EATING IS CRUEL
Mass-produced living creatures, who are born, raised, and killed on an assembly line, perhaps understand on some level what is coming, what has happened to millions and billions of others just like them. Perhaps they are attuned to the echoes of their predecessors looping and trapped in this time and place. Perhaps, for the duration of their short and torture-filled lives, violence is punctuated with enough stillness to think through questions like “why?” Perhaps, they understand enough to be angry that it didn't have to be this way and curse their own flesh down to the bone. May the farmed turn their disgust and rage inward. May they inlay their technologically-accelerated swollen skin, fat, and muscle with their futile desire, fury, and terror. May these emotions with nowhere else to go accumulate like shards of asbestos of everyone who swallows their body parts with delight. May every egg be invested with hot corrosive hatred for those who treat their bodies and secretions as neutral commodities, rather than forcefully extracted living tissue. May the agony of every life born to die suffuse and penetrate every cell of every thoughtless human eater. It is a burden worth carrying, if we are going to nourish ourselves this way.
We all know what happens in a slaughterhouse. Insider video footage is extremely accessible if you have internet. Think about what it would be like to not outsource this killing and do it yourself instead, according to need rather than market logic. Think long and hard about what it is to deliberately deprive a creature of choice and movement, to keep kin trapped while ki grows larger, larger. It is easy to see yourself and your will to live in this creature, who fully sees what's coming because ki knows immobility is death. You have to injure kin's body to the point of full system breakdown, so that the light inside goes off and you're left with meat and no spirit. A body that is alive is robust. It holds itself together. It wants to heal and perpetuate itself. You must puncture holes in the container, so inside bleeds into outside. Sever critical transport tubes and organs, so fluid pools and spills where it's not meant to. Rend, cut, and shred muscle fibers, so they can't contract and produce tension on bone. No fighting back, no seeking egress.
We are not meant to confront the horror reality of inflicting pain and death so we may sustain ourselves. Streamlined economic functioning systematizes and abstracts that reality to have endless reams of food product on demand. It's been set up to keep us consumer-enduser-renter-voter-taxpayers from metabolizing the true, fleshy weight of killing and death.
And perhaps the worst part is that we can walk this world knowing, but we still don't get to choose how we eat. You could destroy yourself if you carry all there is to carry, regarding life and death and production and consumption. A small portion of us are allowed some lateral movement, to avoid putting the worst of it in our own bodies. This is for being born in the right time and place, but no one ever gets to climb out of this hole. It's not a simple matter of choosing between modes of consumption with clear ethical rankings. Organic, grass-fed, family farm-raised. You know what continues regardless of the pains you take to eat differently. We were born losers in a sense.
We all eat and shit and breathe the fumes. This is a people farm. A people grinder. It exists to continue existing. Eternal snake eating itself, crapping into its own mouth. We must keep the economy running or there is no “we” that continues to feed and get fed.
—– to be continued —– forever in a circle —– not done yet —-