4 reasons I'm going from Meatless Mondays to "Meat on Mondays"

I took this pic at the county fair last summer. I grew up eating meat and, after 30 plus years, I really enjoy my barbecue, juicy sausage, fried chicken and much more. So what's the problem? All is fine, right? Well...

We all know by now that animal agriculture is the number one cause of global warming; most of our meat in the US comes from factory farming - - huge factories that mass-produce animal meat and if you have seen the pics of the gestation crates or the rows of pigs and cows and chickens arranged tightly in a glorified warehouse, then you know it looks disgusting... which creates a huge amount of waste that is linked to global warming. (How can there not be disease in such tight cramped spaces where the animals are mutilating themselves out of boredom, especially if they're not treated with meds?)

The number 2 reason is I don't want to eat the flesh of sick and suffering animals. I mean, I don't even want to eat an avocado that's too brown and bruised. We buy non-gmo quinoa and tomatoes that aren't sprayed with toxic chemicals, so it kind of follows naturally that we don't want to eat pigs that are caged in their own feces for their entire lives or chickens who have to lie in it because their chests are bred to be so abnormally large that they can't even stand up to walk away from their feces. Yes I know the package of chicken wings says "ANTIBIOTIC-FREE" but I wasn't there for the chickens' entire life, neither were my friends, and do you really think that the USDA inspectors are being that picky in their "healthy farming" criteria? I'm fine with eating meat that's healthy, meat from livestock that has had a good life. Unless I can visit the farm myself or it's one of those farm-to-table projects that you can trust, eating unhealthy miserable and suffering animals (that we pay someone else to kill) sounds icky and feels icky. Way worse than a bruised brown avocado.

Which takes me to number 3: How it feels. Eating less meat feels better, as long as you're still eating properly. I've been guilty of eating worse on some Meatless Mondays because, in sticking to my guns, I kept pushing off dinner, delaying and delaying, saying that I was going to eat something with no meat, later. Finally by the time "later" came around, it was 10:30 p.m., I was starving and optionless so I had to grab some crappy fast food. Obviously if your time management skills are so bad (or you're just trying to do too much) and you're new at not eating meat or dairy, then you'll probably feel starving then crappy, but that's another issue.

It's funny to me when I see people at the farmer's market peeling back the husks of half a dozen ears of corn, looking to find the very best-looking one to buy, yet they don't question the cheese they eat because they don't see how some dairy cows can't even stand up in their filthy stalls yet continue to be impregnated repeatedly to produce milk. Doesn't sound too healthy, does it...

And finally, reason number 4: I have met some vegans who have really great skin.

So I guess you could say that my reasons for trying to be more vegan and less carnivorous run from environmental to vanity. If you're going to change your lifestyle in a pretty big way, that's a pretty good set of reasons, if you ask me 🙂

I hope someone creates lots of accessible, affordable, delicious and convenient non-meat non-dairy foods soon.