All posts in ‘Random’

• Avocado on toast
• Leftover rice fried with whatever vegetables I can find
• Bananas, Mangos etc.
• Nuts (like almonds) and dried fruits (like apricots)
• Black tea and fresh juice

That’s right – I’m going vegan :O

It being Hallowe’en and all, I watched some horror movies – you could say some snuff movies. I saw factory farm workers beating the shit out of maimed turkeys. I saw cows being skinned and cut up while still alive. I saw tens of thousands of chickens, all with sores and scars and missing beaks, crammed into warehouses. I heard Alec Baldwin (narrating a PETA documentary.) And I know these aren’t exceptions – they’re the norm.

I also just finished a book (cited below) that shook me right down to my soul, by opening the lid on the industry and giving a glimpse of what it really means to eat meat and fish, and I’m a bit torn up about it. How did I keep doing it for so long when I knew all these things?

It’s taken me a long time to arrive at this point… a lot of self-deception and idle forgetting. The stark truth is that most – if not all – meat, fish, eggs and milk that we consume day to day come from factory farms, and I guess I finally decided “That’s enough!”

Don’t Panic

I’m not going to do an annoying, meat-is-murder, try-to-convert-everybody turnaround – it’s a deeply personal choice that I wouldn’t and couldn’t press on anybody else… and while I’ve got no problem with other people eating meat and products, I think it’s important we ask questions about where our food comes from. If you’re going to eat meat, there’s probably a few things you should know about it, so that you can at least make an informed decision… right?

As a starting point I recommend Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. It’s an awesome and terrifying book, if you can stomach his rather self-loving writing style, and his complete failure to arrive at any strong conclusions (instead deferring to entire paragraphs of rhetorical questions). Nonetheless it’s amazingly well-researched and has something like 80 pages of verified sources.

As one of the case-studies in his book says – when you hear the facts, it doesn’t matter what your angle is…