Mark Zuckerberg Takes on Ethical Meat

                     – Mark Zuckerberg

Mr. Zuckerberg, I have to commend you for deciding to become more ethical with your meat eating. 

For a year he’s refusing to eat any meat unless he’s killed it himself. He says that because of this challenge he’s pretty much vegetarian now. For those that aren’t familiar, Mark Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook. And while I love this challenge he’s taking on, I just kind of feel like it’s not going to have any impact just because of his privileged status. Not that it detracts from what he’s doing, but rather a lot of people are just going to tune him out because of it.

I feel very similar about eating meat.  Well, not the same, but close. I feel we should all have a connection with our food, whether it’s simply meeting the animal before you eat it or taking part in it’s death or at least knowing what is involved with eating meat. The pig we have in our freezer we met before it’s death. The rest of the meat we have in our freezer was from animals we raised ourselves.

I recently got into a debate with someone about whether people would become vegetarian or not if they had to kill their own food. Their stance was if people had no option, of course they would. Well, I agree with that, but my point wasn’t in times of famine, but rather regular life, where food is abundant. I don’t think today, people have the constitution to kill an animal and then eat it.

And I’ll be perfectly honest, I had a barrier when we first started raising our own meat animals that I had to overcome. I had that same barrier when we started raising chickens for eggs. I had that barrier when we started milking our goats too. It’s completely natural for me, but eventually I get used to the food I raise or grow and I just have to realize that it’s safer than the commercial food we did eat at one time.

We’re so far removed from our food today. Less than 100 years ago killing a chicken that you had raised in your own backyard was just a part of life. Today most people haven’t even seen a chicken in real life. A couple of months ago there was a turkey cruising around our neighborhood. Our neighbor called us to tell us our turkey was out loose. We didn’t have turkeys at the time but I decided to go check it out. It was in another neighbor’s yard across the street. A teenager was walking on the sidewalk and asked me what that was as it was “the biggest bird” he’d ever seen. I told him it was a turkey but I’m pretty sure he didn’t believe me.

Having a connection with the animals you eat really makes you think about the life that animal led. It reminds you to thank that animal for giving up it’s life. Being removed from our food people are perfectly OK with ignoring factory farms. I’ve been there, I know.