Rolling Stone : Pork's Dirty Secret

Pork's Dirty Secret from the Rolling Stone is an amazing story. Reading about these huge industrial hog factories might be enough to make a person think about going vegan.

The article tells us that the biggest toxic spill in U.S. history was not the Exxon Valdez - it was a lagoon full of liquified pig manure that overflowed 25.8 millions gallons of effluvium into the New River in North Carolina - killing every fish, every living creature, in the river for 16 miles, before it flowed into the ocean.

According to the article, the smell of these pig factories is almost beyond comprehension. They say it takes a few months for people who work in them to get the smell off after they quit...the time it takes to grow new hair and skin cells. It's not just a barnyard-type smell - it's actually a concentration of noxious and toxic fumes that will cause people to become ill. There are numerous people who have been overcome by the fumes and a number who died after falling into the lagoons.

Pigs are raised in the smallest space possible, packed into buildings the size of football fields. The manure flows into tanks underneath their pens and is then pumped onto fields as fertilizer. The problem is there isn't enough cropland to absorb it and it gets into the watershed, raising nitrogen levels - causing algae blooms, killing fish and making people sick.

This isn't farming and ranching - it's a factory for fattening pigs as quickly and cheaply as possible. It's inhumane to the animals and polluting our environment.

Next time you pick up some of "the other white meat" you might want to think about where it came from....or maybe not.

_____________________________________

"If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian."

Paul McCartney

_____________________________________

"In Buddhism, the most important precept of all is to live in awareness, to know what is going on. To know what is going on, not only here, but there. For instance, when you eat a piece of bread, you may choose to be aware that our farmers, in growing the wheat, use chemical poisons a little too much.... When we eat a piece of meat or drink alcohol, we can produce awareness that 40,000 children die each day in the third world from hunger and that in order to produce a piece of meat or a bottle of liquor, we have to use a lot of grain. Eating a bowl of cereal may be more reconciling with the suffering of the world than eating a piece of meat.... Every day we do things, we are things, that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive, the present moment."

Source: Being Peace

Thich Nhat Hanh