Now, as perhaps never before, vegetarianism seems preferable to participating in the great animal holocaust.
Threats of massive killings — or, as they call it, culling — healthy animals in Western Europe. How Orwellian. Pre-emptive slaughter of sheep, pigs, goats, possibly in the millions, to stave off the global spread of highly contagious diseases like foot-and-mouth affecting the meat supply. Herds and flocks facing extermination.
The mass murder of animals.
“A terrible decision,” opined the UK’s chief veterinary officer.
There’s talk of Eurofarmers possibly revolting. Barricading themselves in with their livestock. Ready to defend their prize pedigree breeds. Armed and ready for all-out war.
This, besides the spreading mad cow scare. Sounds like some brains have already turned to mush.
Sure, cows are mad. Why wouldn’t they be? To satisfy the decadent human diet, billions of animals have been unnecessarily, brutally butchered. Are Western meat-eaters being punished for their corrupt, carnivorous ways?
Just suppose, as some Hindus believe, many of the world’s problems — disease, violence, wars — directly result from this massive cow killing? Remember, in India, cows are considered sacred — divine creatures, providers of milk, venerated as holy life-givers, plus their dung used by millions for fuel, fertilizer and insecticide.
And what if many of those surplus murdered cow-souls flopping around the heavenly hinterlands reincarnate … as stupid people?
All my life, I’ve vowed never to eat a MacDonald’s hamburger, and so far, I still haven’t. While some of my best friends are carnivores, some of my other best friends are vegetarians. For more than a decade, I was a strict vegetarian — nearly a Vegan — briefly falling in thrall of an alluring animal rights extremist encouraging me to ban leather, wool, even parmesan from my life. And so I did, giving my best wool sweaters to the homeless, rolling up my oriental rugs to bare my scarred floors, wearing style-less plastic shoes called “Pleather,” as if I didn’t know any better. Until I was told I must begin eating meat again, for medical reasons. So I did. In restaurants. But never cooked at home. Instead, I’d saut? some tofu, or even seitan, that heavenly wheat meat. Or bring back criminally delicious take-out ribs from the Korean salad-bar. Now, even that rule’s fallen away. I stew. I roast. I chop. I cringe.
How can anyone who “loves animals” eat them? Not easily. Unless you mentally disassociate the shrink-wrapped meat-counter package from the living, breathing, suffering creature. In my case, dating a practicing vegetarian when I was 33 catalyzed me to stop eating meat completely. Otherwise, I couldn’t stand it, because my then-companion would imitate the animals on my plate. Almost as sickening as his visit on a newspaper assignment to an abbatoir, a disgusting experience, which led him to give up meat instantaneously.
It’s a big life-style conflict. Like, the exact same day a dear friend e-mailed me a yummy recipe for turkey sausage, spinach lasagna with spicy tomato sauce,
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals snail-mailed me their planned national McDonalds’ boycott targeting the fast-food chain’s “cruelty to animals.” The PETA propaganda — with the incendiary slogan, “America’s No. 1 Serial Killer, Son of Ron” — showed a cartoon Ronald McDonald brandishing a bloody knife over a quivering chicken, guaranteed to cause kids a nightmare or three.
My own meat memories are powerful:
- At four, I stopped chewing, so my mother bought a meat grinder, the old iron kind that gets covered with grease after just one using. She mixed lamb chops, carrots, potatoes, something green — maybe peas, my first puree? — and ladled the thick glop into my mouth. Cruel gruel, indeed.
- Growing up kosher, my mother made us eat cow’s tongue stuck in perpetual taunt, but never pork, that split-hoofed beast slogging through mud to get its garbage dinner. For brilliance, she forced us to swallow brains from a calf, scrambled with eggs and onions. I choked on the convolutions.
- Three grownups sit in a Manhattan cafe where the food is Italian: stuffed tomatoes plump and succulent with sage, stale grated cheese sticking to its glass container, hand-cut pasta stiff with age. My friend Linda ordered a sheep’s head, mostly to shock us. It was a skull, with just a rubbery veneer of flesh. She licked a drop of oil from the corner of her mouth, looks at us across the table, then she spears the eyeball with her fork and chews it thoughtfully, while a fat man sang bad arias he never heard in Italy.
When Tibetan Lama Rinpoche toured the USA, California astrologer/author
Anita Sands heard the spiritual leader on radio. “He said the bad karma of eating a slice of beef was minimal. One bull fed 400 people who shared in the murder of that soul. But, he said with an audible chuckle, ‘a shrimp cocktail was a veritable holocaust.’ An insightful take. He may be right — murder karma is the subtlest effect of eating death. The Hindus seem to know something about hidden effects. Five thousand years ago their Rig Veda said that atoms with spinning electrons were the basic component of all matter. Yogi Bhajan the famed Sikh guru from Delhi who has all those ashrams with turbanned Americans in them, in nearly every big city in USA says that if you kill to eat, it will end up killing you!”
Hence the account, perhaps apocryphal, of a vegetarian woman who received a heart transplant from a man shot in a fast-food restaurant robbery as he consumed a hamburger — and so she had recurring nightmares of dying mid-hamburger.
Try kicking the meat habit gradually. “Stay veggie a week,” Anita Sands advises. “The first day you don’t eat meat you feel OK, but the day after that, you begin to feel really high and energetic. Then eat a steak again. See how logy and depressed you feel the next day? Eat baby lamb or baby calf that’s suffered being taken from its mother. See how depressed you are the next day? Amazing! When you realize that subtle effect, invisible to the stimulant user, you’ll never go back to eating baby animals. Some of us can handle a little flesh foods. There’s talk that certain blood-types, coming from certain European racial strains, do better on meat than others — but what about the death karma?
“But if you’re hell-bent on eating bodies,” she continues, “make sure the chicken was range grown, hence happy and the fish was caught today and just mildly curious at the moment he was caught and killed instantly with a KNIFE so it didn’t suffer drowning in air for ten minutes as we do not want to eat HORROR or ROT. That means NO commercial fish at all as they’re all ten days out of water. It means you have to catch it yourself, dispatch the fine, finny fellow instantly with a single slice to base of brain, and maybe with a prayer. So we’re kosher meat in the best sense of that word which means clean. Clean of karma.”
I always thought my father’s father was a furrier, until I found out he really worked as a mailman. Whew.
