Shh, don’t tell anyone: I’m a member of the Tallowban. Um, no, not the Afghanistan nut jobs who insist on terrorizing the world. I’m talking about the folks who are abstaining from munching on McDonald’s french fries. You see, my fellow vegetarians and vegans (people who abstain from any animal by-product) recently won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the gargantuan company, on the grounds that it failed to inform its customers that it flavors its french fry oil with beef tallow (fat and oil drippings). Naturally wary of the nutritional value of fast food anyhow, you can bet your sweet gluteus maximus that there won’t be any Golden Arches Specialty Lard-Fries consumption in my future.
Now, I don’t expect the majority of readers to care. I’m a fairly realistic person. My own boyfriend eyed his value meal and calmly chewed on a fry, shrugging, “No wonder they taste so good.” Sigh. He’d better be glad I’ve got a superb sense of humor.
I’ve been getting a lot of stares lately. No, I haven’t dyed my hair a flamin’ Flamingo Pink (though there was a purple Kool-Aid phase in high school). No body piercing that I could display would raise as many eyebrows these days, as trendy as tongue studs and nose rings are now. I do think a pierced eyebrow would be cool, but with my luck I’d catch it on a fuzzy sweater and earn myself a nasty scar. No, the blank stares originate from my long-lived distaste for the consumption of animal flesh and animal by-products, which is in no way a passing fad.
I’ve struggled with the moral and ethical dilemma of eating other beings since I was in second grade. I remember the moment when I realized what – or whom – I was eating with perfect clarity. My family was having a perfectly normal spaghetti dinner, when I suddenly bit into a hard chunk in the meat sauce. I quickly spat it out, discovering after close examination that it was a shard of bone. Now, I can’t claim to have never partaken of flesh ever again, but I can say that I have not eaten meat with a clear conscience since that revelation.
And so, more than 10 years since that farm-house supper, I have become accustomed to ordering “cheeseburgers minusthe burger” when I go out to eat with my friends and family. Even in modern times, with vegetarianism on the rise, it is fairly difficult to order a meal in a society that demands more and more meat consumption.
I am not alone in my complaint, obviously, since even Burger King has caught on – the fast food giant has begun serving veggie burgers on their meat-laden menu. This is big news! This is amazing, for a business titled, after all, Burger King, to grill up meat alternatives! In reality, they are marketing genuises, tapping into a segment of the population untouched by fast food. Well, perhaps not genius. I send a big fat DUH towads the food industry in general for not catching on to this sooner.
Why am I a vegetarian? We’ll delve more completely into the suject in a moment, but here’s a brief explanation.
My primary reason for abstaining from meat is that I don’t believe it is humane or healthy (for human or animal) to mass-produce animals in factory farms. They do not live natural lives. They live in cramped, filthy pens, cranking out babies, eggs or milk under extreme duress. They are pumped full of hormones to “up production.” Their bodies are mutilated and manipulated, through genetic programming or through inhumane practices such as “debeak-ing” (day-old chicks have their beaks cut off to prevent them from killing one another in their cages) and other monstrous realities of factory farm life. These creatures feel pain as much as you and I, yet they receive no anesthesia for treatment endured weeks and months before they meet their equally brutal deaths. The chicks are merely the tip of the iceburg – I don’t have the room to talk about the veal calves or mama pigs. I truly believe that you are eating misery when you bite into that Big Mac or Chicken Whopper or that fancy veal plate.
I don’t have to get on my soapbox to make people feel uncomfortable. I don’t lecture strangers, family or friends about their eating habits, unless they challenge my own. Even when I attempt to be as nonchalant as possible, people want to discredit me when I push away that pepperoni pizza, or when they see me pouring soy or rice milk into my cereal. The meat-eating public wants to see me and my fellow vegetarians as flakes, as overly sentimental nut jobs, or even as obnoxious extremists. Well, I’m none of those things, and I’ll tell you something else, I’m sure there are plenty of pork chop-chowing flaky nut job extremists out there.
However, surly opposition to the very notion of the vegetarian lifestyle never fails to suprise me. A trip home to Midwestern Ohio reminded me that beef country, or any place deemed “country” for that matter, doesn’t take kindly to veggie strangers.
Halfway through my eight-hour trip, I pulled over to a Wendy’s in Berea, Ky. Now, I must add here that a veggie diet should never consist of simply pulling the meat off a burger. That doesn’t cut the nutritional mustard with your body, and you should research and plan your diet accordingly. However, when one is on the road, you’d better make do. So I dashed in and ordered a sandwich with the meat in a seperate container for my dog Baylee, who was traveling with me and who was also hungry. I was met with silence, accompanied by an incredulous stare from the cashier, a bony woman with hollow eyes and dull hair pulled back in a severe bun.
“So,” she drawled slowly,” you … don’t … want your meat on your sandwich?”
“No,” I repeated, beginning to grow impatient. Daylight was wasting, and Cincinnatti traffic is scary to drive through at night. To make a long story short, I felt like there were more than one pair of eyes that followed me out to my car. At least my little mutt supports my lifestyle enthusiastically, since he gets to wolf down the flesh that I won’t.
The United States slaughters more than 8 billion animals each year for food. That’s not even counting the animals who died along the way due to neglect and abuse. What a terrible waste of life and resources. The vegetarian diet could help end famine – the money, land and feed it takes to produce just one cow or a few chickens could produce three or four times that much vegetation, which would go to hungry mouths all over the world. There’s people starving right here in America, the land filled with Piggly Wigglies and Safeways.
People love to argue with me about this. I’ve come to expect it, after all these years, after they pop the question concerning why I don’t eat meat. Their main argument seems to be that humans are omnivores, that God/Mother Nature intended us to slaughter animals for our consumption, and that our ancestors did it for thousands of years before us.
I cautiously agree that humans are born omnivores. However, I don’t believe it is good for us to eat so damn much of it, and the way that it is produced is both shameful and absolutely disgusting. I would promote hunting before I would factory farming – at least those creatures have some resemblance of a normal life before they are killed.
However, I have been reading some very interesting material on Christianity and Judaism and vegetarianism.
Now, I would suggest all my readers to check out www.JesusVeg.com, which is a PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)-affiliated web site. There you will find far more material on the subject than I have the time to cover. However, here are the main points that caught my eye.
It seems clear to me that, in the Garden of Eden, man was meant to live a vegetarian lifestyle. His original vision for us was one where there was no bloodshed or violence. It was only after our eviction from Eden that we fell to eating meat, wearing clothes, etcetera. And who hasn’t heard of the Christian belief that we are to return to Eden, and that the lion will lay down with the lamb, and that peace will reign?
Another extremely interesting point is that it is widely believed that Jesus was a vegetarian. He advocated baptism in place of animal sacrifice for forgiveness of sins, he opposed the sale of animals for slaughter in the temples, and for the celebration of Passover he passed around unleavened bread, not leg of lamb.
Not once will you find that Jesus was said to have eaten flesh, except for the part in the Bible when he passes out bread and fish to the people. It is now even suggested that the fish were added to the story later, and that the word for “fishweed,” a seaweed still eaten by Jewish and Arabic people today, was accidentally translated over thousands of years into the word “fish.” Fishweed was far more likely to have been found in the diet of these peasants than fish.
As for Mother Nature, I don’t think that she intended hens to have been so genetically manipulated that their legs collapse under their unnatural weight, or for the udders of cows to drag the ground until they become infected, or for any animal to be seperated from its young immediately after birth and to be impregnated again right afterwards, with yet another offspring that she will never be allowed to nurture or raise.
Mother Nature never intended for humans to eat as much flesh or by-products as Americans do today.
I want to encourage all my readers to check out Peta’s web site, if nothing else but for pure curiosity.
If you don’t think you can go total vegetarian or vegan, try first to simply eat meat in moderation, and work your way up to it. It is hard to adjust to such a diet. It will probably be years before I can be wholly vegan; dairy products are my weakness at present time, though I am developing a hearty disgust for milk, thanks to Peta.
By the way, I’d like to make a few suggestions regarding the food served here. Although the prices may be a little steep in some areas, I believe ETSU provides a fairly large variety of grub – except of course for many of the vegetarian and vegan students. For example, why not start serving soy or rice milk at Java City, for those of us who don’t want all that moo in our mochaccino? And we don’t always feel like paying $6 at Main Meal to eat something vegetarian AND healthy. Veggie soup and subs get pretty old half way through the semester, when that’s all that’s offered on the rest of campus.
Lastly, I want to leave you with a story. A month ago, a cow escaped from a Cincinnatti, Ohio slaughterhouse. She’d been raised free-range and was 7 years old. She cleared a six-foot fence and eluded captors for more than two weeks.
You can’t tell me that animals don’t know what’s going on when they’re shipped to the slaughterhouse. They can smell the fear, the blood, the pain and the death. They know they need to get away.
Well, this cow was one tough cookie. By the time she was caught, there had been worldwide media coverage. Animal activists convinced Meijer Meats to sell “Moosama Bin Laden” to someone who would give her a good home.
In a bizarre twist, former Cincinnatti Reds owner Marge Schott bought the surly bovine for some serious cash. Apparently the equally intimidating Schott has a soft spot for cows, and has a ranch where all the inhabitants are pets, and never steaks. Who knew?
Animals have the same capacity for suffering and misery as humans do. Just because they lack the ability to understand certain things should not give us the right to exploit and torture them. If that were true, should we, like Nazi Germany, dispose of the rights of those folks with developmental disabilities? I don’t think that campaign would find much support, or at least I would hope not.
There. That’s my soapbox speech for the month now. I feel better. What do you think? I’d love to hear your comments, even the die-hard flesh eaters. I know you’re out there. I can hear the guilty crinkling of your Big Mac wrappers. C’mon. Remember, I’m just your flakey, tree-hugging granola eatin’ nut job of a fellow student. Try me.
Blessed are the merciful. Please consider vegetarianism.

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