Thursday, January 28, 2010

Am I just NOT listening?

Do you think that an unrelated series of events that seem to point to one conclusion could be a message from the universe? Or beyond? Or, do you think that the human brain simply connects unrelated events in order to make sense out of our jumbled messy lives?

I think I'm receiving a message from Mother Earth or Karma or Something like that, and it's telling me to "Stop Eating Meat!" Oh, I know it sounds crazy, I love meat. I do. It's fabulous. I'm good at cooking it. Too good probably, which means we eat plenty of it. Too much really because H is a meataholic. But, in the past week I've had some "things" happen...

On Monday my Professor went on a little mini-tirade about how we get too much protein ("too many meats in our meals") for the enzymes in our bodies, and the excess lipids are stored, etc and so forth. Then, after that, we dissected a rat. It was a little hard for me because I had a pet rat growing up, and while I embraced the "Medical Science produced this rat for me to dissect" theory, it was still hard to look at the little rat hands and not think about Nici's hands and the way she used to ride around on my shoulder gripping my hair.

The next thing that happened has it origins a few weeks ago when I bought a hunk of meat for Pork BBQ. It's one of our family's favorite meals. Pulled pork. (Cook a cheap cut in some Orange Juice & H2O in the crock pot for 6 hours on high, drain liquid, shred meat, pour bottle of BBQ sauce over and serve on buns). I typically buy a certain cheap cut, but a few weeks ago they didn't have it. In it's place was a similar looking cut, only bigger. Way bigger. Like, instead of 5 pounds, 9 pounds. NINE. I decided to buy it anyway. Because I figured I could freeze some of the BBQ and have a dinner made for some night when I had a test or class or something. Well, this piece of meat was, uh, a little less processed than I am accustomed to... like, there was still skin on it under the packaging. And it was gross. I mean, grosser than a little rat pinned to a dissection board, for SURE.

And then today. Today's was the weirdest. I was driving home from the witch Dr listening to some music, and I thought about the pig leg that I had prepared for my kids for dinner last night, and I was just thinking about making a chicken for dinner tonight... when I saw a dead chicken with fluffy white feathers in my lane. I moved & didn't hit it and thought... "no, that must've been a seagull and I mistook it for a.... chicken?" I thought at I passed ANOTHER one on the side of the road. And then I realized, I'm on a road that truckers must take to the Tyson's plant. So those poor chickens must have jumped to their death or been thrown from the back of the chicken truck. My next thought was telling: I guess it's better to die on the side of 288 than at a meat plant anyway.

So. No chicken for us tomorrow. And the pork is slowly getting eaten, but, I'm having a hard time mentally separating my thoughts from the food on my plate.

I think maybe it's time to break out the Tofu recipes again for a little while.

2 comments:

RunHapi13 said...

Oh no, don't give up on meat! You need meat. The chickens on the road is sad, but buy cage-free like me. I understand the sadness and can see the upset about the rat, but you won't be eating rat at the F house. Maybe buy some smaller portions and mix in some tofu for a while. If we didn't eat them, they would over-populate and starve to death all over the place, atleast that is how I get past it.

TMB @ RACING WITH BABES said...

EW! The pet RAT part is what getms me most about that post.

Just cut back on meat, don't cut it out!