About

I grew up in the 70s and 80s in Australia.  We probably ate meat every day:  fish, chicken, beef, lamb, pork you name it.  Red meat, white meat it was all the same.  My father worked physical jobs – motor mechanic, roofer – and probably ate beef 2-3 times a week. My mother used to say that if you worked a physical job you needed to eat red meat for energy.

I can’t really remember when I first heard about Organic Foods but I have never really taken them seriously, sometimes I have eaten them but didn’t seek them out or make it habit that was what I consumed every day.  I knew it could be better for you but didn’t really know the details. I’d read articles about companies that produced fake Organic Foods and I had a skeptical view of the whole industry.  I didn’t trust the labels and didn’t dig deep enough to understand them.  I now have children of my own and my wife has always been an advocate of Organic products and we have bought some but didn’t really know which ones were best or which foods we should be buying.

One day I ‘accidentally’ bought a book through iBooks called ‘Eating Animals’ by Jonathan Safran Foer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_Animals).  I say accidentally since I was actually looking for a book about cooking animals and it came up as a suggestion so I clicked on it and downloaded a sample.  I thought it was a sample but then I realized while reading the book on the train that I downloaded the whole book so I thought I may as well read it.  I had always been curious about the facts about farming and what was involved, we have all heard about videos about how they treat animals, but I had always taken the stance that ‘what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me’ and avoided really finding out the details.   So I started to read the book.

Very quickly I realized that this is a book that I needed to read and probably should have read much earlier (it was published in 2009).  I am not going to write a summary of the book or a critique of its content but I will say that if you have an interest in knowing more about food and what you are putting in your body then you should read this book.  You will think about food differently and it will make you question the sources of where you buy your food today.  I have never been a vegetarian and I don’t know if I could be one since I love eating meat so much – I love the taste of all meat and some of my most enjoyable eating experience have involved eating meat.  While this book does not paint a good picture of how meat gets from a farm to your market or table, it’s primary target is Factory Farming, the method used to produce 99% of meat in the US today.  Again I am not going to pretend to be an expert on Factory Farming here, there are plenty of resources to learn more, but the main principles are outlined in the book which does a good job putting the scale into perspective.

The main points I got from the book is that Factory Farming produces animals that are not as nature intended, full of chemicals and antibiotics in order to keep them alive and are treated very badly throughout their whole lives including the way they are slaughtered.  The majority of meat that is in the supermarket today have been genetically and chemically modified to produce meat that is not natural and could be unhealthy for us to eat as well.  This really affected me since I am also making a choice of which meat my whole family eats, including my children, and therefore feel a responsibility to make the best choice.

The book ‘Eating Animals’  makes a strong case that we should all be vegetarians since there is no way to feed the Earth’s population (particularly the US population) meat at its current rate of consumption without Factory Farming.  But Factory Farming is also not sustainable from an environmental perspective as well.  However, it also explains that there are some farms that do things the right way, but they are few and far between.

I am not at a stage that I think I want to give up meat completely and become a vegetarian.  I also don’t believe that I should force vegetarianism on my children, they should make this choice on their own but we should let them know the details of what is involved in eating meat and what the consequences.  I am currently morally stable with the concept that animals are being raised solely for my consumption and are killed for this cause.  I would, however, like to consume an animal that was treated humanely, didn’t spend their whole life in a cage and was treated with some respect.

So where am I now?  I still want to eat meat and want my family to eat meat but want to find a source that provides animals that are as natural as can be and have been treated humanely in their lives.  After reading the book I then started to think: “How can I eat meat that does not come from a Factory Farm?”.  I quickly realized that in order to make this change I would need to do a lot of research and make some serious changes in the way I think about and purchase food.  Also, there is a lot of information out there but to filter this information down to the facts that I need will take some effort.

This blog is about how I am going about this transformation for myself and my family and what I have have found from my research.