DAN'S PAPERS, February 29, 2008 Page 27 www.danshamptons.com
Twentysomething…By David Lion Rattiner Meet Your Meat I love steak, I love beef jerky, I love eggs and I love milk. It’s almost kind of embarrassing. However, it has been a little more than a week now since I have eaten any animal product except for a little bit of cheese. Yes, you guessed it, I Googled “factory farming” after reading about the beef recall on CNN.com last week. You probably did too and are most likely permanently traumatized for the rest of your life. I’m not surprised. I can’t believe my reaction to these videos of factory farms on the Internet. I’ve always been the kind of guy that has thought vegetarians were kind of crazy. Going through life without meat seems to me like going through life without water. I just thought that I’d eventually die from lack of protein. But here I am, well into my second week of eating nothing but cereal, salad, pasta and Boca burgers. I’ve completely lost my identity as a human being in many ways. Words such as soy and veggie interest me now instead of weirding me out. I’m not going to go into the nightmare that is factory farming. All I can say is that it is equal to what I imagine hell to be like, and I have a pretty vivid imagination. Like all of us, I’ve always known that where our meat comes from isn’t exactly kosher, so to speak, but see-
ing it up close like this has really changed my perspective. I’m a pretty big guy and have always attributed being big with my big appetite, and I’m proud of having that appetite. I take pride in hearing at a dinner with friends or family, “Uh oh, Dave’s coming, make way.” I’m the big guy in the house, I’m the big eater, I’m a carnivore baby. These videos on the Internet have completely messed with me psychologically. I used to look at a pile of bacon and imagine swimming in it. I’d be so excited to eat it that I would foam at the mouth. But now when I see bacon, I imagine these fields of super tiny cages packed with screaming pigs like something out of a Holocaust movie. It’s freaking awful. I’m all for eating meat, but I just can’t bring
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myself to do it right now. I didn’t know I was such a wuss and I am in no way judging you if you are still on the meat wagon. It’s not about judging what’s right or wrong, it’s about being completely grossed out. I wish there was a way to really know where our meat came from. You know what I would like? A farm that I could actually go to where I knew the animals weren’t treated so poorly and where I knew the meat that I was eating wasn’t coming from a sick or diseased animal. Does this exist anymore? A part of me kind of wishes that I had never looked at those videos of factory farms at all and just continued to live in complete ignorance. There is that scene in the movie The Matrix when the bad guy wishes to be reinserted back into the matrix instead of living in the real world because the real world is so awful. It’s too late now, I guess. I’m in the real world and need to figure out where to get meat from animals that aren’t treated so badly. Please send an email to david@danspapers.com if you know of a good free-range company. In the meantime, I’ll be eating fish and pasta at restaurants. And I don’t feel bad about this because restaurants make the most profit from pastas, and I’m sorry, but feeling sorry for fish is dumb, unless they are a really big fish, like a whale or an endangered shark or something, then that changes everything.
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