Last week I was sitting around in Joiner's room while she was out, blissfully watching hours and hours of TV, when I surfed my way onto a channel showing a documentary about how cows, pigs, and chickens are raised. After a few minutes of watching piglets anxiously nose about a dead and bloated companion, diseased cows with huge tumors being pulled off trucks to the slaughterhouse, and chicks being dumped by the carton onto breeding grounds, I was squicked out to the max and decided to take Double M's approach of avoiding meat unless there's good chance it's been raised humanely.

Mostly.

(I gotta have my pho once in a while.)

And today, further reason to do so presented itself in The New York Times. Some choice quotes from the article, which described criticism about the inadequacy of new FDA rules on animal feed, which supposedly are to try and stop the spread of mad cow disease:

"The new proposal would still allow animals to be fed material that some scientists consider potentially infectious, including the brains and spinal cords of young animals; the eyes, tonsils, intestines and nerves of old animals; chicken food and chicken dung swept up from the floors of poultry farms; scrapings from restaurant plates; and calf milk made from cow blood and fat."

Let us all note that: "In early 2004, the F.D.A. proposed banning letting cows eat poultry litter and plate waste, but the rules were never adopted."

Cows eat grass. Cows eat hay. Cows should not be eating other cows, much less chicken shit.

The folks in the industry say that if they don't feed the cows this stuff, it'll create tons of waste that'll have to be burned, which'll be expensive and bad for the environment.

You know, I used to think that if people were educated about the problems with raising cows, pigs, etc. on a mass scale, they'd stop eating meat, or at least eat less. I know I grew more conscious about eating meat after learning about the horrors of the slaughterhouse (where cows are sometimes still conscious while being skinned alive) and the industry. But just today I was talking with a guy in my hall about this documentary, and he said, "I know about it, but I just don't want to think about it." And off he went to make some turkey burgers. Huh.