By Angela Blue

When I was a little girl, I had a pet chicken named Binky. He was a banty, a smaller domesticated breed of chicken, and he wasn’t meant for eating; he was just a pet.

My grandma had chickens at her house too, but they weren’t the kind to get attached to. I discovered this one Sunday when I went to her house for lunch, and a good number of her chickens were missing from the yard. Those chickens that I’d watched graze in the yard for many Sundays were covered in barbecue sauce and displayed proudly in a heap on the dining room table.

That Sunday afternoon, which my cousin and I still refer to as “the massacre,” was one of the first times I felt outraged at the death of an animal, and that afternoon, at the age of 10, I refused to eat those or any other chickens for the rest of my life. I didn’t have chicken for lunch that day, but my promise to stop eating meat didn’t last long.

I continued to eat meat for years, always feeling slightly guilty that I hadn’t kept my promise. It wasn’t until age 20 that I made the decision to give it up. I tried vegetarianism for one week to see how difficult it was, and I’m sticking with my decision three years later. However, there is an exception to my rule; I still eat seafood.

I’ve gotten minor ridicule at my choice to be pescetarian instead of vegetarian. Comments such as “Fish have feelings too,” and “What’s the difference between a fish and a cow?” are common when I share my eating morality with others, and sometimes I feel like a wannabe vegetarian or a poser. However, my choice doesn’t have anything to do with what others may label me, and my philosophy is simple: If I can’t kill it, I won’t eat it.

Although I don’t like the idea of fish dying, the act is something that I’ve witnessed and participated in. I used to go fishing with my parents when I was a kid, and I felt sorry for the fish, but the impact wasn’t enough for me to forgo seafood altogether.

Put in a situation where I needed to hunt my own food, I would be comfortable with fashioning a net to catch fish or casting a rod and reel, but you wouldn’t see me running through the pastures shooting cows and pigs or beheading chickens with a machete.

I have a feeling there are many people who couldn’t bring themselves to kill an animal or even watch one being killed but still eat meat like it’s going out of style. Perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to others doing the dirty work that we don’t stop to think where our food comes from.

When we stroll the aisles of the supermarket or skim a restaurant menu, it’s easy to forget that the meat we’re purchasing for one meal of our lives involved the premature and bitter end of an animal’s life.  That perfectly rounded hamburger patty sitting on your plate used to be living, breathing animals with feelings. (Notice “animals” is plural because one hamburger can contain up to 100 different cows.) Not only are you stuffing Bertha in your mouth, but also her first cousin, a couple of her brothers and about 96 of her distant cow relatives ground up into one greasy mass and covered with condiments. Still hungry?

The saddest part is that the lives of these animals make their death seem like a relief. Most of the meat purchased in the grocery store comes from animals that were housed in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), basically meat factories where animals are treated as food rather than living beings.

In an excerpt from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, Steven Hopp explains that these animals are crammed side by side with no room to even turn around. Grass and sunlight are things of the past; now their days are spent standing in urine and feces from their conjoined twin-like neighbors. Looking back, my grandma’s chickens had it good.

With all of these animals living among waste, disease is a common factor even with the antibiotics the animals routinely receive. Hopp said that according to the Consumers Union, over 70 percent of supermarket chickens harbor campylobacter and/or salmonella bacteria, and the antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that grow in these conditions are a significant new threat to humans.

There are many other aspects of the meat industry that are cruel and unfair, but I’m not trying to persuade anyone to give up meat altogether. It’s a very personal choice, and everyone has his or her own moral standards about animals. What I’m proposing is that we become more aware of where our food comes from.

Think twice about that chicken nugget or sausage patty; would you emotionally be able to slaughter a chicken or a pig to satisfy your craving? If not, then maybe you could choose a vegetarian alternative to these items.

If meat is important to your diet and you couldn’t imagine living without it, consider buying it from local farm markets. This way you’ll know that the animals involved in the process had a good life where they could graze freely and feel the warmth of the sun on their backs. Also food purchased from a local farm is friendlier on the environment because it’s not transported far.

Buying local is healthier for the consumer as well without having to worry about hormones and antibiotics being pumped into their diets. The phrase, “You are what you eat,” isn’t just a saying, but a philosophy that makes up your ethical standards, your environmental responsibility and your personal health. Do some research on your own, determine where you stand and get connected with your food even if it means buying your own chickens with the intent to serve them on a plate one Sunday afternoon.