(for the most part)

OK, I admit it, I watch the Ellen show. 

While her humour is usually hit & miss with me, she often finds interesting guests that I enjoy. Also being a vegan, a lesbian, and having her mother survive breast cancer she is quite vocal about events in popular culture. Every October the Ellen show donates thousands of dollars to breast cancer research. As of late she has been talking about bullying in grade schools, not only in the U.S but also in Canada. 

For those reasons, and a few more I have a distinct respect for Ellen. She is unafraid to share her opinions, and stand up for causes she believes in. 

A few months ago Ellen had author, Jonathan Safran Foer on her show. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Foer, he is the author of two fictional book and one non-fiction. Both fiction books have won numerous awards. His most recent book is called: Eating Animals, and as you can imagine this book focuses on Foer's journey through researching the mass produced, factory farmed animals that we all encounter in our supermarkets everyday. 

It is important to mention that when Foer set out to write this book he was not a vegetarian himself. His wife had just given birth to their first child and Foer was faced with one of the most important questions of his life.

What foods should I be feeding my child?

For those of you who have children will know that as soon as your son or daughter was born it was time to eat. Your newborn child was hungry and suddenly your whole life now revolved around making sure this little one was fed. One of the most basic and essential needs of being human starts right after birth and will remain constant for the rest of our lives. So, wanting the best for his newborn son, Foer decided to dig deeper into the food industry to find out where his child's food is coming from, how is it dealt with, before & after slaughter. 

What Foer found was not pleasent and most times even horrific. This book is not about presenting all the facts about how bad our food industry is and scaring readers into making the decision to becoming a vegetarian. This book is about Foer's journey, his personal thoughts and feelings about the things he saw and the people he met. 

Because of this, as the reader I was a lot more receptive to what he had to say. It was the way he presented "the facts" as a story, and that is why I loved this book. 

I would like to share with you a couple quotes from his book that had a huge impact on me and prompted me to rethink what I eat and where it comes from, but also to making a decision that could not only affect my life but the life of my family as well. 

" Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand... that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory - disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

After reading these few sentences it wasn't guilt that I was feeling, but conviction. Moral conviction. I had realized that by eating animals from the supermarket or my favourite fast-food joint I was contributing to the problem. As a God fearing man I could no longer move forward, trying to ignore what I discovered. I could not as a steward of what I'd been given, continue to eat the way I was. 

“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn’t motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?”

I was challenged! Never before I had felt so personally challenged by a book. Foer was outright challenging me to think about what I was eating and how my food choices were contributing to this problem of animal suffering. Every time I go grocery shopping I am unknowingly voting for products that are promoting factory farming and animal cruelty. The largest contributor to global warming today is not too many cars on our roads or the millions of factories world wide, but factory-farming! The methane (farts) released from the billions of animals (cows) on factory farms is the single largest factor in green house gases being released into our atmosphere.

So, now what? I have finished reading Foer's book, Eating Animals, I felt challenged & convicted about the foods that I was eating and the implications it was having on the world around me. But where do I go from here? Well the answer is more simple than it may seem. 

I need to change my eating habits. 

As a family we have stopped buying most meat products. 

I am now (for the most part) a vegetarian!