Eating with a Conscience
So we were chatting this evening, about food and cooking... and C brought up her experience with cooking crabs. J chipped in and asked if we knew how to select good crabs. So she was telling us how and all that and then she went on to talk about cooking crabs. She said "You turn the crab over, use the knife to cut/break the shell and rip it off." While the crab was still alive. Then you cook it.
I went "Oh nooooo! The poor crab!!" And they looked at me like I was a bit psycho.
That made me think about the time when someone told me that the Japanese ate their fish partly fried with it still alive and flopping on the table, I felt quite sick. When I read how geese had their feet nailed to the floorboard and being force-feed so that they won't move in order to get their livers fat enough to be made into foie gras, I was literally sick AND disgusted.
See, I'm pretty ok with people eating animals/meat (but not exotic or endangered ones) as long the animal is killed instantly without having to suffer. I just cannot accept the way animals have to suffer just so we humans can satisfy our tastebuds. When I hear/read about how animals are treated such as the above, I automatically feel like I "feel" the animals' pain. Literally, I feel myself cringing when I imagine how it must feel like to have my chest and stomach fried while I'm still alive... or have my feet nailed to the ground and unable to move while a steel tube is forced down my throat to force-feed me.
It's not that I WANT to think like this. It's an automatic reaction that I get. I can't stop it, it just happens naturally to me. I guess that's one of the reasons why I'm so bent on animal welfare and why I feel so strongly for animals. I think a lot of people would think I'm a bit "off" but they just don't understand that animals are living creatures too and they feel pain like we do and they have feelings like we do (though studies have disputed this and reported that fish have no feelings). But whatever it is, animals ARE living creatures not very unlike us and if we were to eat them, we could at least give them the dignity of instant death rather than let them suffer.
The Food Revolution by John Robbins is a good read. Opens up your eyes about how we get our meat and why he decided to give up his inheritance of the Baskin-Robbins multimillion dollar ice cream empire.
**********
There was another time when I was reading a news report on how a group of boys had tortured a cat to death by first pulling each of its legs in different directions, breaking them and then running over her with the wheel of a car over and over.
That made me totally sick to my stomach.
I went "Oh nooooo! The poor crab!!" And they looked at me like I was a bit psycho.
That made me think about the time when someone told me that the Japanese ate their fish partly fried with it still alive and flopping on the table, I felt quite sick. When I read how geese had their feet nailed to the floorboard and being force-feed so that they won't move in order to get their livers fat enough to be made into foie gras, I was literally sick AND disgusted.
See, I'm pretty ok with people eating animals/meat (but not exotic or endangered ones) as long the animal is killed instantly without having to suffer. I just cannot accept the way animals have to suffer just so we humans can satisfy our tastebuds. When I hear/read about how animals are treated such as the above, I automatically feel like I "feel" the animals' pain. Literally, I feel myself cringing when I imagine how it must feel like to have my chest and stomach fried while I'm still alive... or have my feet nailed to the ground and unable to move while a steel tube is forced down my throat to force-feed me.
It's not that I WANT to think like this. It's an automatic reaction that I get. I can't stop it, it just happens naturally to me. I guess that's one of the reasons why I'm so bent on animal welfare and why I feel so strongly for animals. I think a lot of people would think I'm a bit "off" but they just don't understand that animals are living creatures too and they feel pain like we do and they have feelings like we do (though studies have disputed this and reported that fish have no feelings). But whatever it is, animals ARE living creatures not very unlike us and if we were to eat them, we could at least give them the dignity of instant death rather than let them suffer.
The Food Revolution by John Robbins is a good read. Opens up your eyes about how we get our meat and why he decided to give up his inheritance of the Baskin-Robbins multimillion dollar ice cream empire.
**********
There was another time when I was reading a news report on how a group of boys had tortured a cat to death by first pulling each of its legs in different directions, breaking them and then running over her with the wheel of a car over and over.
That made me totally sick to my stomach.
posted by Ai Ling at
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
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