All the news reports about the cruelty to animals associated with veal came out when I was a kid, so I've lived my whole life without every trying veal. Who would eat such a thing?!
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Right now, I'm reading a book called "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Micheal Pollan. The chapter I'm reading currently talks about how we are forcing our cattle to eat corn, even though their digestive systems aren't made to handle corn and other grains. Cows should eat grass; that's what they were born to do. Grass is cheap enough, so why can't they just eat grass?
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That's a loaded question, but a short answer is this: we have a surplus of corn (another long story - read the book), and it's cheap, and it makes the cattle grow to 1100 lbs in 14-16 mos instead of 5-6 years which it took when they ate grass, so meat can be cheaper and we can all eat it.
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Not only does eating the corn make the cows quite sick (which they are given antibiotics to counterattack, and oh, by the way, that may lead to antibiotics not being effective in humans who consume the meat and build a resistance to it), but it raises the levels of saturated fats in the cows, and lowers the Omega-3 fats that are good for us. The book talks about the hunter-gatherer folks who only eat wild meat, and studies show they do not have the incidences of heart disease and cholesterol issues that the rest of us do.
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Not only do we force these cows to eat corn that makes them very uncomfortable to eat, even for the ones who don't get sick and have their stomach explode from the gas the corn causes which they are unable to process, but we also combine the corn feed with their own beef fat to get them fatter, quicker.
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Remember mad cow disease? When we were feeding cows cows, and we realized it made them really sick and us too? Aren't we kind of flirting with disaster by feeding them beef fat? Doesn't nature tell us otherwise? We also feed them chickens, and the chickens are fed with cow parts, so this is a disturbing cycle...
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I could go into more horrifying details, but you get the point, which brings me to my original question: why don't we eat veal?
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I'm just as troubled with this new knowledge, as I was to learn of the conditions veals are reared, but I'm not sure I'm going to stop eating meat. I'm going to try to find meat from cows that weren't corn fed, but I'm not sure how easy that will be.
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Veal is easy to avoid, because it's not such a staple of our diets, and it's so unpopular, who would want the stigma associated? If red meat had the same stigma as veal, I wouldn't eat it, but it doesn't, so now what? Do I need to start thinking for myself and making educated decisions based upon my convictions? It's so much easier to follow popular thought...
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