so last year sometime the beautiful Valerie and myself decided to take a day out of the week and make it meat-free – and so we chose a Thursday for reasons i can’t remember
[no that doesn’t mean on Thursdays we run down the streets giving away packs of bacon to people altho i can’t see how they wouldn’t appreciate it – the people i mean, not the bacons]
and we encouraged people in our community (our church congregation enGAGE and my weekly thort for the week community) to consider doing likewise
and then after talking about it for a long time we decided to start some recycling as well (and by that i don’t mean we would go out on our bikes somewhere and then repeat the route – oh wait, we don’t have bikes, who were those people?) and so we put some crates outside our place and now have space for glass and tins and cardboard and plastic
then after a while – and big piles of stuff outside our window – we actually discovered where we can take that stuff and so we started actually recycling [altho we are still needing to figure out what to do with the cardboard cos the BP does not have a bin for that] and last nite we told the guy who stays in the flat next to us and he has already started putting his empty bottles with out
and we wrote an email to the complex we stay in and they sounded positive and said they would bring it up at the next meeting and so hopefully it will become an official part of where we stay
my point is that as easy as it is to bury your head in the sand and pretend the situation is so overwhelming (which it seems to be at times) that why bother doing anything… or you can start somewhere – one couple not eating meat and doing a bit of recycling is not going to change the world, but one couple and their next door neighbour man? well who knows?
what are you doing for your planet? and the next generation?
My amazing girlfriend got me recycling and not (*cough* hardly *cough*) eating meat – not because she makes the rules, but just because she un-buried my head, and the more I read up on both (partly to prove her wrong) the more sense it made.
An episode of “30 Days” (think “wife swap”) – episode 3 of season 3, I believe – sent a hunter to go and live with a member of Peta. At the beginning of the show he explained how long he’d been hunting for, why he thought killing animals for food was okay, and that no-one was going to change his mind about it… but at the end of the show his views had changed a lot, he said:
“My life changed… who couldn’t change… I have changed. Am I going to hunt when I get home – yeah, I’m going to hunt. But I do believe animals have rights. You know, that little hamburger you buy real cheap – whether you buy it from a fast food restaurant, or pay $1.99/pound in a grocery store – you look in the ingredients it says ‘ground beef’… it doesn’t say ‘sick ground beef’, it doesn’t say ‘unhealthy ground beef’, it doesn’t say ‘used up dairy cow ground beef’, they just take them all and they mix them in a big pot, and they spit it out a pound at a time. Animals don’t deserve to suffer and be abused. I am a fan of stopping the abuse and stopping the suffering – it’s unnecessary. Yeah, I believe in animals rights.”
In contrast, my uncle and aunt own a farm and sold (full grown) cows for slaughter… those animals were looked after and loved as if they were family pets – so we can’t believe that all farms are bad, and all animals are mistreated.. though I suppose you don’t know what happens once the animals are sold to be slaughtered.
Personally I can’t just assume that all farms are evil and torture animals, but I suppose you can’t assume that all are good either. I would like there to be more strict rules in place protecting the animals and ensuring they’re treated properly and don’t suffer… but I’m not sure I could stop eating meat all together.
The problem I find with this stuff though is “how far do you go” – have you thought about where your milk comes from, and whether those animals were treated correctly? Or thought about the baby cows that are separated from their mothers, so the mothers can go on producing milk. The world’s a messed up place 😐 On that note Fair Cape (http://www.faircape.com) are awesome – they don’t try and hide how they run their farm, or cover up their milking procedures, it’s all on their site and they allow visitors and inspectors all the time. I say good for them – they have my milk-buying-support 🙂
Yay Brett!! Shot for doing what you can to help save Earth (it is the only planet with chocolate!)
Soem other things that I try and do include buying biodegradable chemicals. Woolworths do have a range, but alot of their stuff is nto made in South Africa, so then there is the transport cost which impact the planet, and they tend to be on the pricy side. PicknPay Green stuff is pretty similar price to normal stuff and works just as well. An example of the benefits of the biodegradable chemicals is the fact that you can pour you dirty dish washing water on your plants (and not kill them, which many other chemicals do.) PE currently has major water restrictions, so this is a benefit from that perspective too.
Oh, and if you leave the spiders alone in your house, they will eat all the bugs so you don’t need to use Doom or anything like that, AND you get this cool free decorating with silk all over the place!!
Very interesting post. I used to be a meat eater many years ago and whenever I’d order a pizza with salami on, some vegetarians would remind me that it is not salami I’m eating, but rather a dead animal which was killed and ground up. I thought about it for some time and continued ordering pizza with salami. Then one day I decided to have a pizza without salami – I did kind of miss the salami but not that much. The next few pizzas were a mix or with and without meat or maybe changing to other meats. I kept on thinking about the cow. I eventually stopped eating meat altogether after looking at some of the horrific websites on the internet about animal abuse. So its been about 10 years now since my last salami pizza – and yes I do still think of salami especially when I’m hungry but it passes quickly.
I don’t vegetarian bash meat-eaters or non-vegetarians depending on who you talk to. I do think the end-consumer is lied to in a lot of ways. That picture of the hen on the egg carton chilling out in the sun on top of farmer brown’s barn is a complete lie. Terribly cruel things happen in those chicken abbatoirs and I couldn’t bare buying eggs form a place that mistreats the poor birds and hence support that system and the lies. So I try going free-range or organic and hope that is better.
Pigs are very intelligent animals and have been given a bad rap. Some scientists say they’re on par or even more intelligent than dogs. Some people like George Clooney keep pigs as pets and they make great companions. To see how they’re treated in the abbatoirs and factory farms is really terrible and some of the scenes look like scenes from Hell. You can see its the devils work being done.
In Kynsna there are whole communities of people who eat only vegetables and eggs from their own sources. They keep chickens and eat and sell the eggs. I’ve eaten lunch at friends who only grow their own, and it tastes amazing. I do understand that its difficult for the modern person to grow their own and you’d have some explaining to do having chickens in your apartment.
I think its a case of going gradually into it. Buying where you can, being intentional about buying free range or cutting meat out a little. Eventually you may go the vegetarian route or be closer to that.
As I walk past the boerewors stand I still to this day get a bit of a tingle in my mouth, but then I think that a nice vegetarian burger would be better. Its a much cleaner way of living. I dont want to eat scraps of old meat scraped from the abbatoir floor and ground up then stuffed into the animal’s intestines (sausages).
And each Thursday that you don’t eat the meat, after 50 weeks, thats quit a bit of meat. Maybe enough to make a whole lamb or sheep or maybe cow.
McDonalds has a liquid meat. They pour it out and it solidifies when cooked. How disgusting is that.
If Jesus were here today, I doubt he’d eat meat.