at the world vegan day, they had a few food vendors outside and a british peta sort of video running. i was sitting outside trying to enjoy my nice vegan food as the gruesome parts of the video ran. i've always tried to avoid watching horrific scenes of animal cruelty but i felt like watching one such film tonight. i just downloaded peta's "meet your meat" video. i didn't change my diet for the animals. i changed it for myself. but as the months go on, i think more and more about the animals. i watched the whole video horrified, disturbed. i hope i can sleep at night. it's just sickening. this peta film didn't cover the bullshitness of "free range" animals, but the british one at world vegan day did. however, i was too busy trying to ignore it so that i could eat and not vomit.

as a meat-eater, i was aware that what i ate was once alive like me. that's why i had a hard time eating animal flesh that still resembled the animal. i could never eat off the bone food such as ribs. it would make my own ribs hurt. that is why i preferred things like chicken nuggets as opposed to sea food. with sea food, you can really see what your food once was. i don't want the fish eye staring right back at me. i used to think that if i couldn't kill the animal for food then i shouldn't be eating it, but it wasn't enough for me to change my ways because i thought why stop there? why not eliminate all animal products? i knew in high school what an impossibility that would be for me because pig oils are used in stereos, the plastic parts of shoe laces, etc. i didn't know the word vegan but i knew it was too daunting a lifestyle.

when i think about the meat industry, especially when i see it such as at the LA county fair this year and during the peta video, i wonder who the hell could work such a job as being the one to actually kill the animal? or work at a company that sells the cages and other devices used in the industry. who the hell designs these contraptions? how can you live with yourself? that's the sort of thing i think about. if someone can live with themself over it, if they have the stomach for such a dirty job, that is one thing. but unnecessary cruelty in raising livestock baffles me. purely out of profit greed does such brutality exist. what i'm talking about are how animals are crammed in close quarters and pumped with so much food and hormones that their bodies collapse, organs explode, limbs deform, and so forth. what i'm talking about is mutilating the animals for whatever pitiful excuse you can think of, (i.e., cutting off chicken beaks, cutting off pig tails, cutting off horns, branding, et cetera). what i'm talking about is how can someone go around bashing animals with metal bats and cattle prods simply because the animal does not look like they are of the highest possible market value.

i completely believe in the adage, 'you are what you eat'. reading up on macrobiotics, i am starting to be able to tell what someone's favorite animals to eat are because you start to resemble what you eat. they say that pets and their owners look alike but i think the resemblance to your food is much sharper. it's not just these meat industry animals suffered so and you are eating unhappiness. but let's think about that for a moment. you are eating unhappiness. you are eating suffering. you are eating misery. you are eating terror... it's not just a karma thing. it's about quality of product. if you really want to eat animal flesh, why would you eat sickly, diseased, deformed creatures? i'm not talking about hormones but you should be very concerned about them. if you were to go to a sea food restaurant and pick out a lobster, you would not pick the sickly, diseased, deformed one of the lot. but that's what happens many a time when you consume meat.