Meh list, roast chicken smells wonderfully, humanity and eating

Have y'all seen the "Meh List: Not Hot, Not Not, Just Meh" in the Sunday NYT magazine? I love it. It's a tiny little column in the chaos that is The One-Page Mag. I generally agree with it completely excepting today's inclusion of couscous which I adore. But Amanda Seyfried? "Now out on Blu-ray"? Yes. Kinda reminds me of the Approval Matrix in the NY Magazine which is another great publication. Anyway, totally gaga and in need of comfort, this morning I bought a lovely little chicken rated 5, the penultimate grade, in the Global Animal Partnership's animal welfare standards, and roasted him with thyme, bay leaves, garlic and butter. It smells wonderfully in here right now. I'm a voracious reader of all things related to the ways in which our food is produced, processed or not, and how these methods impact our environment and health. The more I learn, the more stridently unwilling I am to buy or consume animal products whose origins I don't know or aren't traceable. I want my food to come from actual farms, true to the image I conjure when thinking about traditional ones- pastures, no cages, no administered hormones or antibiotics, the food provided is the food the animals evolved to eat.

I want the animals who give their lives to serve our palates to be treated not just humanely, but kindly and with respect during their living tenure. I want to know that, barring any depressive personality characteristics they might have had, their lives were good ones, with space to live and move, that they were fed well, that they weren't suffering.

Not like the feedlot cattle forced to eat the byproducts of our government subsidized, massive corn- and soybean- production rather than the grasses which they evolved -they're ruminants people- to eat, relegated to miserable lives spent not in grassy fields but in pools of excrement, shot through and through with drugs and hormones of all kind, kicked and beaten when they fall down sick, left to die in heaps of similarly ill kin, slaughtered in grotesque and inhumane ways. Not like industrial laying chickens who are caged in windowless warehouses from the moment they're born (if they're female; males are immediately killed), given a space smaller than a sheet of 8x11 paper, placed under lights and administered drugs which force them to lay eggs exponentially more often than they do in nature. Their cages are stacked one upon and next to the other, excrement is everywhere, those who die are tossed aside without care. Not like feedlot pork, industrial turkeys, broiler chickens, geese forcefed and then used for foie gras, and on and on. I'd rather never eat meat again than eat, and thusly support that treatment of, these indentured animals.

The next installment of this subject will focus on the nutritional differences found in animals raised industrially and naturally. Literally food for thought, huh?