“Why Meet Your Meat” by Rachel Tayse Baillieul

It’s nice to see someone who gets it.

“Americans can buy butchered, trimmed, plastic-wrapped cuts from the meat counter that are as easy to cook as a vegetable. Simpler still, pre-cooked rotisserie chickens and frozen products only require a little reheating to serve. Restaurant dishes usually have no bones, scales, or other indication that the protein once belonged to a living thing.

This is all a fine, convenient thing, but it allows many people to be completely disconnected from the reality of eating meat. Eating meat – just like eating vegetables – requires that a living thing dies.”

Rachel closes by asking if you’ve ever looked your meat in the eye. I’ve been talking pretty regularly these past couple years to some deer I plan to eat in the very near future. They’re the ones that ate my chard last year and expanded their diet this year to include my beans, cucumbers, zucchini, bell peppers, eggplants, and most of my tomatoes. Over the summer, I’d chase them away, but now I don’t bother. Let ’em graze. I’ll be grazing on them soon enough.