A Few Things You May Not Have Heard About Factory Farm Animals

Factory Farms are not good for anybody or anything - this includes the animals, human workers and the environment. With Time Magazine now putting a great foot forward and telling the truth - to cut down on carbon gas emissions we need to stop with the meat-eating - vegetarianism is starting to enter the mainstream. Though I have been researching the topic of vegetarianism and veganism for some time now, I am still learning all sorts of new things.
Take this list for example, that I found from Naturalnews.com.

Conditions from Inside Animal Factory Farms

The following comes from the article, which I have provided a link to.

"To understand the conditions present in these factory farms, you must first examine what the animals in these factory farms are eating. The factory farmer has redefined what constitutes animal feed in a 'bottom line' effort to save money. They seem to care little about the health or the happiness of the animal, and instead treat it like a product. The low quality standards placed on animal feed by these "farmers" prove that little consideration is being taken towards the animal or the consumer.

For example, some of the "ingredients" commonly used in animal factory feed include: (think hard about this list the next time you order a hamburger...)

• Excessive grains -- Abnormally high amounts can make the animals sick, especially natural grass eaters like cattle. Their bodies are not designed to handle a corn-rich diet; as a result, these animals can form liver abscesses and excessively acidic digestive systems.


• Plastics -- For the many animals whose digestive systems still need roughage to move food through, these factories have turned to the use of plastic pellets instead of plant-based roughage to compensate for a lack of natural fiber in the feed.


• Meat from members of the same species -- The factory farming industry is turning farm animals into cannibals. Scientific research has linked this practice to the spread of both mad cow disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) and avian bird flu.


• Manure and animal waste -- This can include cattle manure, swine waste, and poultry waste. It can also contain wood, sand, rocks, dirt, sawdust and other non-food substances.


• Animal byproducts -- This is often categorized as "animal protein products" and may appear as rendered feathers, hair, skin, hooves, blood, internal organs, intestines, beaks and bones. These may also include dead horses, euthanized cats and dogs, and road kill.


• Drugs and chemicals (including dangerous antibiotics) -- Drugs are frequently implemented in order to fight disease, control parasites and reduce animals' stress from overcrowded living conditions. However, the antimicrobials used on some poultry promote the accumulation of arsenic inside their bodies. This is a highly carcinogenic chemical that can then contaminate the water supply near the farm, or emerge in the meat later eaten by consumers."

I actually had no idea about the plastic! When you're grilling hamburgers this summer, you're probably grilling up a piece of animal that was forced into cannibalism and fed plastic, pills and other garbage. Why would you want to eat that? So if you absolutely must have your animal protein this summer, do yourself (and the animals) a favor and buy locally, grass-fed meat.
It would be like eating a heroine addict that was nibbling on the limb of another heroine addict. That doesn't sound nice, does it?

Of course not.
Better yet, how about trying your own homemade veggie burgers? I do this sort of thing all the time in my house, when I am not barbecuing slabs of tofu (so good!). I prefer my veggie burgers made from chickpeas (I love them!) but you can also use many other ingredients. For a decent recipe, check the link here.

I always tell my husband that I think veggie burgers are much more interesting anyway, because you can make them with so many different ingredients. I also love mushroom burgers, because they grill well and have a chewy texture that is different from tofu. If you want other great veggie grilling recipes, vegcooking.com now has a guide up to help you.

Dairy: The Hidden Enemy

...Or not so hidden, depending on how you look at it. For me, dairy was not an obvious antagonist. It took me quite a while to actually figure out that my face wasn't breaking out because of hormones. It wasn't breaking out because of stress (what stress?). It was the damn dairy. Fatty indulgences for me often included pizzas with extra cheese, or iced coffees at Tim Hortons, both of which included a frighteningly amount of dairy. I was looking around the internet one evening, checking out my favorite vegan food blogs (before I was vegan) and noticed a blog about a mom whose child had never had milk before. Once the child started chugging the stuff down constantly, she noticed abnormal behavior from him. He was gassy, he was sniffling constantly with a runny nose, he was just overall not feeling well.

And then someone apparently suggest to her that it was the milk that was doing it. At first I kind of rolled my eyes because I wasn't educated in the ways of milk, or why it could possibly be considered "bad." Why should I? I had been drinking milk for years because everyone kept jamming it down our throats that "milk does a body good" and builds strong bones. Nothing could be further from the truth with this.

If you even stop to think about milk for just a moment, and where it really comes from and what it's for, you might start to think it's strange to be drinking it. A manatee doesn't drink the milk from a fox. A fox does not drink the milk from a human. But a human drinks the milk from a cow, something they naturally produce (like all mammals do) for their babies. The babies nurse on it, and then they stop once they reach a certain age. Yet we still give it to our children long after they are done nursing, and encourage them that it's good for them. Why?

From milksucks.com:

"Will drinking milk make you greasy, grimy, and pimply? Some doctors suspect that the fat, animal protein, sugar, and hormones in milk irritate the skin, causing break-outs.

Dr. Jerome K. Fisher conducted a clinical study of 1,088 teen-age patients over 10 years and reported to the American Dermatological Association that milk was a principal contributor to some patients' acne. Dr. Fisher found that their acne tapered off as their milk consumption did.

Dr. Fisher noted that dairy products often contain large amounts of butterfat and milk sugar, both of which, he believed, aggravate acne. He also suspected that the high volume of hormones produced naturally in the milk of pregnant cows may break down into androgen when consumed, which in turn stimulates the production of sebum, the waxy substance secreted by the sebaceous glands that clogs pores and creates acne when the pores become infected."

Screw you, dairy. Screw you a million times, because my face was doing so well until I ate some non-vegan pizza in an effort to be more easy-going. Never again! If someone wants pizza, I'm going to explicitly insist that it's either soy cheese or just cheeseless all together. It really grates on my nerves when people scoff at me and say I'm being selfish for requesting such things, but how is it selfish to not want to exploit a cow and not torment my face? I think it's pretty selfish for someone to not try to find something that won't give me gas and enough acne that would make a fourteen year old girl look clearer than a sunny day.

I also found out that cheese isn't vegetarian, either. Vegetarians need to be really careful about which brands they are buying, because most of them use a product called rennet. Rennet is from the stomach of a baby calf - raised for veal in those awful crates (that were just banned in Maine, so go Maine!). I also found other interesting tidbits, that vegan buddhist monks were fond to have the same bone density as non-vegans, and that dairy actually encourages osteoperosis.

So, why are we still drinking milk? I honestly don't know why we do, when there are things such as hemp, almond and soy milk readily available in the store. The benefits from drinking soy, hemp and almond milk far outweighs dairy milk.
Hours after cows are born, they're taken away from their mothers and sent away to become veal. The milk that the mother produced for her baby is then produced for us instead - the same stuff that leads to acne, breast cancer, prostate cancer, mucus and countless other ailments. Most people think they seemingly feel fine after consuming dairy, but it might also be because they're just so used to living with mucus and gas that they don't even realize anything could potentially be wrong.

I know this post sounds angry, and it's probably because I am - my face has broken out because of this stuff, and it infuriates me to think that most people would rather guzzle down a milkshake because it brings them five minutes of happiness. Meanwhile, other living things are miserable for much longer than five minutes when there are other things out there we could be eating.

And you know what? Soy ice cream is pretty damn good if I do say so myself.

Oh, and my husband and I drove past some fields that had a large group of cows, grazing in the sunshine. I saw three calves chasing each other, playing. It was the most adorable thing I had seen in quite a while, calves chasing each other in fields of grass. Some were happily suckling on their mothers, but the group of three that were frollicking was an image that's going to stay with me for a long time. And I'll conjure up this image whenever I start to become tempted by a pizza with cheese on it.

I Do Not Like Fish.

I haven't updated the blog in a few weeks and that's partly due to the fact that I haven't had anything truly interesting to say, and because I've been busy with my class. I know it's just one class but I take it very seriously and my brain was just exploding from this last final I had to write.
A couple things that are especially difficult with the vegan lifestyle is eating out, which is something that I almost never do anymore. And to be honest, my body really appreciates it.

Last night was the first time I had ever experienced disgust with meat. True disgust. To the point where I had to leave the room, because the smell was just revolting to me. My husband is still a pescetarian, and I will not push my vegan principles onto him. He lives with a vegan, so he's very well up to date on why we shouldn't eat flesh to begin with. Still, he clings to being pescetarian and I'll be damned as a wife to take away his rights to choose what he is comfortable with. There are many vegetarians and vegans out there that can't stand omnivores but this just isn't the case. He is a wonderful partner and the fact that I got him to go from cheeseburgers, chicken tenders and milkshakes to salmon, vegetables, legumes is definitely worth while in my book.

He's mentioned a couple times that since making the transition, his favorite "new" food has been lentils. I make a fresh pot of lentil soup nearly every week, which usually includes a whole head of garlic. But last night was just bad. It nearly resulted in a fight, but I kept my cool and so did he and we respected each other's space. I was cooking up ginger-tofu stir fry, but he wanted salmon. I had purchased a packet of salmon burgers from our local grocery store, and honestly if Whole Foods was closer I'd buy all my fish from them because I just don't trust anyone when it comes to my food. Still, I bought the burgers out of my affection for him and proceeded to take them out of the box.

I was shocked and mildly horrified. It was so...so pink. And fleshy. So pink and wiggly. I went to pick it up so that I could place it in the pan, and my body just said, "No, hun, I ain't touchin' that." I couldn't pick it up! I had never experienced this reaction before, and my husband accused me of being immature. The immature comment is what almost caused a fight, but we ironed that out quickly. So, I told him, "I'm sorry but you're going to need to cook that in a separate pan." So, he pulled out another small pan to fry it in, and I just kept stirring up my stir-fry, which was loaded with all sorts of different colors from the vegetables. My mouth waters at the sight of tofu, now. He's cooking it up in olive oil when he starts to panic.
"What's going on!? What is happening?!" I look over to check on him, and the salmon is merely sizzling in the pan, and a couple droplets of hot oil are popping out all over the place.
"It's...it's cooking." I assured him. But he looked uncomfortable. It was there that I realized that he's either going to need to start learning how to cook his own meat, or I am going to have to suck up the smell of burning flesh and help him out.
So, he finally managed to cook his salmon and I was content with my tofu and veggies. Sitting at the table, I did what many vegans and vegetarians alike would consider a big "no-no." I was curious with my response to the smell of the fish, and was wondering what would actually happen if I tried to put some in my mouth. So I cut a tiny sliver off from his plate and put it into my mouth curiously.
My husband was amazed with my reaction. Amazed as in he just couldn't believe the histrionics that just happened. I crinkled my nose and waved my hands as if to say, "Oh God, Oh God! Get it out! Get it out!" And he got up very slowly to get a paper towel, but I was too impatient and just got one myself so that I could spit it out. I had the taste of salmon in my mouth the rest of the evening, and I hated it. So, I am definitely not reverting back to being a pescetarian myself because I can't even handle the smell of fish.

On a much more pleasant note, I finally tried tempeh for the first time last week and it was delicious. Although, I don't know if I even cooked it properly but it tasted good all the same. I can see using it for some type of breakfast protein, since it had a very mild sweet flavor. My husband and I were also conversing about tofu turkeys at holidays, and how we're definitely going to have them. I've seen ads in my VegNews magazines for whole vegan "birds" that actually look exactly like turkeys. At first glance this would seem promising to someone who isn't transitioning so well from omni to veg, but my move from pescetarian to vegetarian to vegan has been frighteningly easy for me. Sure, I screw up every now and then and accidentally scarf down some dressing that has dairy in it (and my stomach reminds me angrily, don't worry) and I'll eat pasta and bread. But there is something creepy about eating a vegan turkey that looks exactly like a turkey.
Why does it have to look like a dead bird? We're vegans, so obviously we don't want to eat animals so why mound up some tofu in the shape of an animal? That to me is just bizarre and I can't truly understand it. One day when I was eating my President's Choice brand "chicken" tenders (which are the best "chicken" tenders ever, by the way) I was a little freaked out by how close the texture was to real chicken flesh and had to reassure myself that it was soy that I was eating.
I've seen omnivores argue constantly that, "Well you vegans and vegetarians eat mock meats all the time, so it just proves that we're meant to eat meat." My reactions to mock meats is actually a proving point that no, we are not necessarily meant to eat meat. Tofurky "meat" slices don't freak me out because I don't think they taste like meat at all. They're leaner, not greasy and are smoother in texture. To me, they are just a flavor. The same goes for tofurky sausages. What's interesting to note is that even when I did eat meat in the past, I would never eat sausage. Sausage just freaked me out, I never knew what was in it and reading, "The Jungle" in the 9th grade stuck with me.
But, Tofurky sausages are excellent with tomato sauce and pasta, I can assure you. Eating a "whole vegan turkey" this Thanksgiving isn't going to be happening. I like the Tofurky vegetarian feasts that I saw at the super market, they were just inconspicious rolls. No drum sticks or "breasts." Just rolls filled with vegan stuffing. I am okay with this.
So really I think I'm doing okay, but I do have my minor slip ups. I think the important thing is that I try my best to watch what I put into my mouth, and that I try to educate others on the lifestyle through being a good role model rather than preaching.

I gave my mother a couple recipes from Bryant Terry's "Vegan Soul Kitchen" (which I love!) and she made the citrus collard greens in a raisin redux for company, and everyone loved them. My sister was mentioning how it tasted, "So healthy." Indeed!