Social Sins and Eating Meat?

After reading The Compassionate Carnivore recently, I am seriously considering (as the author puts it) "switching from factory meat to happy meat". :) After all, I grew up in America's Dairyland, where (California's cheese ads notwithstanding) what made for happy cows was grazing grass in pastures, not waiting for corn in feedlots. And from happy cows... come happy bovine products of all sorts.

I saw my Grandpa talk to his cows, call them by name, whistle them in from pasture for milking. I watched my brother kill, and Grandma pluck and cook, a chicken that we'd have for Sunday dinner on the farm. And when we would buy a half a hog or a split-side of beef from a farmer friend, we knew where it was being butchered and packaged, and could go watch if we wanted.

Honestly, I want those days back. (while I still have teeth to eat meat..) I'm sick of reading about the inhumane practices of factory farms and being (as a consumer) complicit in the process - especially when I grew up patting cows on the rump and squirting barn cats with the milk I was squeezing into the pail.

Gandhi articulated 7 social sins which I think are right on the money; in this country, factory farms and cheap meat make us as a society guilty of numbers 3, 5 & 6 on the list:

Seven Social Sins By Mahatma Gandhi

Politics without Principle

Wealth Without Work

Pleasure Without Conscience

Knowledge without Character

Commerce without Morality

Science without Humanity

Worship without Sacrifice

- Young India, 1925

Personally, I want to stop contributing to the problem by buying only cheap, processed meat from animals inhumanely treated for the sake of profits. So... rather than just rant about it, or stop eating meat altogether, I think I will stay "at the table", join the local food co-op, and support compassionate small local farms with my wallet.

Especially since the monthly drop off site is in the same mall where my new library branch is, about a mile from the new house. :) Closer, in fact, than the nearest big-box grocery store. Conscience-clearing made easy. I dig it.