What’s my beef with meat?

Here I go again.  You may be wondering, perhaps with increasing irritability, why I keep posting about meat.  Short version: The bottomless American appetite for cheap and abundant meat is starving much of the world and contributing to global environmental destruction.  And the economies of scale that yield cheap meat are based on warehousing and slaughtering methods that are cruel and abusive to living animals, and that endanger our food supply.

If you prefer a longer version of the story, go read these links:

• Carnivores Like Us (the source of that great photo above)  (Aside: I follow this stuff fairly closely, but was stunned to read in a sidebar in ”Carnivores Like Us” that “70% of the total antibiotics consumed in the US are used to enhance growth and promote weight gain in livestock.”)
• Face it, we aren’t all going to become vegetarians
• Bad Cow Disease
• Health Risks Outweight Farming Cost Cuts

If you don’t want to think about ethics or economy at all, but still want to reduce your meat consumption, perhaps just for health reasons, read Mark Bittman’s tips, “Putting Meat in its Place.”

And if you prefer the cartoon version of this whole discussion, check out the Simpson’s episode, “Apocalypse Cow,” free on Hulu.  (Deep and grateful bow to The Ethicurean for calling that to our attention.  If you have any interest at all in food ethics and economics, you should be reading that blog.)