How come we humans do this shit to each other?

Staying on the topic of food, here’s a clip from the Daily Show about the recent revelation that the meat industry puts up to 15% really disgusting “pink slime” in ground beef.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that this isn’t news - Jamie Oliver for one showed this on his Food Revolution show last year - what’s shocking to me is (a) the extent to which they have gone to industrialize this - packing it into bricks, freezing it, shipping it to supermarkets, and all - and (b) that you can get ordinary people to participate in this crime against humanity.

Seriously. How come no-one along that whole production chain - the people making the machines, the people operating the machines, the people cutting away the gunk from the meat, the people driving the bricks to the supermarkets, the people stuffing it into the ground beef packets - how come they all participate willingly in the system? Are we all so scared of losing a paycheck? Are we all so frightened into submission?

To me, that’s the real warning sign here. That something as clearly unhealthy and unethical and go on to the extent it has.

If you’re wondering why I write so much about food, it’s because:

• what we eat is critical to our well-being, to our ability to be creative, to think, and to love ourselves and others. If you’re filled with shit and don’t feel good about yourself, it’s hard to live a happy, creative, loving life.
• our relationship with food shows just how unconscious we all are. We eat several times every single day, and yet we’re so unaware about what it is that we stuff ourselves with.

Food is important. You become what you eat.

I think I heard a Feynman quote a while ago, but I can’t find it now. It went something like this:

“How can the potatoes I ate for lunch remember my childhood?”

Point being that all of the atoms in our bodies are replaced continually. I think over the course of a year, they’ve all been replaced. Yet we still recall our childhood, even we share zero of the actual physical matter with the person we were back then. Isn’t that amazing?

All of that physical matter is made up of what you stuff your head with. Better make it good stuff.

Btw, I’m considering going vegan. Or raw. Or both. I’m going to experiment with doing it for a month and two when we get back to San Diego. We’ve found a great place that delivers what seems to be raw food in San Diego. Will give that or something similar a try and see how it feels after a couple months. I suspect it’s going to feel great. I will report.