A Matter of Taste > Ethics? Scary, but quite possibly true

A discussion in Food and the City touched on the question of why we eat what we eat. It is a matter of taste development. The culture that I grew up in has a lot of farming history, and there are still a couple of small New England farms in the family. I've grown up with hearty, somewhat simple meals of farm fresh vegetables and meat when they are available. Even though I do not live on a farm, part of the year my immediate family gets a lot of our food from our own garden when it is in season.

On the other hand, yes, I am a meat eater. I tried to go veggie a couple of times, but it didn't really work out for me. Meat has been ingrained in my eating culture for my entire life. My uncle still owns a small farm in rural Vermont, and that is where my family gets a lot of our meat. Chicken, lamb and occasionally pork can be found, free range and truly organic.

I grew up with this option in the past, but the body does seem to dictate what you want to eat. Here at Bryn Mawr, I still it meat. Unfortunately it is a matter of taste. Watching Food, Inc. just made me step back and look at the situation again. I know where the mass produced dining hall food comes from. Seeing this process on screen made me confront my own actions...again. I feel guilty ever time I actually take time to think about this. Apparently the visceral effect is really strong, because it seems like regardless of how many times I try to theorize meat eating at Bryn Mawr from an ethical standpoint, I still end up eating it at some point or another.

I worked a prep shift in Haffner last year and had to chop impossibly large chicken breasts for the salad bar. They came in plastic wrapped trays as far removed from an actual chicken into the industrial realm as possible. The film got me even closer to this experience, because we saw the chicken house stuffed full of birds that were engineered to produce white meat. The breasts are caused to be so large that they were damaging their internal organs, and the chickens themselves can't even stand up on their own two feet. That's where that chicken on the salad bar came from.

I wish there could be more options for meat around here. Since there are not, I have a dilemma. So far, the choice seems to have been made for me by my compulsion to eat meat regardless of the fact that the slow food option is not there on a daily basis. There is a serious disconnect between how I feel about where my food comes from and what my body wants to eat.

--> Instant commentary from a friend reading over my shoulder as I'm typing this entry that brings up a tangent point:

She buys stock in what she calls the "anthropological" viewpoint, and is wondering why I even have an ethical dilemma at all. This is what humans are supposed to do - go into an area and exploit resources to our advantage. She also brought up the point that we genetically modify plants, and just because people always see "critters" as living beings, does not mean that plants are not.

I do not agree that this level of exploitation has to be the natural order of things. Humans have enough of a superiority complex as it is. However, there is one good point here. GMOs that are associated with the fast food agro industry for plants should be given the same consideration, but generally are not because the harms to do not show up as dramatically. There is a need for an understanding that the harms are there, and that people really do need to explore different options for where they get their food. Think of what the consequences of our eating habits could be if alternative food systems became more mainstream.