You know the scene, when you’re at a friend’s birthday party,
the guy is throwing a healthy bar-B-Q, what’s the average for a man,
about 400 grams of meat an evening… Let’s make it 500 just in case.
It starts with the sausages, all kinds, maraguez, chicken, pork,
you eat it with some kind of bread and some salads,
just oiling your stomach, as the guys say.
Off course, you top it with a cold beer or a glass of wine.
Then comes the second part, now the meat starts to look real,
you got chicken breast and legs, tastefully marinated,
you got the hamburger, king of beef, with the fried onions and egg,
you got the Kababs, with some oily sauce, and some bread…
Don’t forget to keep on drinking, and the mood becomes jolly.
Suddenly, you notice that girl, over there in the corner,
sitting there with a plate of some rice and green salad, and a glass of water,
poor thing, you think, another one of those vegetarian hippies.
They don’t know what’s good for them, they’re just acting emotionally,
everybody knows that the body needs lots of protein, and B-12
and all kinds of ingredients that only exist in meat, in order to survive,
in order to be healthy. I mean, look at me, you think, I got fangs, I got a stomach that digests meat,
I, sure as hell, like to eat meat…
It’s true, every instinct in my body is telling me that it’s right,
and so does everyone’s bodies, it’s just that they don’t know how to listen to their body,
they get too emotional, they don’t realize that these animals were put on this planet,
to keep the food chain working, and us living.
I swear, you ponder, I should just put some chicken in her salad,
I know she’ll like it, how can anyone resist some good chicken.
Then comes the third part, the highlight of the evening , the moment we’ve all been waiting for,
they serve that juicy, reddish, smooth, succulent, half raw, Argentinian piece of Antrecotte.
That’s a big piece, and there’s some delicate creamy pepper sauce on top.
You can feel the fluids filling your mouth, only by looking at the dish,
now that’s the good life, you think to yourself, friends, beer, and a juicy steak…
This image derived from my own experience and imagination.
Man kind, has always been trying to find new ways to improve it’s own comfort,
first by making it easier to hunt, using sticks and stones, then by making the cave warm, using fire,
later it was by carrying things easily, using the wheel and strapping beasts.
Somewhere along the history of the planet, comfort has become a way of life for humans,
it has become the main object of their desires.
Now a days, in the era of hi-tech, when machines are doing all the hard physical work,
and computers are doing all the thinking for us, especially in the western society,
people no longer feel satisfied with sitting around the fire, and making their home between trees.
They find the need for cinemas, football games, internet porn, 300 T.V channels, electrical lawnmower,
head ache pills, anti dipressent pills, highways, long distant flights, light pink colored cellular phones…
All of these, are manufactured by people for people, while exploiting every material they can on this planet.
These thoughts are not new to me, I’ve been watching this progress since I was born,
and I’ve been noticing it much more in the last half a decade or so.
About 5 years ago, I’ve been to India, travelling, exploring, enjoying, and thinking a lot.
My eyes were suddenly opened to so many new views, new ways of life, new logic,
and I can’t shut them to these new ideas ever since.
When you see the harmony between man and beast in the street,
when you see the the simple people, living their simple life, eating the same rice every day,
drinking the same chai every morning, working in the field with their bare hands,
carrying water from the fountain, sitting around the fire and having a good time,
you start to understand that there is another option.
A couple of years later, it happened that I read two different things,
and made an interesting connection between them, that really effected me.
The first was an article in the national geographic magazine about the epidemic of obesity in the world.
Leading the score was, who else, the united states.
(for some statistics about u.s obesity rates – http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/trend/maps/index.htm)
As a part of my perception of the reality I live in, I see the greediness of man kind almost everywhere,
and still, I was amazed to see how far we took it in the past 30 years alone.
By 2007, the rate of obesity in the U.S doubled and tripled what it used to be in the 80S.
an average of about 30% of the adult Americans are obese.
The rates have been raising sharply in children obesity too.
No wonder, as much as 50% of the commercials during children’s T.V shows are for candies, fast food and snacks.
If you mix that with the fact that these kids eat alone while their parents are at work,
and they do much less physical activities (other then moving their thumb on the remote control…),
and you get a dangerous situation of a nation that can just eat itself to death.
And it’s not just an American problem, I would say we’ve become pigs, but it would be offensive to pigs.
We just turned into consuming machines, whether it’s wood, rock, water, metal, plastic or food.
So different than the life of that farmer in the Himalayas.
It’s sad though, that as quick as the Indian stock market is gaining weight so do the people.
The obesity rate for low socio economical class is still very low, about 0.9%,
but that also indicates of a different problem, because the rate in the mid and upper socio economical classes
is reaching about 10%. To make a long story short, If you’re rich, you’re most probably fat.
(The statistics were gathered for different websites, and were all cross checked)
The second thing I read was a book called “feathers”, written by the Israeli author Haim Be’er .
The book portraits a child growing up in Jerusalem, and his weird relationship
with a man from his neighbourhood, who’s a Utopian socialist.
I hardly remember the story itself, but I still carry a strong impression from the book,
something in the words of that communist fella really effected me.
Utopian socialism, is the term for early socialist ideas, from the beginning of the 19th century.
Generally, the idea behind it is that the free market and capitalist enterprises
can’t be the base for a healthy society. These early socialists believed we should live communal life,
where each one works for all the others, and settles for the minimum they need to live .
Most of those thinkers were also objecting to the industrialisation of our day to day life,
and supported all kinds of socialistic ways of life, that may give welfare to all poor people.
They believed that people grow up to be as their environment, therefore we should
grow our children in a pleasant one, and not in an on going competition.
The idea of settling for the minimum you need to survive, echoed in my head ever since,
and combining it with the article I read in the national geographic, made some kind of a switch
in the way I acted from that time on.
I started to eat less.
Never had problems with my body weight. When I was in the army, I gained a few kilos,
when I was in India I may have lost a few, but it never changed drastically since I was 16 or so.
I started realizing, that the amount of food I eat is much more than that I need to be healthy.
I don’t know how my body handled it untill then, I’m not the biggest athlete as well.
Gradually, I stopped mounting my plate at family dinners, settled for a nice dish, with a bit more
rice and salad than meat, and generally, less food.
Someone once told me that he never fills more than 80% of his stomach,
he always leaves a bit of room, it’s healthy, he said.
Well, I know that where I grew up, I sometimes felt that I’m way over the 100%… and then ate desert.
And for no good reason, I now understand.
You stop then, paying visits to Mcdonalds, and you discover the beauty and the simplicity of rice
and noodles and cheese (I can hear those giggling voices of meat lovers…) and raw vegetables and fruit.
you discover it like you did before, only now, you’re not in India anymore, , but in the west’s turf.
Not in anyone’s turf for a matter of fact, in you own turf, deep in your mind.
I still kept eating meat, not as much, but I still wouldn’t give up the dosage of meat I was taught to consume.
So what happened then, that got me to stop?
Well, it did happen in one day, when I just decided to stop, but it was a long process filled with milestones
that lead me up to that day. Finally, it’s just a combination of everything that I learned during my life,
Which is such an astronomical amount of things, that you rather just pile it up to a word like intuition or belief.
I remember a documentary on channel 8, that showed the way we slaughter the animals we eat.
It was so mechanical. Well, most of the jobs are done by machines sited over a long production line,
loaded with cows, chicken, turkeys, what not. But there’s always a man involved too.
No matter how hard we try to let the machines do the dirty job, we still have to push the button,
and in this case, also clean the blood, attach the hook, or get rid of the sick ones, disinfect them,
chop them, and feed them to their brothers.
Not an easy job… I remember a scene from a book called “the lord of the barnyard”, that I read 8 years ago,
where the hero/anti hero of the story, is portraying his job at a factory for turkey.
he never left a single detail untold:
“The turkeys themselves were the monstrous product of all kinds of medicine,
they were born and raised on massive cycles of steroids, located in over cramped cages, and distorted
beyond recognition, by kinds of filthy food that made them hostile to every kind and specie
that exist in nature other than themselves. When pushed to the corner, they often reacted violently,
but finally they were all beaten, lifted up, and tied by their ankles to the moving belt along the ceiling.
they whiped their limbs, flapped their wings, and gurgled their throats all the way to the electrification chamber,
where they got a two hundred valt shock that tore up every cell in their bodies and left them finished and lifeless
when they came out the other side, straight into the slaughter chamber. and there stood four to six wet becks
armed with knives, and wallowed up to their ankles in blood and feces for nine hours a day and slit throats
one after the other. there were six seconds breaks for a man between birds. each turkey that somehow survived
the electric chamber and the slaughter chamber, was promised to end it’s life in the boiling water tanks,
the next stop behind the rubber doors at the other end of the room…”
later in the book, he talks about the mental problems that this job creates for the workers themselves.
no wonder then, that when I ate a full pullet in a restaurant, a few years after reading the book,
I felt my stomach telling me that it’s not right. you can actually see the whole body structure, it looks like a baby chicken, that was probably really cute before they plucked and roasted it.
This pullet, the book, the documentary film, the article in national geographic, and the Utopian socialism,
I realise today, were all milestones in my way to becoming a vegetarian.
I want to make something clear, I’m not here to preach, I’m not here to make anybody stop eating meat
(even though it would be a nice side effect), I’m here to tell my personal view of this world and the way of life
that humans chose for themselves. If you dig down, it’s not even eating meat that I have problems with,
it’s the way we treat those poor animals, which is the same as we treat the planet,
and many times even our human brothers and sisters. I wish people will start taking responsibility
for their actions, that’s all… I wish people will truly understand that the piece of meat lying there on their
plate, which they picked up in the super market, wrapped in shiny plastic, was not only a living creature once,
but also a pour creature that suffered it’s whole life for us to have a bite.
There are a few other options like hunting your own food, or generally eating animals that were caught
in nature rather than ones that were brought up in a factory.
I wish that people would check if the shampoo they use so often,
that gives them the fresh smell of spring, hasn’t been tested on monkeys and Ginny pigs while
making them suffer. I’m not saying that there’s no awareness to these things, there’s just too little of it.
it might not be financially worthy for the whole meat industry, or beauty products industry,
or to many other companies, but the small man, standing in front of these giants, should truly understand
the meaning of free will, and that these huge corporates, are, in the end of the day, the providers
of goods that we choose to consume.
For conclusion, there’s still a long way to go. I have many subjects unresolved, such as eating eggs and dairy product,
driving a car, consuming so much electricity and plastic and so many other materials that won’t disappear
in a million years from now, but will continue to pollute the earth, wether they’re thrown in the ocean,
or get burried under the ground. It’s not easy, living in a western society, and, at the same time,
caring for earth’s harmony . It’s an everyday conflict I deal with, from the comfort of my room,
out to the busy street, and I know that it’s a never ending one. What I have left is to act upon my words,
make my choices carefully and wisely, and try to pass it forward to others.
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