Killer Chickens With Red Glowing Eyes!!!

Ok, sorry about the headline, but that’s the only thought running through my head right now.  If you’ve gone to business school, you might know what I’m talking about.  It’s a particular business case that most MBA students cover during their education and it discusses the treatment of chickens as they’re raised.  Just for a bit of background, chickens get very aggressive when raised in small confined spaced.  To prevent them from killing and eating (yikes!) eachother, chicken farmers will debeak their chickens at a young age.  That means they grab a chicken and cut off the beak with a red hot knife and then throw it back into the coop.  The business case in question discussed an alternative where red contact lenses would be inserted into the chicken’s eyes to make them less aggressive.  This method never really caught on by the way.

Ok….

So why the heck am I talking about debeaking and chicken lenses?  Well, because to me, this is an example of just how crazy our food industry has become.  We mutiliate our chickens so they won’t cannibalize eachother.  We pump cattle full of antibiotics so the open sores they have won’t become infections.  We finish our beef on corn, a food they were never meant to eat, and then take pride in how it tastes.  We raise turkeys so grossly fat that they break their own legs when they stand up.  Does this sound healthy to anyone?

Killing Animals Doesn’t Bother Me

Let me clarify, killing animals doesn’t bother me.  I don’t have a moral problem with eating meat nor do I think killing an animal in order to eat it is ethically wrong.  What I do have an issue with is a food industry that deviates so far from the natural order of things.  We raise cattle, chickens and other animals so badly and in such unnatural conditions that the only way we can sustain this is by mutilating them, pumping them full of drugs and hoping that various health issues don’t kill them before we can eat them.

By the way, this is true for non meat foods as well by the way.  Have you looked at modern fields lately?  Most of them are corn, most of them require so much fertilizer that the rivers around are poisoned for miles and most of them require enough pesticides to make the produce itself a chemical hazard.  And we wonder why we’re so unhealthy.  We need only look at our food industry to see where the problem starts.

A Simple Rule

This is not 100% true but it’s close enough to be a great rule to live by.  The more processed food is, the less healthy it is.  You want to eat healthy?  Start eating a bit more naturally.  Start eating meat that was raised the way meat is supposed to be.  Start eating vegetables that don’t have to be washed in boiling water before they can be handled without gloves.  Stop eating foods where 3 of the top 5 ingrediants are chemicals you can’t even pronounce.

Yes, it IS Affordable

Oh, I can hear it now.  “You’re just saying that because you have money.  Good healthy food costs money which I don’t have”.  That’s a load of crap.  If you saw what this business school is costing me you would know I have no money to spare.  However, even without that, healthy food does not have to be expensive.  Forget the Whole Foods supermarket that will charge you 10 dollars for an apple.  Start shopping at local produce stores, farmers markets and ethnic markets.  They have very reasonably priced produce that’s local and not toxic.  My weekly veggie and fruit purchases at the local produce store amount to less than $20 and that’s enough for two people for a week, and we both consume quite a bit of fuirts and vegetables.  Same applies to meat by the way.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and there are many ways to find inexpensive meats.  For example, I have a friend who fishes on weekends.  For a low initial investment, he gets a decent amount of meat per week for essentially free.  I know other people who buy large quantities of organic beef from local farms and freeze most of it.  Buying in bulk gets them a price that’s comparable to most supermarket prices.  That’s right, they’ve found ways to make healthy meat affordable.

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Our modern food industry is an abomination.  It’s wasteful, poisonous, toxic, pollutant and unhealthy.  We spend an enormous amount of resources to get unhealthy food.  Don’t be a part of this monstrosity.  You can have food which is healthy for you, healthy for your wallet and healthy for the world around you.  Knowing this, how can you make any other choice?

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