I try, I really do, but for the life of me, I cannot understand how some of the people I know who make the biggest protestations about loving animals and hating to see them suffer can eat meat. And not just any meat, but the meat processed in industrial slaughterhouses, where the animals are kept in small pens as they wait for their turn to become a raw material. Where, my friends, do you think that chicken parmesan comes from? That juicy hamburger? That sanitized styrofoam tray of meat in the supermarket?

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying people shouldn’t eat meat. But in this country we vote with our money. Let’s eat the meat from farms where we know that the animals are treated humanely and live in a way fairly normal for their species up until when they die for our steak dinner. Or let’s not hear any more of your whining about the “poor animals”.

Wendell Berry said it better than I can:

“Eating with the fullest pleasure–pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance–is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.”