Slaughter-free Meat is "Fake"?
It is hard to believe that "meat" that excludes slaughter, grazing, ranching, CAFOs, feed needs, toxic run off and many drugs given to the animals would be attacked by anyone but the meat industry. Yet progressives are also attacking the very successful Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat which threaten to replace slaughter meat.
More than 10,000 hot dogs are sold at Chicago's Wrigley Field baseball park during one game. If those 10,000 hot dogs were animal-free, acres of feed and chemical/fertilizer run-off would be spared not to mention the environmental blight of meat processing and slaughter facilities. The human effects are just as dramatic. The 10,000 hot dog lovers would begin lowering their cholesterol, blood pressure and weight with each slaughter-free hot dog they ate.
Already White Castle serves the plant-based Impossible Burger and the major food supplier Sysco Corporation offers the Beyond Burger. U.S. consumers spent $698.6 million on plant-based meat in 2017----up 25 percent since 2012----and Goldman Sachs calls them one of the hottest emerging new trends.
Ignoring the slaughter of sentient beings that makes meat is like the old joke, "Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" Here is what Upton Sinclair wrote in the Jungle:
"There were high squeals and low squeals, and wait of agony...It was too much for some of the visitors--the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand with hands clenched nervously, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes.
One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog squeal of the universe. Was it permitted to believe that there was nowhere upon the earth, or above the earth, a heaven for hogs, where they were requited for all this suffering? Each one of these hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black; some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and lean, some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart's desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a sense of dignity. And trusting and strong in faith he had gone about his business, the while a black shadow hung over him and a horrid Fate waited in his pathway.
Now suddenly it had swooped upon him, and had seized him by the leg. Relentless, remorseless, it was; all his protests, his screams, were nothing to it-- it did its cruel will with him, as if his wishes, his feelings, had simply no existence at all; it cut his throat and watched him gasp out his life. And now was one to believe that there was nowhere a god of hogs, to whom this hog personality was precious, to whom these hog squeals and agonies had a meaning? Who would take this hog into his arms and comfort him, reward him for his work well done, and show him the meaning of his sacrifice?"
If "meat" could remove the horror of slaughter while pleasing meat lovers which the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat do the benefit is nonnegotiable.
(Article changed on June 27, 2019 at 16:18)
