Fear - It's Whats For Dinner

If there was a bottle of fear in the grocery store, would you buy it and feed it to your family? That was the thought in my mind yesterday morning as I by-passed the meat department at our grocery store. If you somehow missed the shocking footage from the beef processing plant out in California this past week, lucky you! It made its way into our cable-free, Fox-free home via the Newshour on public TV. And I can't shake the image of the fork lifted cow from my mind. It's enough to make one think of not eating meat anymore at all . . . and me likey like the steaky steak.

Have you ever been terrified? Not a little scared but truly terrified, fearing for your life, the bejesus scared right out of you? It happened to me once snorkeling in Saint John. There was an amazingly beautiful school of friendly little blue and silver fish, there must have been thousands of them from the sea floor to the surface, and to increase my awe and wonder I swam right through the middle of them and saw TWO GIANT SHARKS!! I screamed out loud under water and my husband swears he could actually hear it and I swam away like an Olympic athlete! Ok, they weren't sharks, rather some big fish eating fish having a rudely interrupted breakfast, but for a few seconds I perceived them as Jaws incarnate and man oh man I was so sickeningly scared. That's how the cows must feel. That fear adrenaline that coursed through my body probably courses through the cows' bodies, right? And then we eat it in our hamburgers, our meat sauces, our beef stroganoff. We say, "take two more bites and then you may be excused," to our babies.

Every farmer worth a salt will tell you an animal brought to slaughter must be kept as calm as possible. It's not that they feel bad for the creatures; it is that they know stressed and bruised meat won't sell (or shouldn't sell as the USFDA decided this past week). Scared animals make bad meat. The meat manufacturers know this. Dr. Temple Grandin knows it. She is a professor of Animal Studies at the Colorado State University who possesses the unique ability to think like an animal. Dr. Grandin has designed humane cattle and pig processing plants and is responsible for the humane slaughter of half the animals in this country.

But how do you know where your meat came from when it is neatly packaged on a slab of styrofoam at the grocery store? For now, we can't. And for now I am going to buy local. Living here in Maine enables us to buy meats from local farmers, slaughtered locally. I'll fit it in my budget, because it will cost more, but so be it. We can eat less meat of greater quality. But for many of you, living in places where you can't buy from the farmer, or deciding it won't fit in your budget, what are you to do? I bet even organic cows get scared when they smell the blood at the slaughter house. I bet even my local cows get scared, but hopefully it only lasts less than a second . . . fear - it's what's for dinner.