What's the Beef?
To the vegetarian students who insist that Santa Monica College omnivores wouldn't eat meat ever again if they only knew what horrors were occurring inside of slaughterhouses: grow up. The majority of the SMC student body – to say nothing of the human race as a whole – doesn't eat meat because they're ignorant of the fact that their burgers are actually dead cows; they eat it because it's delicious. Besides, they don't need secret video footage or some crybaby bleeding hearts to educate them about the process of turning cows into burgers. In fact, the only meat-processing education they need is basic English: it's called a SLAUGHTERhouse, I'm pretty sure people can deduce that it's a HOUSE, in which there is SLAUGHTER. Before it was a slaughterhouse, it was called a butcher shop. Again, people were
aware that butchering happened in there. Not just making things dead, but BUTCHERING them. The whole reason we don't call them cuddle factories or snuggle plants or happy farms is so that people know what they do: they kill stuff you don't have time to.
You understand that this is a relatively new concept, right? For millions of years we – all of us – killed our own meat: we hunted with sticks and sharp rocks and simple tools; we developed weaponry and archery and guns to kill progressively larger amounts of prey as our species conquered the planet; we cut pig throats; we shot cows in the head with pistons; wives decapitated and boiled chickens and turkeys while they were still fluttering; EVERYONE on the planet could gut a fish by the age of 5. But since the industrial revolution (less than 200 years ago) we all got factory jobs and 9-5s and started getting paid by hour and not by merit. In short, we simply lost the spare time required to find or raise food, so now we pay other people to do it for us.
As we become less primitive and more technologically dependent, fewer people are willing to spend their lives doing any amount of manual labor at all, to say nothing of dirty (read: difficult) work. Ergo, those who are still providing our food have to maximize space and streamline time-management efficiency to feed the rest of our fat, obese asses. Everyone hates McDonald's, a business that would SURELY have gone out of business 50 years ago if we simply stopped buying their burgers. Know why we never will? Because the good people at the Golden Arches are buying tiny baby cows we can't afford, raising them in cramped tiny pins that collectively take up plots of land the size of small countries we could never float the mortgage for, and are taking the time to feed all of them, breed all of them, and kill all of them – all while enduring their loud, unruly, wretched commotion for DECADES – so we can take five minutes out of a lunch break to EAT MEAT. Do you have any idea how good we have it here in the US thanks to the ruthless killing of large quantities of livestock? People all over the world are starving and you're upset because of HOW we're being sufficiently fed?
Until you decide to sacrifice your career goals to raise and care for enough animals to feed the planet "in a nice way," quit crying and calling people stupid: it's meat. It comes from animals. No one is blown away by your revelation. And if you're not going eat yours, I'll have seconds. The cows are going to be slaughtered either way, but you not eating them means cows are dying in vain. That's just cruel and unusual, not to mention a waste.
Want to save the planet? Stop wasting all the food. And pass the A1.