Still reading Eating Animals , still consumed by the facts, figures and disturbing images it is creating in my mind.

My decision to not eat meat/poultry/seafood until I find a humane, ethical alternative source (if that exists) has been going well save for the Easter dinner I had with my international roommates last night where there was a plethora of chicken, beef, pork, seafood and venison. Speaking of venison, Im looking into the possibility of substituting the normal meat and poultry choices with those that have yet to be turned into factory farm models. Venison, buffalo, wild boar, perhaps some wild game birds? Its something I plan on looking into soon, but perhaps those have gone the way of the industry as well. Maybe I need to find a local game huntsman and purchase meat from him - or just stop with the meat all together.

You dont realize how dependent on meat your eating lifestyle has become until you cut it out of your menu. When thinking about what to make for lunch or dinner I have been going down a mental checklist thinking, "no, no, no" as nearly everything has meat in it. It is challenging yet sort of freeing in a creative way. Of our dependence on factory farms to provide us with the bulk of our food, the amazing farmer/writer/poet Wendell Berry says in his The Art of The Commonplace:

"Our methodologies... have come more and more to resemble the methodology of mining... This is sufficiently clear to many of us. What is not sufficiently clear, perhaps to any of us, is the extent of our complicity, as individuals and especially as individual consumers, in the behavior of the corporations... Most people... have given proxies to the corporations to produce and provide all of their food."

With every dollar we spend on factory farmed meat we are telling the corporations that run these places to keep doing it - faster, cheaper, easier. We might mentally remove ourselves from the steps that happen before we buy it, neatly packaged, at Safeway or Tesco, but we are the ones encouraging the entire process with our spending and demand for the product. It will be difficult and uncomfortable and a pain, but we need to stop the dependence and send a different message.

Did you know that Smithfield, the largest pork producer in the US, produces at least as much fecal waste annually as the entire human population of the states of California and Texas combined? There are no rules or regulations in place that determine how these companies must dispose of the waste. You can imagine where its going.