As a little girl, I was used to seeing the slaughter of the pigs every fall, slaughter of chickens almost every Saturday and rabbits were beheaded and skinned on days before holidays. My grandfather was a butcher and also raised his own animals at his beautiful farm in the country.
We loved all the animals on the farm, fed them each day and petted them on the days before we ate them. It never crossed my mind to see the ritual as something wrong or brutal. "This is a cycle of life" , my grandfather would say, while skinning the rabbit's coat and exposing its pink fresh flash.
That is why, the approach of Polyface Farms to farming and their philosophy of a meat production sound so familiar and right to me. On the other hand, Polyface Farm and the butchers in my homeland are rare in today's mass production of meat. The ideal of eating the animal that was loved and cared for properly is unrealistic. In the article "Against Meat" published by The New York Time Magazine this October, the author Jonathan Safran Foer presented the hard facts: "...factory farms now produce more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in this country.” This leaves me spending a lot of time and money trying to find the remaining 1% or to stop eating meat at all. Why? The 99% of meat in this country is produced in horrible conditions, lot of it is fed food that is indigestible for their kind. Also the amount of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere by the mass production of animals is alarming. Foer describes it : "...reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming."
So right now I choose not to eat meat and I am searching a way to reach the 1% of meat produce in the United States by traditional farming , that would remind me the childhood approach to the " life cycle".
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