources

and cost it takes to produce meat. People in poorer countries live almost exclusively on a veggie diet. It is people in richer countries, like in the US and europe, who have the luxury of eating meat. In Flesh of your Flesh Elithabeth also commits on the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer. He explores topics about factory farming. Foer writes, if “every man, woman, and child in every city and town in all of California and all of Texas crapped and pissed in a huge open-air pit for a day. Now imagine that they don’t do this for just a day, but all year round, in perpetuity.” Wow, that is gross but is happening Raising many animals for meat creates a lot of animal waste. Therefore, unfortunately some thirty-five thousand miles of American waterways have been contaminated by animal excrement. America is seen as one of the perfect countries in the world No! That is not true. We need to open our eyes and hearts to see what is really happening around us and face the truth. We need to stop because we are destroying the environment our selves.
People need to be open to hear the truth about where the majority of our
meat comes from, and the effects it has on the world, including the land, the people, and the animals. Recently I have found it a difficult conversation some people won’t accept the fact and choose to ignore. What we eat says a lot about who we are and the things we want. No one wants to be accused being immoral. No one wants to feel ashamed of what they eat, yet we are all remain baby serial killers if we don’t realized the truth and act on solving this issue. The more we talk about it and the more we listen, the more we can understand how our daily choices affect the greater world, and ask ourselves where did this meat come from; we are participating in changing this factory farm system and as a result we will have a relationship of honesty and humanity not only with the animal but with the environment and our healths too.