Should I be eating meat or should I not? That is a question that has been on my mind lately. I've struggled through the guilt of eating meat for several years now, trying to figure out if it's better to just...give it up. For me personally, meat has never been something I've loved. Sure there are some things that contain meat that I would say I like, but for the most part, I really don't like it that much. I've given up meat several times throughout my life, many of those times being for Lent [or events/reasons like that]. Not eating meat was great in the short run- I never felt guilty about supporting the killing of animals and I actually physically felt better. But I was never really able to stick with it.
On this last Late Arrival Day morning, I turned on the TV and ran into a special Oprah was doing about slaughterhouses and the methods [many labeled by these slaughterhouses as 'humane'] used to kill these animals for consumption. At one point, Oprah's TV crew went into an actual slaughterhouse and filmed parts of process. They were not able to film the actual killing of the animals because that was too graphic but they showed much of the rest of the process: the cows being led through tight, winding conveyor belts, essentially, to their deaths, handling the bloody animals, etc. Additionally, the crew interviewed the workers at the slaughterhouse, who described how the cows were killed: essentially, they shot a metal rod into the cow's head, which dislocated it from the body. Then, the body gets reeled over to be handled by the workers.
Honestly, I don't think anyone who would have watched this episode would leave feeling good about eating meat. For me personally, I started to think about where the meat I was eating came from. Was it from a slaughterhouse like this? Did the animal die unhappy? What were the conditions in which it was raised in? All of these questions started flooding into my mind and I figured that I had most certainly eaten meat [many times, at that] from animals mistreated as badly as I saw in Oprah's show.
So why do people eat meat? We obviously know why vegetarians don't eat meat: no guilt of killing an animal, not enjoying the taste of it, to be pushed to eat healthy fruits and vegetables, etc. But there are so many more meat-eaters than vegetarians out there. So what is it? Well first off- meat is convenient. It's easy protein and it's everywhere. Also, you can do so much with it [cooking-wise, that it]. Even further, though it is not necessarily healthy, meat does possess certain health qualities that you can't obtain through vegetables or meat substitutes. As we can see, there are benefits to eating meat...and that's why so many people eat it!
Do the pros outweigh the cons, though? Should we keep slaughtering animals like this? Is it justifiable? I don't know the answer to those questions. I feel like it depends on the person. Some say that eating meat is natural- that we're just part of the food chain and there's nothing wrong with it. I mean, I know animals die, that's inevitable. But is it necessarily to kill so many animals to eat them? Personally, I don't think so. I'm convinced that if I would give up meat, I could live a healthy life and have a good diet that doesn't lack any important nutrients. I'm just not sure if I can look at a piece of meat the same way again and feel good about eating it.
That said, the question of whether or not it's good to eat meat is rather complex. As we've seen, there are pros and cons to both. And I suppose it's up to the person to decide what is more important to them. I don't think the world will ever become a place where humans don't eat meat- it's too popular and too convenient. But I also think many people don't know the actual horrors of how the meat they eat is produced. I feel like if people had watched what I had watched, they would not be able to eat meat without feeling guilty or disgusted. For me, I'm going to learn how I can live a healthy life without eating meat and hopefully, once I've got a good understanding about it, I will be able to become a vegetarian for good.
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