Why is it ethical to eat meat? Well, you wouldn’t want to
let it go to waste, would you? Waste is a sin and that makes wasting meat
unethical. Why waste a perfectly good complete protein? I mean, you could
combine some incomplete proteins, like rice and beans, for complementary
proteins, but if the meat is already sitting there going to waste… I mean, what
are you going to do with the meat, just throw it out so it rots in some
landfill? You can’t compost it. Are you going to bury it? Like a proper burial
in a cemetery? That’s kind of a waste of space, don’t you think? I suppose you
could put it in the freezer but that’s kind of a waste of space, too. You could
keep a ton of uneaten rice and beans there, instead.
Actually, you know who might be interested in eating some
of those rice and beans? Some of those heritage breeds that are going extinct
because of the rise of commercial farming; I bet they’d love some rice and beans
and maybe that spot of land you were going to bury them in to live on. It’s
quite a shame, the loss of the family homestead. Maybe people have become so far
removed from food production they’ve forgotten how important domesticated
animals are to agriculture and to our survival as a species. Not only do they
provide meat, they provide the power to plow the fields and the nitrogen to fuel
them. Pigs root, chickens scratch; every animal on the farm has a job, and most
of them roast up nicely. And even Hunter/Gatherer societies ate meat; I’ve never
heard of Gatherer/Gatherer societies, have you?
Gee, if every community committed to saving just one
heritage breed we could save them all, asses to turkeys. How hard can it be? Get
a few Narragansett turkeys or Midget Whites and throw them in a coop. Let them
lay some eggs and sit on them (the turkeys, not you) and then let the things
grow up for a bit. Once they reach a certain age you’ll have to check them for
the breed standard. You don’t want to breed sub-par turkeys. The ones that don’t
live up to the standard of the breed that your community is trying to preserve
you cull. Cull is a nice way to say kill – or you could give them away as pets,
not to be bred. But let’s say someone in your community wants a nice turkey
dinner for some special occasion. They contact the butcher, the butcher contacts
you, you both decide who will do the dirty work and for what price the butchered
turkey will sell, the family gets their turkey dinner and money has exchanged
hands – leaving you and the butcher able to feed your families. And someone gets
a turkey feather tuffet to sit and eat their rice and beans on.
Yes, I skimmed over the killing part a bit. It’s not
pleasant, but unpleasant doesn’t automatically mean unethical. Over thousands of
years man has learned how to utilize every part of the animal he killed, to not
let any of it go to waste. They even made pink slime somewhat edible. (Don’t
worry, man will find another use for pink slime; scented candles, automobile
fuel, something like that.) And rice and beans will never go out of style. But
here we are with dozens of breeds of domesticated farm animals who may go
extinct if we don’t make an effort to save them. And, yes, that also means
eating their meat.
