Eating is something we take for granted due to conditioning. As little kids what choice do we have other than eating what our parents put before us? But, as we get older and somehow develop consciousness, we can make choices.
Hopefully, the processes by which some of our food choices get to us will enable us to seriously consider other
dietary avenues.
Many people feel uncomfortable about cooking and eating lobsters; and for good reason: lobsters suffer severe and prolonged pain when cut, broiled, or boiled alive. Wouldn’t you?
Lobsters are sensitive beings who struggle against death and have sophisticated nervous systems making it so that they feel a great deal of pain when cut or cooked while still alive. In addition, they contain excessive amounts of protein and cholesterol and are highly contaminated with bacteria, pesticides, and other toxins due to the fact that they, along with shrimp, are the scavengers of the ocean.
In their favor is the fact that they can take long-distance seasonal journeys and can cover 100 miles or more yearly. In life span, they can live 150 years or longer if they can manage to avoid the millions of traps along the coasts.
I really don’t think that anyone would consider dropping a dog or a cat into boiling water while still alive. Why should it be any different for lobsters?
Ben Franklin called turkeys “true American originals” and had tremendous respect for their resourcefulness, curiosity, agility and beauty. Obviously he was talking about wild turkeys, which can fly 55 mph, run 18 mph, and live up to 15 years. But the hundreds of millions of turkeys who end up on American dinner plates every year feel no less pain, than their wild cousins but are, sadly, birds of different feather.
The factory-farmed birds are fed enormous quantities of antibiotics and have been purposely bred to gain an enormous amount of weight in a short period of time. After all, who would want an emaciated turkey representing “Thanksgiving” on their dinner table? This enormous weight gain leads to painful, swollen joints, crippled feet, and heart attacks.
Turkeys slaughtered today live for months in sheds packed so tightly – usually 3 square feet per bird – that flapping a wing or stretching a leg is nearly impossible. Due to their environment, they stand mired in doo doo and urine waste, with the urine and ammonia fumes burning their eyes and lungs.
To keep the overcrowded birds from scratching and pecking each other to death, a portion of their upper beaks and toes are sliced off with a hot blade and without anesthesia. Think of how you would feel if you went to the dentist or had surgery all without anesthesia. If it’s not ok for you, why is it ok for them?
Millions of turkeys don’t make it past the first week, sometimes drowning in water dishes or starving to death when eating with their mutilated beaks is too painful. Then, if the knife misses its mark, they are boiled alive in a tank of scalding water used for feather removal.
Eating these guys has ramifications. Millions of people become sick and thousands die each year from eating contaminated flesh. Studies indicate that as many as 90 percent of supermarket birds are contaminated with salmonella, campylobacter, or other bacteria. They contain no fiber or carbohydrates but have lots of fat and cholesterol. For example, a roasted turkey’s leg contains 72 milligrams of cholesterol, 47 percent fat, and is anything but desirable for your heart.
When fish are caught and killed for their flesh, they suffer greatly. Whether caught by a hook or a net, fish experience fear. And like humans, their heart rates and breathing rates increase dramatically.
Fish, along with unintentional victims, including dolphins, birds, and turtles, are captured in huge trawlers’ nets, squeezed for hours along with any netted rocks and debris. As they are dragged from the ocean depths, fish undergo excruciating decompression and often the intense internal pressure ruptures their swim bladder, pops out their eyes, and pushes their stomach through their mouth.
Then, as if that’s not bad enough, they are tossed onboard where many slowly suffocate or are crushed to death. Others are still alive when their throats and bellies are subjected to intensive crowding and unnatural conditions, which spread infection and parasites. And how do the fish farmers deal with this? With more antibiotics to counteract the pollution and growth hormones to make them fatter faster.
We all know how polluted the oceans are with mercury, PCBs, radiation, and toxic wastes. Well, this is what fish ingest on a 24/7 basis. How come no one even comes close to thinking about this when they eat fish? And yet, we fall for the “eating fish is healthy” line.
In today’s factory farms, chickens have their beaks sliced off with a hot blade, pigs have their tails chopped off and their teeth removed with pliers, and male cows and pigs are castrated – all without anesthesia. Imagine what it would fell like to have your dick cut off or your breast removed without anesthesia. This is what they experience!
Then, they are fed a steady diet of genetically modified growth hormones and antibiotics so that they grow really fast. Because of this their hearts and limbs often cannot keep up, causing lameness and heart attacks. Finally, at the slaughterhouse, they are hung upside down and bled to death, often while still fully conscious.
Some religions, like the Jewish and Muslim, where compassion allegedly reigns supreme, the animals have to be slaughtered while still fully conscious. The Jews call this humane and loving act “Kosher” and the Muslims call it “Halal”. I call it despicable and heartless.
Every year in the United States alone, more than 8 billion chickens are slaughtered for food.
While chickens are shy and sensitive animals, almost all of them spend their unnaturally short, miserable lives crammed together in windowless sheds on factory farms, each one with less space than a standard sheet of typing paper.
“Broiler” chickens are raised and killed for their flesh and they are bred to grow so large so fast that often their legs cannot handle their weight. Tens of thousands of them are forced to live in a dark shed in their own doo doo among corpses of other birds who died of heart attacks, suffocation, starvation, or stress. Their natural lifespan of 15 to 20 years is cut short when their throats are slit after six or seven weeks and many broiler chickens spend much of their lives in so much pain that they are unable to move.
Only female chicks are useful to the egg industry, so the males are tossed live into a grinding machine, killed with carbon monoxide, or thrown live into the trash to suffocate. The female chicks have their beaks seared off with a red-hot iron, and then they are shoved into a tiny cage with three to six others in windowless sheds filled with thousands of stacked sheds. They have so little space that they can’t even stretch out a wing.
Eighteen months and about 400 eggs later, the hens are packed into trucks and sent to slaughter, with their battered flesh made into dog food, “chicken franks”. Or soup.
Chicken contains as much artery-clogging cholesterol as beef (100 mg in just four ounces) and a single egg has twice as much cholesterol as a hamburger.
The slaughter machines spatter bacteria-laden doo doo onto the carcasses so that up to 90 percent of all chicken flesh in the United States is swarming with salmonella, campylobacter, and other dangerous bacteria. But, our beloved USDA (U. S. Department of A#@holes) says, “If you cannot see the doo doo through the clear wrap, it’s finger licken good to eat!” As many as 4 million Americans get sick from salmonella “flu” each year, and about 500 die.
Oh yeah, chickens in the U.S. produce more solid manure than the entire human population. And the farms, being the upstanding environmentalists that they are, violate environmental laws by dumping their waste into nearby rivers and streams, to flow down to the oceans where it is consumed by the fish, which, as we all know,
are so healthy to eat.
How your consciousness develops, whether or not your heart becomes soft, if you develop compassion for the exploited, or if you continue to buy into the conditioned mind-set, is an individual choice. But, understand one given fact and reality – karma is a bitch! As you sow, so shall you reap.
Aloha!
Sources:
www.quora.com
www.peta.org
www.thesensiblevegan.com
Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.
After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a "plastic" community would be an understatement.
Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.
I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, " let's become vegetarians". I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, "okay"! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.
So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, "The Little Kitchen".
Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.
I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I'll elaborate on that in a minute.
But right now, back to "The Little Kitchen". Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.
The owner said to me, "Let's make a deal. You do our tax return and we'll feed you as well". So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.
But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, "Hawaii". Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called," Mr. Natural's". I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at "Mr. Natural's." To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened.
So, I'm working at "Mr. Natural's" and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle - it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka'anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.
Since I was the new guy, and didn't really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.
I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.
Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I'm asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn't thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, "You expected anything less"? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, 'enchilada's at "Natural's" tonight'. I never had to cook anything else.
A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That's when they found out I was an accountant and "Down to Earth" was born. "Down to Earth" became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.
In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD's that would call in asking for my credentials.
My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.
I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii's premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She said," If you want to be with me you've got to stop working on naked women". So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.
Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a "chicken" or "egg" or "fish" or "pig" or "cow" was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.
The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.
Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.
For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.
Namaste!
