Craving a way from Carving

 I was reading the New Yorker, November 9h 2009 issue that features walking among autumn leaves on the cover. Inside is a radically different illustration of animals in slaughter as it is that time of year in America, Thanksgiving, when we spare one turkey and eat the rest.  Elizabeth Kolbert asks the question, “Should you eat meat?” A portion of the article is posted below, “Flesh of Your Flesh;” is that a give away?

After reading the description as posted, and after still digesting my BBQ ribs from last evening’s meal, I declare, I always feel better when I just eat vegetables. My Hindu friends are lean and healthy, and maybe they have the way ahead.

Searching the Hindu diet, I discovered the following phrase:

“Flesh-meat cannot be procured without injury to animals, and the slaughter of animals obstructs the path to beatitude; from flesh-meat therefore let man abstain." (v. 47, 48.)” Joseph Edwin Padfield, The Hindu at Home, Being Sketches of Hindu Daily Life.

“Followers of the Hindu religion, which is practiced primarily in India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, believe that the body is made up of natural elements: earth, air, fire, water, etc. The proper balance of these elements indicates good health, while an imbalance indicates the opposite. Hindus believe self-control and meditation is the path to health, with prayer to the Almighty God being the last resort. For many Hindus, yoga is a means by which to bring the integration of the body, mind and intellect together in order to achieve perfect harmony or alignment. “ says Gihan ElGindy, MSN, RN, an educator and independent consultant on health, nursing, cultural competence, education and business entrepreneurship issues.

YankeeeJim declares Jim Hindi is the way. Where is my Yoga mat?

YJ/JH

[q urlhttp://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/09/091109crbo_books_kolbert#ixzz0XPS653Ub"] Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”

For pigs, conditions are little better. Shortly after birth, piglets have their tails chopped off; this discourages the bored and frustrated animals from gnawing one another’s rumps. Male piglets also have their testicles removed, a procedure performed without anesthetic. Before being butchered, hogs are typically incapacitated with a tonglike instrument designed to induce cardiac arrest. Sometimes their muscles contract so violently that they end up not just dead but with a broken back.

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious.” [/q]