Of Rice and Men -and Cows

While thinking of titles for the blogs, this one was so clever and witty I had to use it as a title, even though this blog has nothing to do with rice. :-)

I am disgusted. Michael Pollan's book has officially ruined my appetite for cows for quite a while. If any of you readers are having trouble staying vegetarian, just read The Omnivore's Dilemma and you'll see what I mean. Couple that book with the short animated spoof called The Meatrix and you have instant vegetarians. The film compares the agriculture of humans in The Matrix to the way we raise cows, pigs, and chickens nowadays, and it is so disturbing I can hardly finish the juicy hamburger I'm eating as I write this. Mmmmm... so good, yet so bad.





Anyways, the fact that they feed the spare animal parts back to their kin reminds me of the film Soilent Green in which humans are recycled as food. The only reason the FDA banned the practice was because of mad cow disease, and they still use the growth hormones and antibiotics that are widely known to be bad practices but make for good profit. Plus, since they can no longer use cow meat as feed, they use pig or chicken instead. Have our food producers no ethical sense? Just because cow tissue is the cheapest commodity available does not mean it should be used; I think there are certain boundaries set by nature that should not be crossed. In support of this, Pollan says nature selected against cannibalism for a reason. "Fat is fat, protein is protein," they say indifferently, but I beg to differ: herbivores stay herbivores.

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