So Much Meat

Too bad I was without my cell phone camera yesterday evening as I examined with a cautious horror the bacterial slime waste in what looked to be a decade-old package of meat at the supermarket. Plastic containing one pound of some form of a pig oozed alone and unpurchased at the bottom of the bloodbath, at the lonely left end of the 10 yard meat shelf. The meat in question was brown, with large strips of discolored fat hardened to the flesh belonging to a once oinking and stomping friend.

Now, I'm no expert, but everything I seem to recall about eating and preparing meat is that it has to be pink and red when you take it home from the shop, and it needs to be carefully handled and cooked in a sterile environment where everything is cleaned thoroughly before and after preparation. But looking at this brown slab of rot left me certain that any fool willing to pay the $1.69 discounted price surely deserves his ill or deathly fate. I’m not making this up, it was really that questionable.

The bacteria was practically visible to my naked eyes, pools of bloody salmonella water filling the crevices between packages and staining the wire rack shelves; it nearly had me holding my breath just to get a closer look, the way you examine a corpse up close, the scent and microorganisms raging over the dead slab. I wondered: how long has this been here, rancid? Who looked at it, decided it’s been out too long to sell at full price, yet deemed it safe enough to keep on the shelf? What poor fuck would serve their children poorly disguised carcass for dinner? I also wondered about the pig it came from, thought about how scared he felt his entire life, never a moment of love shared with him.

Admittedly, I'm biased against the toxic waste diet (carnivorism) and yes, I look down on lowlifes willing to stoop to senseless violence to satiate their selfish lifestyles, "discount meat? Fuckin' bag it up!" There is no room for this attitude in our present situation; we can no longer live as though our choices have no impact on the world. We simply cannot sustain such a sickeningly wasteful diet that allows an animal’s life to be wasted while the food product it was ground up and reconstituted to resemble rots off of the shelf, even if it does “suit our tastes.” Are our tastes for flesh worth the murder of animals and the starvation of children (abroad and right here at home) that results from our misguided grain allocation and over-consumption of the world’s resources? I think it’s something like roughly 5 percent of the world’s population here in the US uses 30% of the resources and we produce 30% of the waste . Do we need the ribs of a baby lamb in our hands to feel satisfied and nourished?

Ok, I’m using a piece of rotten meat to make an example here because it strikes me as totally appropriate and representative of how so many people approach life. Mentioning that one rotten package that probably had to be thrown away is to say nothing of the ton (and I do mean here literally two thousand pounds) of other grotesque selections you can find in a typical grocery store.

You know, I think I WILL say something about them. cheddar liver-wurst? "turkey" ham, “turkey” bacon, “turkey” hotdogs, “kosher” hotdogs (which by the way are the fucking stupidest thing I think I’ve heard of, those and the whole “kosher” meal plan), stringy pink ground beef, rack of lamb, chicken legs, chicken breast, boneless chicken? rump roast, steak, [and my god there is so much meat being processed it's rotting off the shelves…[it would be really nice here to write a short paragraph on the concept that the way you know meat is being wasted, is by the fact alone that if you go to a supermarket, you know with absolute certainty you can find X meat product. if they are out of one, it would be utterly rare and astonishing and the staff would apologize thoroughly as if they had committed a great sin upon you. If no one ever experiences running out of a meat cut, that means there necessarily has to be a surplus. Add that surplus up across every supermarkert in America. Fucking scary!!1]

It is an 'easy out' and a fundamentally escapist excuse [for meat eaters who actually acknowledge the problem] to say that “there is nothing we can do to make a difference, so let’s keep doing what we’re doing.” This is typically paired with a general aversion to learning the truth about where our “food” and all of our stuff comes from, how it could be so cheap for us, and who the cost really falls upon. Think your hamburgers are fast, easy, and cheap? It’s because there’s no real nutrition there, the employees who waste their lives serving you get paid shit and have no health insurance. That’s sure shittier than what you eat, but you don’t have to support it anymore. It’s challenging to effectively communicate how easy and gratifying it is to prepare a delicious meal with your own two hands, with fresh and local organic produce and cruelty-free ingredients. But easy doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take work.

First, you need to reevaluate what is more expensive to you: a few extra bucks for organic and local ingredients at the grocery store, or the high prices paid in human and animal lives in efforts to perpetuate what is ultimately an unsustainable system? The point isn’t to live perfectly, it’s to be conscious, conscious about what you consume. Now, try telling me how someone determined that one dollar and sixty-nine cents was a reasonable price in exchange for the cost of raising, feeding, killing, packaging, and transporting that pig. Who paid for the wasted meat?


-BB