Essay Love

I just finished my essay and let me say that it is a good thing that it was not required for it to have a structure, such as a five paragraph essay. This was definitely more of a ramble about several of my life experiences with food, and I guess a few things I have learned. 
My essay starts off with a brief rant about my "health nut" of a mother. In college my mom had a short stint with body building (yes she is pretty muscular - not freakishly though), and she is currently the Manager of Cardiology at a hospital. 
Health is her job. 
She tried her hardest for a short while to change what my family ate to some pretty, in my opinion, extreme health food. Things like pesto sauce (blah), tofu (please no), and black beans (a.k.a bad beans). After a little while of hearing complaints every time dinner came around my mom was quick to pull back on the extreme foods and gave us more options. She is still pretty strict with what my dad eats though.
A good portion of my essay was centered on my brief period of vegetarianism though. By brief I mean REALLY brief. Say.. 3 months brief. What was weird though, was that when I took my first bite of meat after those three months I actually felt a little sick. The meat I ate was from a chicken salad I bought from McDonald's. After everything I have learned from reading Slaughterhouse, looking back on that sick feeling I had is a little nerve wracking. There have been far too many cases of E.coli for anyone to be ok with feeling sick after eating meat. Luckily, nothing detrimental came from that sore stomach.
I continue with my essay by saying how reading Slaughterhouse and remembering what I learned from watching Food, Inc. my junior year of high school have caused me to have thoughts of trying vegetarianism again. There is one problem with that, though. I love meat. That is the main reason I did not succeed with my first attempt at being vegetarian. 
Recently, though, I watched a TedTalk that a man named Graham Hill did that has re-inspired me. His idea, as a meat loving man, was to be a "weekday vegetarian." Eat no meat during the week, eat whatever you want on the weekend, and decrease your carbon footprint while doing it. 
I am on my second week of trying this plan, and so far it has not been too bad.

An Hour of King Corn

The first thing that was said that really grabbed my attention in King Corn was, "For the first time in American history, our generation was at risk for having a shorter life span than our parents. And it was because of what we ate..."

The two main guys in this film are friends, Ian and Curtis, who set out to Iowa to discover all they could about corn in America.
 
They began by planting their own acre of corn. Before they could start planting though, they had to inform the government, who in turn paid them. For one acre of corn they would make about $28 a month. One of the farmers they talked to made a point of saying that if you are a corn farmer then you have to have a lot of farms, or a very large one, or else you kind of get "squeezed out" of the business all together because there are so many other farmers.These corn fields are basically taking over most other kinds of farms.
 
Another line that caught my attention as I was watching the friends plant their acre and spray it with anhydrous ammonia, is that because of the ammonia apparently farmers can grow about 4 times more corn than before. It is concerning to me that we are spraying chemicals on our food in order to make more of it. This ties back into the whole "shorter life span than our parents" thing. I highly doubt that adding chemicals to our bodies will help us live longer lives. If our grandparents did not need it to grow their food, then why do we?
Even more chemicals are sprayed on the genetically modified corn (modified to be immune to the chemicals) in order to kill weeds. 

Today Iowa is proud to claim that they produce the most corn, which happens to be enough to feed the whole country by itself. Most of this corn is not immediately edible though. Corn has to be processed before anyone can eat it, which means that farmers cannot feed themselves anymore.
A large percentage of corn is turned into either sweeteners or is fed to animals who will one day be sold as food. I remember watching Food Inc. my junior year of high school and learning about these animals being fed corn. The problem with that is that many of these animals are built to eat grass and not the large amount of corn they are fed each year. Feeding the animals corn is intended to make them fatter faster, but it just is not natural. 
In fact, very little about our food system seems to be anymore.

200 Pages

Slaughterhouse is a book that holds back very little. Once you get over the shock of the first 100 pages and start taking in all the continuing gore and disturbing aspects of this book, though, you begin to notice a few patterns.

The first is that whether the slaughterhouse is killing sheep, horses, cows, pigs, etc. does not matter. They all have the same likelihood of letting the animals be conscious when they are killed because of one reason... The speed the workers do their job at. Everyday the workers' main goal is to get through as many animals as possible; which means always, no matter what, keep. production. moving.

This adrenaline pumping desire for speed is caused by a second pattern that I have noticed. All the owners and managers of these slaughterhouses care about is getting as many animals cut up in order to get as much money as they can, no matter the cost to their workers or the actual animals.

Money is very important to these people. A side fact that I noted from this book is that workers even sell meat on the streets to restaurants and other places sometimes. This fact was told by a former worker, Steve Parrish, who was in jail when Eisnitz interviewed him. He had worked at a horse slaughterhouse and let it slip that they would sell horse meat on the streets disguised as beef. Or, even worse, the places knew it was horse meat and gave it to their customers as some other meat. But I digress. 

My main point was that management would purposely turn down the power of the head knocker, which is supposed to knock the animals unconscious. They push their workers to speed up knocking speed to get more animals through, which also leaves more room for error in knocking them out. Then they change nothing about this system, even after it proves to leave their workers injured and the animals abused; by iron rods, boiling water, hooks in the mouth, freezing temperatures, etc. Even worse, the workers are too afraid to speak out to authorities once they realize their bosses are not willing to listen, because those same bosses make it very clear that their jobs can be easily replaced.  

A final pattern linked to the speed of line production, which one would think would concern the people who run these slaughterhouses, is food contamination. The author of this book, Gail Eisnitz, writes that according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) approximately 40,000 cases of E. coli 0157:H7 poisoning occur every year. Many animals are not properly checked before they are sent through the line of production just because more animals = more money, no matter what condition they are in. We all know by now, though, that usually that condition is "awake".

A Disturbing Process

2 Parts. 8 chapters. 105 pages. That's how far into Slaughterhouse by Gail A. Eisnitz I am at the moment. 

I can already tell that I am not going to enjoy this book. 

While the author has a style of writing that is both blunt and intriguing, her subject is extremely unpleasant. She does not try to hide this fact from the reader by sensitively approaching the subject, but instead begins the book by describing a horrific case (which she had to go undercover for) of dog training using live rabbits. 

Of course this case had nothing to do with the food industry, but a case she was given at the same time as this one led her to discover a somehow even more disturbing crime that was taking place in a cattle slaughterhouse.

By the second chapter - only 28 pages in - Eisnitz already had two witnesses who claimed that the slaughterhouse, called Kaplan, had been making its workers skin living, conscious cattle. Not only is this clearly a form of animal cruelty, but it also made for a dangerous work environment for the people who actually had to skin the cattle.  

If you are wondering why this might be, try thinking about if someone tried skinning you while you were aware of it. Would you simply relax and let it happen? Or would you start kicking and fighting for your life, and then trying to run from anyone who came near you; even if that meant trampling anyone in your path? 

I would hope most of you would have enough "life preservation" instinct to do the latter.

The worst part, to me, is that even if the cow does not get loose it still gets passed down the line, only to be stabbed in the spinal cord once it reaches the skinners. According to Eisnitz, severing the spinal cord only paralyzes the cattle so they can not move. It does not, however, rid them of the pain of being skinned.

Conditions in this slaughterhouse were not only gruesome for the cattle, of course, but also extremely dangerous for the workers, and not just because of scared cattle.

At this point my main interest in finishing this book is being able to see Eisnitz get the owners of this slaughterhouse in just as much trouble as they deserve.

The Random Location

In every town there is at least one place where teenagers like go to hang out with their friends. The city I grew up in, Grand Blanc, was fairly small but there were still plenty of ice cream shops, coffee shops, and restaurants to go to meet up with people at. Conversations are best over a nice cup of coffee from Tim Horton's in the winter, or while meeting up at Ziggy's, the local, popular ice cream shop as soon as they open in the spring. There are many places in town that are fun to go to, but my best friend Emily and I liked to be a little bit different. We would still go to the majority of these places when the desire to arose; however, there was one place in town that we went to the most. Kroger.
 The way I remember this tradition starting is I was with Emily at her house when she pulled some sushi out of the fridge. I had only tried sushi once before and was curious about it, so Emily shared some with me. (It is important to note that in our friendship we bond over food a lot.) The next time we hung out we were trying to figure out what to do for lunch. I remembered liking the sushi and suggested that. Really the only place in town, at the time, to get sushi was Kroger. So we hopped in Emily's beat up, red mini van (which we had named the "swagga wagon") and made going to Kroger the event for the day. 
When we got there the sushi was located at the front of the store so it was not hard to find. We had not planned anything else for the day, so we decided to waste some time and stroll around Kroger. I am a self-proclaimed "bread-aholic" so naturally I steered us toward the bakery section. Both of us had taken French in high school, so we nearly overflowed with excitement when we found some "fresh" baguette bread. We ended up purchasing the bread, the sushi, and (still feeling the French excitement) some cheese and made it a meal. Ever since that day, Emily and I have often returned to that Kroger and it has now become part of the memories I hold of our friendship.