Eating Meat

This is the time of year when we fill our freezer with meat for the coming year. A few weeks ago we went to the Schlabach's farm in Charm, Ohio to pick up our chickens and a Thanksgiving turkey. (See Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey). We also went to Baltic Meats in Baltic, OH to pick up a hog and a quarter of a steer that they had processed for us. The hog came from one of Kevin's former students at Sacred Heart who raised it for 4-H. A picture of the girl and one of her hogs (named Wilbur) appeared in the newspaper during fair week. We have the photo hanging on our fridge as a tribute to this pig who is now in our freezer. The steer grew up right down the hill from us in the King-Yoder's pasture. We would see it on our walks and Kevin tended it while the King-Yoders were in Mexico this fall.

Being this close to the source of your food makes you think and I don't like to think about eating someone named Wilbur, just as I didn't like eating Millie the milk cow when we lived in Georgia. In the early 1990's we lived at Koinonia Farm, an intentional community in Americus, GA and one of Kevin's jobs was "substitute cow milker." When Ray wasn't there, Kevin would take Gabriel who was 3 years old, with him to milk Millie. Millie, however, was past her prime and prone to mastitis so she was eventually sent to the freezer. Every time we ate hamburgers after that, Gabriel would ask, "Is this Millie-meat?" I had serious thoughts about becoming a vegetarian. We had friends who were vegetarians for health and ethical reasons and I talked to them about their reasons, and we cut back on our meat consumption but I never went so far as to declare myself a vegetarian.

This issue came up for Michael in a very real way this weekend when he went on his first deer hunt. He and Kevin went out early Saturday morning and saw four does. Michael took a shot, but missed. Later that afternoon he was feeling very out of sorts and frustrated. He was upset that he had missed such an easy shot, but as we talked, it became obvious that he was also somewhat relieved that he had missed because he wasn't sure he really wanted to kill a deer. But this made him feel even worse. It's hard to be a hunter when you have these mixed feelings. I just hugged him and rubbed his back and told him that these feelings were normal. I didn't try to talk him into anything or out of anything. Later that afternoon, he was ready to go back out and try again. I'm not sure how he resolved his feelings or if he resolved them. I just trust that he was taking a step in the right direction.

I have attached a very good article called "The Ethics of Eating Meat: A Radical View" by Charles Eisenstein, author of The Yoga of Eating. The article appears on the Weston A. Price website. http://www.westonaprice.org/healthissues/ethicsmeat.html Eisenstein addresses this issue in a very thorough and thought provoking way and I encourage you to take the time to read the whole article. For my purposes here I will just quote one paragraph:

There is a time to live and a time to die. That is the way of nature. If you think about it, prolonged suffering is rare in nature. Our meat industry profits from the prolonged suffering of animals, people and the Earth, but that is not the only way. When a cow lives the life a cow ought to live, when its life and death are consistent with a beautiful world, then for me there is no ethical dilemma in killing that cow for food. Of course there is pain and fear when the cow is taken to the slaughter (and when the robin pulls up the worm, and when the wolves down the caribou, and when the hand uproots the weed), and that makes me sad. There is much to be sad about in life, but underneath the sadness is a joy that is dependent not on avoiding pain and maximizing pleasure, but on living rightly and well.

This is what our family is trying to do. We are trying to "live rightly and well" and for us this means being intentional about how we eat and what we eat. It doesn't mean that we have all the answers or that we are free from contradiction or that we have the perfect diet. It's a process. We are learning as we go and we are finding, just as Eisenstein says, "when we live rightly, decision by decision, the heart sings even when the rational mind disagrees and the ego protests."