I'm reading a book called The Face on Your Plate: the TRUTH about FOOD by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (more on him later - you may remember him from When Elephants Weep.)
The cover blurb says, "Somewhere in between Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, between eating at McDonald's and killing a pig for dinner, there is a need for a book that will probe more deeply and provide greater understanding and insight into the psychological factors that influence decisions about what we eat and why--and how these choices affect our lives, animals' lives, and the environment."
Indeed - and The Face on Your Plate is probably that book.
I have had to read it in installments. Not just because I'm busy and because I got the H1N1 and found that I was too sick to read [unheard of] -- but because it is really hard to take, the information in this book.
It's a hard read. I cry. I've just finished Chapter 4 "Denial" now, and the fact is that the mechanism that Masson (a former psychiatrist) describes which allows us to go on eating our fellow creatures, is so strong that you keep wanting to put this book down, even though you know you want to finish reading it.
I have been aware of this weird, other world where we dwell when we eat meat, or are part-vegetarian and "only" eat chicken and fish, for a long time - because that's where I've been for years.
I've lived in this unSpockian land of illogicality even when my daughter (vegan) has asked me why I find it okay to eat chicken but not beef, that it doesn't make sense this choosing of "okay animals to eat" (cows, rabbits) and "not-okay animals to eat" (horses, cats).
I've clung to retaining beloved cheese & dairy products even though my son (vegan) has described to me how live male chicks (no good for egg-laying) are thrown alive into the grinders at birth. I've still kept on eating those things.
I absolutely love eggs, always have, and a Saturday breakfast of eggs and hash browns and once upon a time, bacon, was heavenly. I dropped the bacon years ago. And, after reading Masson's book, I'm going to try now and drop the eggs. I say "try" because I can't honestly say I know I will succeed, although I haven't been able to face [no pun intended] them since I started the book. Which coincided with the onset of the H1N1, so who knows if it was me or the flu. I am hoping to keep my resolve, because after what I read.....
Ah yes after.... That is what this book is largely about. That even when many (most) of us hear about the absolute atrocities of torture and horror animals, and fish & fowl, are put through to arrive on our plates ... we will still go on eating them, even though we are horrified.
We go into Denial.
And who better than a former Freudian psychoanalyst who has been psychoanalyzed upside-down, sideways & backwards to de-construct the roots and continuing engine of this Denial?
So this post today, this beginning, is a start at trying to come out of the Denial. My Denial.
I dedicate today's post to my cat, Stripey, while I contemplate why it is all these years I've been able to eat chickens but not him? Why I cry at baby seals getting bludgeoned to death but not the salmon in fish farms? And I thank Jeffrey Masson for helping me sort through it. And my children who were not able to dwell in the land of Untruth on this, but who have been very patient and have attempted to be nonjudgmental while I have walked its bloodsoaked dishonest shores.
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"It is hard to tell if male chicks have it worse. They are 'macerated' at one day old--crushed to death by a high-speed grinder while they are still alive. Or else they are 'bagged' and left to suffocate or die of dehydration." (pg. 69 in the chapter The Lives They Lead).
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