Soylent Green is Beef!

Last night I met up with some friends for an unusual night of fun. First I met up with Simon and Lowri at the college art room which meant that I got to chill out for an hour by playing with clay. Then Hannah and Chris joined us and we went to grab a bite to eat at a creperie at the local arts cinema. After that, we jumped in a taxi and went to the other side of Cambridge to the university's astronomy department's observatory. Apparently last year Simon passed a test on how to use the observatory and the telescopes. It was so surreal - we were walking around in complete darkness, and of course the department has modern art statues lurking about on the lawns which is a little unnerving as they're all about 6 foot tall men-sized, urgh. Simon unlocks the door, goes in, and starts hitting buttons and switching switches. Suddenly, the air was filled with a neon red light, and there in the middle of this giant steel cage of a room, is the telescope. Probably the biggest telescope I've ever seen - it's about 15 feet long and the mechanism to move it a good 4 feet in diameter. We're there by ourselves, and we have to operate this whole observatory on our own. In typical Cambridge style, it was founded in 1838 and not a lot seems to have changed since then. So we're rotating the telescope around, getting readings off of a tape measure, and moving and opening the observatory viewing doors with ropes that look like they've seen service on the Titanic. It all felt so very Jules Verne. Now, did we actually see much? No, because as I now know, these things are bloody difficult to use. However, the point is, I got to mess about with a ginormous 170 year old telescope and I think that's pretty darn nifty.

Anyways, the other thing I wanted to note - on Wednesday, Gareth and I went to see a documentary called "We Feed The World". It was about food production and the European Union's direct and indirect relationship to it. And boy was it ever depressing. In fact, if you're sensitive to these kinds of things, it's best not to read on, but it will probably enlighten you. One example from the film: In Brazil, 850,000 acres of rain forest has been chopped down to grow soybeans. But the land is quite poor to grow soybeans on. And the soybeans are exported to Europe for livestock feed. Meanwhile, 25% of Brazilians suffer from malnutrition. What kind of world do we live in that precious rain forest is cut down to grow food for animals in the wealthiest countries thousands of miles away while people down the street are starving to death? Well, apparently we live in crazy world, because this definitely happens.

Then the film showed us the life and death of a broiler chicken - being born in a room-sized incubator in a crate, dumped onto a conveyor belt and sorted, dumped into a barn where it's completely jam packed. Then it spends the next eight weeks of it's life moving two feet back and forth between the food bucket and the water dripper. After that, men come in trucks in the middle of the night and pack them into crates. They're taken to the slaughter house (which is lit with blue lights because the chickens can't perceive blue light and only see darkness) they're hung upside down by their feet, have an electric-shock facial, and then become acquainted with the rotating saw of death.

In watching this, I was in tears. I mean, sure, it really didn't help that this farm was in Austria and the uniformed workers were all speaking in very gruff German, making a definite connection with the Holocaust in my mind (not to undermine the Holocaust). The thing that really got me though was how completely mechanized food production has become. With the chickens, very very few people were required. The slaughterhouse was almost entirely machines. The people who were working there were quite obviously marginalized people, which of course raises questions in of itself like is it safe or are they paid fair wages? And what really shocked me was how shocked I was. I consider myself a pretty aware person, but the inhumanity and brutality of this just emotionally sideswiped me. How didn't I get this before? How could I have become so completely disconnected from the food I eat?

This is, I think, a very important lesson. We need to reconnect with what's on our plates. It isn't about fat/calories/cholesterol; rather, it goes like this: This beef that is on my plate was fed by soybeans grown thousands of miles away on rain forest land, even though there are people there who are starving to death. This beef is responsible for excess methane and depletion of land and water resources. If this beef is from the U.S., it was almost definitely slaughtered by illegal immigrants who are working in atrocious conditions for despicable wages. At least for me, this beef is getting to be too much to swallow.