Honourable Eats, or The Ethical Meat Re/generation

The “ethical meat re/generation” works to regenerate our consumption of meat in an ethical way. We should be known as a generation of people who are health, earth, and cruelty aware, making responsible and sustainable choices. Let’s honour the responsible measures taken and see them as positive models. Let’s explore how we can cook better, eat out better, and understand sustainable meat farming better. The goal is to make Toronto more meat-responsible. The first step is through individual awareness, and business awareness. You will find essays and anecdotes, interviews, films, recipes, reviews, and readings about the ethical meat re/generation topic.

[honourableeatszzz-blog]

In my third year of university, my goal was to be a vegetarian.

Vegetarianism was important to protecting the environment for me essentially. Earlier, I experimented with eating less and less meat for health reasons (staying away from added hormones and high levels of stress in the meat I was consuming, and supporting unethical animal handling processes, for example) My vegetarianism never touched not wanting to harm a sentient being in eating it. However, like many vegetarians alike, what did bother me was knowing an animal suffered for the duration of its life so it could be my food. Ideas of treating meat fairly were naturally prefaced by typical encounters: watching the ever-scaring videos of mass produced meat and Peta ‘behind the scenes’ footage...these well-acquainted scarring experiences did convince me that treating a sentient being in this was wasn’t right. It also convinced me that I should stay away from meat. My main problem was staying away from something I enjoyed.

I had a conversation during a carpool to Québec City later on. The girl in the car said something along the lines of: ‘I only buy meat from farmers who I know, that way I know their practices and I know the lifestyles that these animals lead. They live good happy lives, they are slaughtered in a way that is not humiliating or torturous, and I support that type of farming’. When in a situation where she didn’t know the status of the animal’s life and death, the decision was easy, she just wouldn’t eat meat.

I knew that she was onto something, and that she was right. However, I couldn't see myself living that lifestyle. What seemed like a great idea to me deflated when I realized that living in Calgary, Alberta makes it much easier to ‘know your cattle farmer,’ especially when she explained how easy it was to meet a cattle farmer just down the road in her town. Now, I don’t know about most people living in the GTA, but I know no cattle farmers, and there definitely aren’t any ‘just down the road’ from me, even living in the suburbs. The next best option seemed to be cold vegetarianism.

My shift was unsuccessful because pure vegetarianism just didn't fit with my view of food-consumption: I didn't have a problem consuming animals—naturally, I often found myself slipping into an omnivorous state, neither here nor there, and it did upset me because I lacked true commitment to VEGETARIANISM.

And then one day I had a fruitful conversation with a couchsurfer I hosted from Germany. We realized that you need not boycott meat to make a difference in the environment, your life or an animal’s life either. What would it be like to support the farmers who treat their animals well and not support the commercial superpowers who are irresponsible with animal well-being? Why isn’t it a widely supported perspective amongst vegetarians and celebrated as a reasonable lifestyle choice? What would it be like to support one way of eating meat over abandoning the whole meat industry ship and letting it work itself out on its own terms?

Let’s experiment with this lifestyle instead.