Scare Tactics

My father eats meat daily. My younger brother depends on meat-filled fast food and dining hall cuisine to fuel him through his freshman year shenanigans. My mother could easily give up meat if it weren’t for the fact that she doesn’t want to make separate meals for herself and my dad. As much as I would like to ask them to stop eating animals that sometimes resemble our beloved dogs, I won’t.

Not eating animal products has been my choice, and mine alone. No one has pressured me to eliminate what most Americans consider to be essential to one’s diet. When I was a child, no one forced me to order chicken noodle soup instead of French onion, a former favorite.

I believe in spreading a positive message that veganism isn’t completely crazy, but I don’t believe in shunning loved ones for their choices, nor do I believe in forcefully pushing my lifestyle upon them. Trying to get my brother to chow on tofu instead of meat would be like asking him to replace his Nike’s with Birkenstock’s. It’s simply not his thing.

Only when I come across terrifying stories of meat consumption gone wrong do I want to beg my family members to quit their fleshy ways. The New York Time’s “E.Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection” made me yearn to do just that.

The piece focuses on a woman who consumed a largely vegetarian diet, but after one hamburger her mother grilled for her, she became increasingly ill. Eventually, she became paralyzed. E.coli, a nasty infection that is spread by feces-contaminated meat, was to blame for the woman’s illness and paralysis.

While the woman’s story is horrifying, certain bits throughout the article are alarming. As stated in the article, “a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses,” which are more vulnerable to contamination. This means that what customers assume to be ground beef coming from one part, from one cow, is actually a meat smoothie of sorts. Food companies can take, say, a fatty slab of meat from Uruguay and blend it with less fatty cuts from Texas and Nebraska (NY Times). Isn’t that an eclectic treat?

More startling than the combining of meat from around the globe into one product is the fact that the government doesn’t require grinders to test ingredients for traces of E. coli (NY Times). Beyond this, practices in slaughtering are downright filthy (and, let’s not forget, morally corrupt).

“The cattle often arrive with smears of feedlot feces that harbor the E. coli pathogen, and the hide must be removed carefully to keep it off the meat,” writes Michael Moss. Let’s break this sentence down. Cows arrive to slaughterhouses covered in feces. Said feces may be festering with E. coli. The hide has to be taken off “carefully” so that the feces doesn’t touch the meat. If things were done “carefully”– with care and fully– people wouldn’t be removing cowhides from meat in order to promote animal consumption in the first place. Just sayin’.

The article does a thorough job of scaring people into an E. coli-fearing coma, no doubt. What it doesn’t do, however, is suggest that the best way to avoid possible contamination is to stop eating meat altogether. If the safest sex is no sex, then it’s fair to say that the safest meat consumption is no consumption at all.

I’ll be sticking to protein-packed meatless meatball sandwiches like this:

Substantial and satisfying.

Dad, Brother and Mama, feel free to do the same.

QUESTIONS:

Do you try to spread your eating habits to loved ones? Why or why not? How do you do so?

Have you read the NY Times article? If so, what did you think?

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