#63 - Today, I'm grateful for my food, and where it comes from.
Some of you may have heard/read about Mark Zuckerberg's personal goal for 2011 - that he only eats what meat he has killed himself. That sounds a little crazy, but read on.
This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat.
I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have.
You know, I think he has a point. I was taught at a young age that every living thing has a life that should be valued. I also appreciate the reality that today, with food being produced en masse, we don't need to hunt to live anymore and have lost the immediacy that hunting/slaughtering your own food may possibly bring. Arguably, this may be a good thing, but on the flipside, if you had to kill your own chicken, could you bring yourself to, with the knowledge that you are extinguishing a life so you may sustain your own?
In the developed world, the fact remains that there is excessive food being produced. Waste and excess now go hand when it comes to food production, so if someone takes measures to curb that, would that not be a positive thing?
In the haste and convenience of everyday life, we forget, and take for granted the labour that goes into producing the food, and the suffering of the living things that die because it is a) presented in a such a way that does not promote thinking about the death of the animal, and b) so easily accessible.
A friend of mine told me about her experience of working on a farm planting sweet potatoes while she was travelling in South America. She said it was one of the hardest things she's ever done, and as a result, has since realised the amount of work and effort that goes into cultivating an edible crop. This, too, is a realisation many in the developed world don't really dwell on. We assume that the crops in our supermarket are grown in an environment that promotes efficient growth, with maximum sunlight and sufficient water available. But what this also means is that someone has to take care of this crop, so that others may enjoy it in the future. Someone has to invest hours and hours of tending and maintenance for something that can be swallowed in 2 seconds. Perhaps this is how it has always been since the birth of agriculture - crops are grown, tended, harvested, then consumed. But when you're doing it all yourself, suddenly your corn stops looking so much like corn and looks a little more like gold. I think Mark Zuckerberg started seeing this in his fillet mignon.
Cubes of Meaty Goodness from here.