Chapter 17:
The ethics that concern the slaughter of animals are now being noticed. And people are starting to believe the justification of slaughtering an animal is if they live happy first.
Gems:
"Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the life of the pig- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog- that becomes the Christmas ham." (p.306)
"That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall." (p.317)
"We are the better for it, and they are never the worse...The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature" (p.328)
Thoughts:
I believe that the slaughtering of animals in our society cannot be justified in any means. We have changer the circle of life, which was made for the hunter/gatherer method that justifies the killing of an animal. When this method was used it was a sacred thing to kill an animal and you only killed what you need nothing more now. Now we kill to feed whom? The refrigerators that we stuff with food no body eats for years.
Chapter 18:
Hunting used to be natural way of life for humans. We have a sense of pride killing an animal. When I went out hunting I felt this sense of pride when I killed a pig but the after affect made me feel discussing.
Gems:
“A brain chemical that sharpens the senses, narrows your mental focus, allows you to forget everything extraneous to the task at hand (including physical discomfort and the passage of time), and makes you hungry would see to be the perfect pharmacological tool for man the hunter,” (p. 342)
“I felt a wave of nausea begin to build in my gut. The clinical disinterest with which I had approached the whole process of cleaning my pig collapsed all at once: This was disgusting." (p.356)
"So much of the human project is concerned with distinguishing ourselves from beasts that we seem strenuously to avoid things that remind us that we are beasts too - animals that urinate, defecate, copulate, bleed, die, stink, and decompose" (page 357)
Thoughts:
I don’t feel I could ever take another animals life. That’s me being a hypocrite because I eat animals all the time but I don’t think I could hold a gun and watch an animals life end before my eyes. The biggest mystery to me is, how do people work at these slaughterhouses and live with themselves?
Chapter 19:
Humans have become very good at gathering over the year but there still is a risk of identifying something wrong. Wild mushrooms are easy to identify wrong even though we have become great gathers.
Gems:
“For the individual human, his community and culture successfully mediate the omnivore’s dilemma, telling him what other people have safely eaten in the past as well as how they ate it,” (p.372)
"Without fungi to break things down, the earth would long ago have suffocated beneath a blanket of organic matter created by plants; the dead would pile up without end, the carbon cycle would cease to function, and living things would run out of things to eat." (p.376)
"Who's to say the day won't come when science will be able to measure the fungi's exotic energies, perhaps even calculate our minimum daily requirement of lunar calories?" (p.378)
Thoughts:
I have no experience gathering mushrooms but I have gathered berries in the woods before and they are right, you have to know what your doing before you do it. You do not want to pick the wrong mushroom or berry because you will get sick or worse. Trust me I know from my own experiences. I find it also very interesting that mushrooms can hold lunar energy. Can this be used for anything like solar energy? Will there be lunar panels? It’s something I feel some research should be invested into. It could save the world or mess it up even more.
Chapter 20:
After I hunted and gathered food for myself, which was harder than I imagined, it gave me a feeling as if I was linked to mother earth. This meal was food that mother nature meant omnivores to eat when she put us on here.
Gems:
"No, little if anything about this meal was what anyone would call 'realistic'. And yet no meal I've ever prepared or eaten has been more real" (p.392)
"I suddenly felt perfectly okay about my pig- indeed, about the whole transaction between me and this animal that I'd killed two weeks earlier. Eating the pig, I understood, was the necessary closing act of that drama, and went some distance toward redeeming the whole play." (p.401)
“Another thing cooking is, or can be, is a way to honor the things we’re eating, the animals and plants and fungi that have been sacrificed to gratify our needs and desires, as well as the places and the people that produced them,” (p. 404)
Thoughts:
This chapter made me think a lot about how hard it is to get your own food from the wild, and how civilization spent most of their lives getting food. In Time magazine there was an article about organic food in the august issue and they said, “if we all decided to switch to healthier, chemical-free meat, there wouldn’t be remotely enough to go around.” (Kluger 32) We have to work towards coming off processed foods and switching to natural food like we used to live on. These processed foods are not just bad but from this book I have learned there made with the use of oil, which is not a resource that will be around forever. So how can America continue to let the food companies run this way if the companies, which feed us, are setup to fail?
Bibliography
Kluger, Jeffrey. "What's So Great About Organic Food?." Time. 176.9 (2010): 32. Print.
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