Whether you come to the vegetarian or vegan diet by way of health, environmental, or ethical concerns, it’s not uncommon to find yourself tempted by animal foods. The recently launched Carnivores Anonymous support group, with meetings currently occurring in southern California, aims to keep people meeting their plant-based goals.

Carnivores Anonymous was founded by Marilyn Kroplick M.D., president of the thirty-year-old In Defense of Animals, an international nonprofit animal protection organization with more than 250,000 supporters worldwide. IDA has worked on numerous animal rights issues including laboratory animal rescue missions, shutting down exploitive puppy mills, and the group also runs extensive rehabilitation efforts through its sanctuaries.

The group calls on the same 12-step program used in other addiction recovery programs, working through accepting the addiction, making amends, and supporting others on the same path.

I caught up with Kroplick via email to discuss the group’s recent foray into taking the 12-step approach to meat-eating.

[This article is edited for length and clarity.]

Jill Ettinger: Where did the idea come from to treat meat-eating like an addiction? Is meat addictive? I mean, alcohol wrecks lives—it literally kills people. Is it fair to put meat in the same light?

Marilyn Kroplick: A study published in Psychology Today found that 84% of people who try to ditch animal products go back to them. Clearly, we need more support for people who want to live full, healthy lives.

Animal products have addictive effects and pose a serious risk to our health. People who eat animal products are at increased risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Scientists, dietitians and health professionals are only now beginning to discover the extent of the harm that meat, dairy and other animal products cause to humans. Carnivores Anonymous was formed in the model of Overeaters Anonymous to support people to overcome addiction to animal products and gain a healthful way of living.

The World Health Organization has classified processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen, giving it the same cancer-causing potential as tobacco smoking and asbestos. Most processed foods containing animal products are hyper-palatables, meaning they are high in sugar, fat or salt (usually all three) that stimulate endorphins in the brain, making them chemically addictive.

A recent study published in the U.S. National Library of Medicine highlighted the shared characteristics between consumption of highly processed foods and drug abuse.

JE: Can you walk me through what a Carnivores Anonymous meeting looks like? I know AA meetings can get pretty emotional for people. Is there an emotional aspect to giving up animal products? For example, does the guilt of eating animals factor into the equation? If so, for how many people?

MK: Carnivores Anonymous meetings follow along the same format of all 12-step programs. Participants introduce themselves by first name and admit that we are all recovering carnivores. We then recite the Serenity prayer and read through the 12 steps together. From there we discuss our recent struggles and invite a featured speaker to tell their story. In our first Carnivores Anonymous meeting held on July 24, our speaker [television journalist, author, and vegan Jane Velez Mitchell] kindly agreed to be recorded for our first meeting, you can view her story here.

There is indeed an emotional aspect to overcoming addiction to animal products as well as food addiction in general. Some people may experience withdrawal symptoms, others struggle with the empathy they feel for the animals they eat, and many struggle with uncooperative or belligerent family members or spouses.

Our main goal of Carnivores Anonymous is to help these people to provide specialized support in the healthy lifestyle they are trying to lead and to bridge the gap between vegans and non-vegans teaching to reach out to each other with compassion in a non-judgmental way.

JE:  What is the biggest challenge for meat-eaters looking to go more plant-based?

MK: Members work through and overcome their own personal challenges with the support of the Carnivores Anonymous group, the 12 Steps, and their sponsor. On a societal level, the biggest challenge to overcome is the social conditioning. Years of government-funded advertisements have convinced us of the false claim that animal products are necessary for a healthy diet. Doctors, most who have little or no nutritional training, instruct their patients to consume animal products not knowing they are harmful for health and completely unnecessary when nutritional requirements can be easily met through a plant-based whole-foods diet. This is compounded by powerful addiction to processed hyper-palatable food, and very low awareness of food addiction, making it very challenging to break out of the social norm.

JE:  What’s the biggest result people see once they shift to a plant-based diet?

MK: Within the first two weeks, people who eat a plant-based diet start seeing improvements in their health. High blood pressure begins to decrease and stabilize, cholesterol in arteries starts to break down, blood sugar evens out. Members report having more energy, clearer skin, and regular bowel movements. These are just some of the benefits to removing harmful animal products from one’s diet. In the longer-term, those on a plant-based diet enjoy lessened symptoms and even reversal of health complaints, reduced risk of further disease, and a longer, healthier life.

JE: I know you just had a meeting last month. How did that go? What’s the response been like?

MK: The first Carnivores Anonymous meeting was a big success. The group was a blend of members interested in going plant-based, others that had just started eating plant-based, and plant-based veterans. All participants brought something to the table, whether it be our current struggles with people around us, the health improvements they were starting to see, or sharing strategies to help us succeed.

Find Jill on Twitter and Instagram

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Earlier this week, the animal welfare organization Mercy For Animals (MFA) filed a false advertising complaint against a Vermont slaughterhouse that promotes itself as producing “humane” meat. The company, Vermont Packinghouse, has been suspended from operating four times in six months because of allegations of animal cruelty.

In addition to the four suspensions, the USDA has “repeatedly cited this facility for botched stunning and other inhumane treatment of animals,” notes MFA. Over the past two years, Vermont Packinghouse was written up more than a dozen times for violating the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. “In one such instance, a sow was shot in the head but remained conscious—bleeding from her snout and screaming—until she was shot again. The USDA also cited the slaughterhouse several times for failing to provide something as basic as food or water to animals—sometimes for longer than 24 hours.”

Cruelty and “humane” make for strange bedfellows, but as far as raising animals for food goes, it’s much more common than you’d think. Whether it’s labels like “humane”, “cage-free”, “free-range,” or “grass-fed,” the messaging is consistent: these are animal products you can feel good about eating. Except, they’re not.

“How can I make sure the meat I eat is humane? People ask us this all the time,” writes Joe Loria for MFA. “The answer is really quite simple: If the meat you eat comes from animals, it isn’t humane. If it comes from plants, it is.”

“Cows, pigs, chickens, and other farmed animals are just as sensitive and intelligent as the dogs and cats we love at home,” writes Loria. “Sadly, the meat industry is allowed to legally abuse billions of them in ways that would warrant felony animal cruelty charges if the victim were just one dog or cat.”

While claims that animal products are “humanely” raised and produced are rampant in our food supply these days, neither the USDA nor any government agency currently regulates use of that term. Any humane or welfare certification you see on an animal product is done solely by third-party organizations the USDA doesn’t regulate. “Humane” is the “natural” label of the animal products world. Companies can and do define what they consider to be humane treatment, leaving the burden of proof on consumers.

The USDA’s certified organic label does come with some stipulations to animal welfare, but even those guidelines have been abused by the nation’s largest dairy producer to a shocking degree, as the Cornucopia Institute discovered in a months-long investigation.

“Because the requirements for the ‘organic’ label prohibit the use of many medicines, producers frequently allow cows to languish with ailments that otherwise could easily be treated,” explains the nonprofit rescue and education organization, Farm Sanctuary.

And as demand for organic and clean products continues to rise, there are likely more offenders making humane claims that don’t live up to reality. To call the imprisonment and eventual slaughter of an animal who doesn’t need to die so you can enjoy a burger or a nugget “humane” is a bit like applauding a thief who says “please” and “thank you” while robbing you at gunpoint.

While some farmers do let the animals graze on grasses, insects, and other natural diets, they can keep those same animals confined as often as they’re given outdoor access (or longer). And “humane-certified” farms often employ many of the same egregious standard industry practices as conventional farms: tail docking, castration, and beak searing are routine procedures done without aestheticizing the animals, many of whom are babies recently torn away from their mothers.

And then, there’s the inevitable slaughter, which even dairy cows and egg-laying hens experience when they’re no longer viable. Numerous investigations have shown the undeniably inhumane practices standard in the slaughter process. Animals can be trucked for hours without food or water. Animals that may have been free to roam as they please are now crammed into hot transport trucks. In a victory for the animal rights community, a Canadian activist was recently acquitted of criminal mischief charges for attempting to offer water to pigs stuck in a hot transport truck. Pigs have been compared to dogs in terms of intelligence, personality, and ability to show affection.

Animals waiting for their turn on the slaughter line can become visibly disturbed by the sounds and sights of their friends being murdered (and no surprise that cases of animals escaping slaughterhouses make the news with some frequency). Any number of issues can and often do happen in the slaughtering process. Whether it’s botched stunning, which is to render the animals unconscious before slitting their throats, or animals being dragged and beaten in the terrifying moments before their death.

“Regardless of the welfare standards followed at any farm, all animals raised for food are slaughtered at young ages – broiler chickens at around 42 days when they could live four years or more, pigs at 6 months when they could live 9 years or more, beef cattle at less than two years when they could live 20 years or more, dairy cows at 4 to 6 years when they could live 25 years, and veal calves at only five months,” notes Farm Sanctuary. “No matter how well they are treated, these animals’ lives are cut drastically short.”

Then, there’s the cruelty bestowed on you, the customer. If you’re buying a product because you think it comes from an animal who enjoyed a natural and stress-free bucolic lifestyle, you’re not only being misled, but often being asked to pay considerably more for the product than its conventional counterpart. And while encouraging animal producers to become more humane and ethical is important, the reality, says Loria, “is that the meat industry slaps on labels like ‘humane’ to give consumers peace of mind,” writes Loria. It has less to do with the animals, and more to do with earning your loyalty. “Don’t buy their lies,” says Loria, or their products.

Find Jill on Twitter and Instagram

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Grist has some answers, and all of their meaty research is in the below video!

Recently, Grist posted this interesting video about why America eats (and expects to eat) so much meat. The answer is a bit more complicated than you may think.

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ColumnIf we are going to be enraged about the killing of one lion, then we need to start being enraged about factory farming. 

In the last week we have seen the rage that has ensued over the killing of Zimbabwe’s famous lion Cecil. When someone is able to spend almost double the average American salary for the chance to kill an animal, there are many questions to be asked, and “why?” is just the beginning.

Many people have expressed disgust in the treatment of an animal in this way. #CatLivesMatter comes to mind. In fact the Internet has banded together, in scary proportions, to speak out against the dentist Walter J. Palmer, the man charged with the killing of Cecil. He has even received death threats.

This begs the question: citizens can be fueled with outrage over the killing of one lion, even causing them to physically protest, and yet everyday most of us go about taking part in an industrial meat processing system that’s inherently flawed, both in terms of the health of the animals involved and our own.

As Vox put it, “eating chicken is morally worse than killing Cecil the lion.” Certainly, there are differences between the big game hunt of a lion and the food we put on the table. Cecil the Lion was killed for the sake of fun, while in our modern day food industry, chickens, pigs and cows are killed so that people can put them on the plate in front of them. But, it is still worth raising the question: what makes one animal’s life more valuable than another?

I had a friend who worked in nonprofit development who once told me about a workshop she had gone to. Someone had presented on what makes for successful fundraising. The example given was a starving child. If you tell potential donors that an entire country is starving, and show them a photo of that town, a few of them might give a little money to help the cause. If you tell them that a village is starving, and show them a photo of that village, a few more will give money. But if you show them a photo of one individual who is starving, there are so many more who are likely to give. The point emphasizes how much an individual connection means in changing our mindset.

The killing of Cecil the lion is easy to protest and be angry about because it is one animal. Cecil has a face. But factory farms? There are too many animals for our brains to even begin to comprehend. They’re not animals; they’re just numbers. And if it’s just numbers, and our chicken comes to us on a styrofoam platter wrapped in plastic, barely even looking like an actual animal, maybe it’s not so surprising that most of us fail to question the system in place.

This is not to say that the killing of Cecil isn’t important. It’s extremely important. Illegal poaching is a serious issue. For example, in South Africa, between 2007 and 2013, illegal rhino poaching has increased by 7,700 percent. But caring about one issue shouldn’t turn us away from another. It’s all about balance, and while we are up in arms about Cecil, we should also be up in arms about what’s happening here at home, an issue on which we can have a daily impact.

Around 11 billion animals are killed for meat in the United States. Around 8.5 billion of those are chickens. Nearly all of these animals are mistreated, living in cramped quarters with little to no quality of life. But factory farming isn’t just a question of animal rights, it’s also a question of health, and for anyone that isn’t moved by the animal welfare argument, make it personal: the meat system is making you sick. Not only is the industrial meat system’s overuse of antibiotics (80 percent of antibacterial drugs sold every year in the U.S. go to livestock) leading to a very scary situation of antibiotic resistance, factory farms are big contributors to pollution and the environmental degradation of the community around them.

The response to the killing of Cecil the lion is a reminder that people do in fact care. But the question is if we are caring and concentrating on the right things. Our everyday actions have an impact, and we need to start challenging the status quo and taking some responsibility for the food that’s on the plate in front of us.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

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ColumnThere are so many things we know we should stop eating, but we don’t. Why?

We’re going to get into a tough discussion today.

It’s one that I am sure is going to elicit a lot of comments. We are going to talk about what we eat. “But I love talking about what I eat!” you think. Nope, we are going to talk about the things that we eat when we know we should be doing otherwise. We are going to talk about the “I know better, but…” syndrome.

I thought of this as I was researching an article on the sustainability of cheese production. Without getting too far into it, large scale cheese production is pretty bad for the planet. On an Environmental Working Group list of different foods and their greenhouse gas emissions, lamb comes first, beef second, and in third place is cheese.

It’s these kind of articles that I read, feel overwhelmed, sigh, and then question everything I put into my body for the following week.

It’s hard to write about food without thinking about your own personal actions. I eat cheese, it’s something that I struggle with, having cut out meat from my diet. But I do try to buy cheese from small scale producers, and I try to eat smaller amounts of it. Enjoy the good stuff in small quantities so to say.

There are a lot of people out there that don’t have a choice in what they eat, the majority of them because of economics. But for those of us that do have the choice, and read all of the various articles looking at the impacts of all of the foods we eat – meat, cheese, coffee, quinoa etc – what is it that leads us into the “I know better, but…” syndrome.

“I know better, but I am going to eat this anyway.”

That is essentially what we are saying every time we are standing in front of an aisle at the grocery store, or sitting in front of a dish in front of a restaurant, and our emotional self wins out over our rational self. Our brain says no but our stomach says yes.

This is not to get on a soapbox. I know better too. There are things that I eat that I know I shouldn’t, be they for health, sustainability or ethical reasons, so I try to keep them in moderation. Smoked mackerel, I am looking at you. Ocean activist and all around wonderful human being Sylvia Earle doesn’t eat fish, and I always think of her. As she once said, “We have choices; they do not.” To really stick to one’s morals is admirable, most of us will choose convenience and comfort. I have yet to get there, and I am very aware of that.

What we eat is a process. You don’t wake up one morning miraculously having committed to the healthiest, most sustainable diet out there. No, it’s a work in progress. You give up one thing here, add another ingredient in there. No matter how we eat, we can always do better.

But doing better means letting our brain win out over our stomach. It means truly accepting that our choices do in fact have an impact.

It also means being accepting and sensitive to our peers around us. It means not passing judgement based upon what their choices are. The best thing that we can do is to lead by example, and to walk our talk. We are all human, none of us is perfect.

Are you truly willing to stop eating the things you shouldn’t? Maybe you aren’t, and that’s ok, as long as you accept it, and take the small steps to get to a place where you maybe might be. There are things that all of us could consume less of, without entirely eliminating them from our diet. Also, you should definitely give bananas the kick to the curb, as well as those out of season tomatoes and strawberries. Being a year-round locavore isn’t as hard as you think.

We are emotional beings, what we eat, or don’t eat, is sometimes a tough question. But let’s be sensitive, and keep our eyes open. Let us at least acknowledge our imperfections, and that we are working on improving them.

Choose to be better tomorrow, and the next day and the next day. That’s what we can do, no matter where we are at.

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The post Are You Willing to Stop Eating the Things You Know You Shouldn’t? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnDealing with antibiotic resistance starts with thinking about what’s on your plate.

I was watching a PSA this week, all about antibiotics. It got me thinking: why aren’t we more pissed off about the problem of antibiotic resistance? Or moved to change our actions that are part of causing it?

Imagine you have an infection . . .

. . . that your child has an infection.

Nothin’ major a few days of antibiotics should clear it up, right?

Wrong!

Well-known antibiotics are proving to be less and less effective every year, and people across America are starting to wonder why.

More and more people are starting to talk about antibiotic resistance. But we shouldn’t just be talking about antibiotics, we should be talking about what we’re eating. Because it is in part our food habits that are fueling this problem.

Antibiotics, originally developed to protect human health, are now keeping the industrial livestock industry alive. About 80 percent of the antibacterial drugs sold in the United States go to livestock, and not even to sick livestock. They’re simply used to keep animals healthy in a system that’s inherently unhealthy for them, raised in overcrowded spaces that are often unhygienic. This non-therapeutic use of antibiotics helps keep the industry producing cheap meat. I’m talking about your bacon. Your hot dogs. Your burgers. Your bologna sandwich. Are people still eating those?

As the industrial meat industry has grown, so has the use of antibiotics. Between 1985 and 2001, the use of antibiotics in feed for industrial livestock production rose by 50 percent. The U.S. isn’t alone. In Britain about half of antibiotics go to livestock.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists:

While the links between animal agriculture and human disease are complicated and in need of additional study, evidence is strong enough for scientists and public health organizations to call for reduced use of antibiotics in agriculture. The CDC has concluded that, in the United States, antimicrobial use in food animals is the dominant source of antibiotic resistance among foodborne pathogens.

Drug resistant bacteria that develops on farms, easily reaches the general public, making these bacteria a national health issue. We’re not talking about just a few cases here and there of not being able to deal with certain infections. We’re talking full-blown health crisis. In fact, according to the NRDC, drug-resistant infections are estimated to cost Americans up to $26 billion per year in additional healthcare costs. That $5.99 steak on sale might seem like a good deal now, but the ramifications and costs of its productions are much higher.

“A post-antibiotic era – in which common infections and minor injuries can kill – far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st Century,” wrote the authors of a recent World Health Organization report on antimicrobial resistance.

Beyond leaving us incapable of dealing with infections, there are also studies on the link between obesity and the use of antibiotics. The use of antibiotics for livestock is making us fatter and keeping us from treating infections. Choosing to eat industrially produced meat isn’t just a matter of your own health, it’s a matter of global health.

Wherever you fall on the eat meat vs. don’t eat meat argument, I think we can all agree that this is a flawed system. Using antibiotics in farming is dangerous. We are keeping an unsustainable alive, while at the same time putting our own health at risk.

We need a different system, and that starts with thinking about what’s on the plate in front of us.

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The post Antibiotic Resistance and the Industrial Meat Industry: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

They don’t call Dame Vivienne Westwood the ‘grandmother of punk fashion’ for nothing.

The 72-year-old fashion icon is raising a lot of eyebrows lately. Westwood has always been risqué, and if you thought age would have settled her down a bit, think again.

Westwood shaved her head recently to draw attention to climate change and the impact it’s having on the planet. “We face mass extinction,” she said. “It’s being hidden from us because our rulers still pursue their own vested interest, they’ve been trained to think that the people do not understand what’s good for them.”

Like her new hairdo, she’s downsizing her massive clothing empire. “I’ve got too much product,” she says. “I’m trying to completely reduce the scale of operation. I’m concentrating on quality, not quantity.”

And without all that hair it was easy to fashion on a shower cap for her latest appearance in a PETA video about the depletion of fresh water due to the meat industry.

“I am an eco-warrior, but I take long showers with a clean conscience because I’m vegetarian,” she says in the video. “By avoiding meat, you do more for the environment than recycling or driving a hybrid car, combined” she explains from underneath a shower head.

The video is being released in advance of the United Nation’s World Water Day on March 22^nd. According to PETA, rivers are being diverted for the livestock industry—both to hydrate the animals and grow grains that make up their feed.

The New York Times recently reported that 4 million gallons of fresh water are needed to produce just one ton of beef. In comparison, a ton of vegetables requires only 85,000 gallons of water.

“I don’t hate the older people now — I’m one of them,” says Westwood. “But I’ve been trying to do something to change things all my life.”

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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 ColumnHow sustainable can fast food really be?

If you hadn’t heard the news, McDonald’s is having a go at sustainable beef. Quite frankly, those two things in the same sentence sounds… well… wrong. But that is exactly what McDonald’s is trying to do, vowing to begin purchasing “sustainable” beef in 2016.

But wait, is there such a thing as sustainable beef? In terms of a certification, no, there is not. So McDonald’s is looking to a wide group to help come up with that definition.

“Sustainable beef is not going to be defined by McDonald’s. The key here is to get sustainable beef defined by a wide stakeholder group and coalition. We needed a bigger critical mass,” Bob Langert, McDonald’s vice president, global sustainability told GreenBiz in an in-depth interview (which if you’re interested in the topic, I highly recommend checking out).

And this brings us to the question of sustainability and corporate responsibility.

We commend big business only because we live in a world of big business.

What I mean by this is that if a small, local restaurant had the same practices as McDonald’s – low employee wages, shitty food, wasteful packaging, plastic toys, meat from god-knows-where – we would never go there. In fact, we would immediately throw up our hands in an outrage and criticize them for being a negative impact on the community. And yet, because it’s a huge business, we say to ourselves “they are so big, it’s good they’re changing how they do business because it will really have an impact.”

You know what would really have an impact? If we didn’t give the McDonald’s and Burger Kings of the world our business in the first place. (Hello, this is the business that told their underpaid employees that they should “sing away their stress” after all, and if you don’t care about sustainability and health, the least you could care about is people making a decent wage.)

No matter what your definition of sustainability it is, we can all agree on the fact that it’s difficult, if not nearly impossible, to implement on a large scale. We live in a world with big business, and while it’s certainly better for us and the environment for those businesses to act in a more sustainable manner, we’re kidding ourselves if we give them kudos (and continue to frequent their locations) for doing it. Especially when it’s a big business with a pretty horrendous track record.

Which raises yet another question: when it comes to corporate responsibility, in my opinion, propping the public full of high fructose corn syrup, addictive additives and calories is probably on the more irresponsible side of things. Sure, responsible for business – you sell more burgers after all and that makes the CEO happy – but irresponsible in regards to public health.

I will tell you what’s sustainable:

Not eating at large fast food chains.

Supporting local, independent farmers.

Because if McDonald’s is looking to sell more “sustainable” beef, they know that doing so is a good business move. It’s not because they truly care about the planet and the environment – they just want to sell more burgers. The business move says that the market is demanding more sustainably produced products, and if the market demand is there, that implies that the consumer is educated, making choices about where their food comes from and we should have no problem switching to something else entirely. As consumers, that would be our responsible choice.

Why? Because the words sustainable and fast food don’t go together, no matter how many layers of greenwashing you paint the billboards with.

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The post Hey McDonald’s, Sustainable Meat Doesn’t Make You Responsible: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnEven if we’re not vegetarian we have to be thinking about our meat consumption.

There has been a repetitive question in my brain for the last few months.

“Why am I not vegetarian?”

I consider myself a conscious eater. I am the kind of person that nowadays passes up fruit and vegetables because they are out of season. Certainly, I still drink coffee and eat chocolate, and by no means am a 100% locavore, but I constantly think about what I consume and what I eat.

I am however, not a vegetarian. There, I said it.

Sometimes, ethically, that makes me cringe. In fact being a person that writes about conscious eating, publicly acknowledging that I am not a vegetarian puts me in a vulnerable spot; I get nervous about the response. The internet loves to hate, after all.

But I have watched too many under cover factory farm videos and read too many investigative reports about the state of affairs for mass produced meat to be able to avoid asking myself this question.

And so my personal policy to eating has evolved. I eat very little meat (in the past month I have eaten it twice), and I try very hard to think about it when I do.

What’s so bad about factory farmed meat? A lot of things. From environmental to human health to animal rights, there are a variety of things that are wrong about factory-farmed, cheap meat. Nearly 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the U.S. go to livestock farming. To make one hamburger, it takes more than 50 gallons of water. Around 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from the global meat and dairy industry. The list goes on. And despite our awareness of how bad the situation is, we continue to become more carnivorous.

Eating well isn’t something you wake up one morning and decide to do. It’s a process. Some people succeed at completely changing their diets overnight; for others it’s more gradual, but the point is that we move to something better. It is better to not be vegetarian but commit to eating less meat overall than to completely dodge the topic because it makes us uncomfortable. If we want to find solutions to the problem, then we have to join forces: omnivores, vegetarians and vegans.

One of the arguments for eating meat that I have often heard, and even used myself in the past, is the “we’re humans, we’re omnivores.” But the “we’re meant to eat meat” position doesn’t hold, because we’re not meant to eat meat the way in which we eat it. Mass-produced meat propped full of GMOs and antibiotics is not what our ancestors had in mind.

I walked through a market the other day and saw a row of poultry with the heads still attached. The birds were all plucked, but there were bent necks and a few duck bills here and there. I had the classic “yuck” reaction that is so common when we have grown up in a sanitized world where our chicken comes pre-cut in manageable sized and wrapped in plastic. We have no relationship to that piece of meat as an animal, it’s merely a piece of protein, something that is a building block of our daily nutritional intake.

The more I thought about it though, the better I felt about seeing those ducks and chickens than I did about seeing packaged breasts at the super market on sale for a minimal amount of pocket change per pound. At least whoever was buying these poultry were well aware of what they were eating, and while they probably weren’t about to have a eulogy about the beautiful life that Jean Pierre the chicken had lived before sitting down to dinner, there’s a much better connection to meat when you have to de-head and de-gut it yourself. It’s an animal, not just a grocery store product.

Talking about eating or not eating meat is difficult, because there is a lot of emotion involved. In fact, I often feel I can’t launch into the discussion because I personally haven’t made the commitment to completely take meat out of my diet. But one thing is sure: we all need to be eating less meat, and not just for the sake of animals, for our own health. And we need to be talking about it, no matter who we are, because the system has to change.

All this said, and I am still not a vegetarian. I do however realize that mentally I have made a transition from just a few years ago, and when I do eat meat it’s a very conscious decision. It’s not an addition to my dinner plate just because I need a slab of protein.

I think back to a meal I had in Afghanistan, a lamb stew that was prepared for us in a small village. It was the religious holiday Eid, and all around sheep were being slaughtered and served as dinner. No one goes unfed on Eid; a sheep is sacrificed not to feed a family, but to feed a community. It is for those moments I guess that I am not a vegetarian, or at least one of the reasons.

But a lamb stew in a small Afghan village and a pound of red meat on a bed of Styrofoam are two very different things.

Just like with your vegetables, if you eat meat, then reconnect with it. Know where it comes from and know what–or who– you’re ingesting. There is no room in our society for mindless eating anymore.

If you have ever talked to an artisan butcher, you realize that there is love and passion in their work. We are part of a natural food chain, and most of our ancestors had meat as part of their diet. But there is something inherently wrong with the way we raise, kill and eat meat today. So wrong that we can’t keep turning our head the other way.

There are no rules for eating, it’s up to each and every person to listen to their bodies to figure out what it needs to function best and also to find their moral compass and let that guide them in their food decisions, but if you consider yourself a conscious eater, you have to be thinking about the meat you consume.

We all can benefit from having a serious thought process about where our meat comes from and how it was raised, and whether or not, ultimately, we feel good about eating it.

Related on EcoSalon:

What Every Conscious Meat Eater Should Know

Your Guide to Eating Out as a Vegetarian or Vegan

10 Infographics on Farming and Agriculture

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Tambako The Jaguar

The post “Why Am I Not a Vegetarian?”: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

A round-up of what we’re reading right now. 

Because you should never be without a to-go cup: now you can make your own from a mason jar. Just make sure you use a reusable straw. [Via Fine and Feathered]

It’s back-to-school season, but what does education look like in the rest of the world? This portrait slideshow takes us into classrooms from around the globe. [Via Brain Pickings]

Summer isn’t over until the fall equinox, and this healthy Mint Mojito Smoothie might just be the afternoon reminder that you need to embrace the late season. [Via Well+Good NYC]

Movies can be educational, which is why someone came up with this list of Lifetime movies for Republicans who don’t understand rape. [Via The Cut]

Minimalism is on trend right now. Even for Kuwaitis. [Via Dezeen]

Your drinking habits depend on the shape of your glass. [Via The Atlantic]

Our new dream house? A converted barn in France. [Via The Style Files]

On average, Americans eat 200 pounds of meat a year. That’s not just bad for our health, it’s also fueling the water crisis. [Via Mother Jones]

Trying to figure out how to live better in small spaces? You need the Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Feng Shui. [Via Greatist]

Image: Fine and Feathered

The post Link Love: How to Turn a Mason Jar Into a To-Go Cup, Kuwaiti Minimalism and Movies for Republicans Who Don’t Understand Rape appeared first on EcoSalon.