Challenge! Can you gross me out enough about meat and factory farming to turn me into a vegetarian?

Question

This is the biggest personal conflict I have. I'm a meat eater. I was a vegetarian for 1.5 years. I jokingly call it the worst year and a half of my life. I LOVE meat, specifically chickens, cows, and pigs. I find vegetarian options very boring or they're usually mushroom based - my least favorite food. I find meat to be satisfying in every way but one... and that is that I believe that humans should be morally concious and compassionate enough to choose to be vegetarians. Factory farming is awful, animals have feelings, and I'm smart enough to know what the right choice is. Where is my willpower? I challenge you to throw all the vegetarian/vegan propaganda that will gross me out and change my diet my way. I NEED to be grossed out. If you could actually make me puke, that would be awesome. If I can't get grossed out about this, I think I'll be a meat eater for the rest of my life, struggling in and out of half-assed vegetarianism phases.

Answer 1

I can relate! I am a gourmet chef, and every meal revolved around meat. If anyone had told me I would be a vegetarian, I would have laughed my tush off! Research though, taught me the truth about meat, and it was enough for me and my young daughter to go veggie overnight. Factory farmed animals are kept in deplorable conditions, which makes them susceptable to disease. They are fed an unnatural diet of pesticide laden grains, ground up other dead animals, and weird things such as newspaper as fillers. Because they get sick so easily, they are given large doses of growth hormones, steroids, antibiotics, and other meds-that all ends up in the meat. The meat is infested with parasites, bacteria, blood, pus, urine, feces, amines, purines, cholesterol and loads of other nasty stuff. Meat has to be cooked to a certain temperature to kill off bacteria and parasites ( I dont think eating them dead is much better) It is very hard to digest meat, and it often stays in the body for months. That makes your body a graveyard for decaying animal flesh. Think about battery caged chickens stacked 10 cages high-where is the feces and urine from the upper cages going? Straight to the ones at the bottom who must wallow in it, and are often so diseased that at slaughter, they are so infested with sores that they get turned into canned meat and meat for soup cans. I could go on for hours, but I am gagging just thinking about it. Hope this helps. We have been veggie for many years now and are totally okay with it. I cant even walk past the meat aisle in the grocery store withouth smelling the blood and bleach thats used to disinfect the meat. Yuck! On the up side, if you think about it, meat only tastes like what we flavor and season it with. You can make breaded vegetables with the same coating you would use on chicken, and grilled veggie kebabs brushed with bbq sauce are awesome! Good luck. Email if I can be of any help

Answer 2

I became a vegetarian about 10 years ago after learning about factory farms. The more I researched how animals are raised for food, the more information I uncovered about animal rights in general. I used to think that it wasn't wrong to eat animals, if raised humanely, even after becoming vegetarian. But after interacting with farm animals and realizing they are as intelligent and deserving of life as my companion animals, I now think it is absolutely wrong to kill and eat them. I have been vegan now for 5 years. So I guess I can't really say for sure that I would have become vegetarian if it wasn't for factory farms. I'm so happy that I am now though.

Answer 3

when you have time go to youtube and type in 'earthlings' in the search bar. it is a documentary split in to three videos (its long so either make time to watch at lest the first two, or just watch some of one and keep coming back when you can and finish it) it is on puppy mills/ catteries/ pet shops. slaughter houses, testing, circus animals and something else but i dont remember. when i watched this i had never cried so much for so long ( it was at least an hour of straight crying and earthlings is a hour and a halfish) not even my dog could comfort me. its horrible. a smack in the face. if i hadn't been vegan when i watched this, it would have turned me vegan in a second.

Answer 4

http://www.attilahildmann.com/en/no_eggs/no_egg.html

-France, which has only a fraction of the U.S. cattle population, tests more cattle in a single week then the U.S. has tested in a decade
-According to Europe's latest annual report, Europe is testing cattle at a rate of almost two thousand times that of the United States
-In fact, the USDA, which now tests only 1 percent of all slaughtered cows
-Addressing the feeding of slaughterhouse waste, blood and manure to livestock, cattle brains, eyes, spinal cord and guts from the human food supply is certainly a step in the right direction, but the World Health Organization recommends that these tissues not enter any food chain,for either human or animal consumption.Unfortunately, the U.S. still feeds those potentially risky tissues to pigs, pets and poultry,the pig remains can then be fed back to cattle
-Almost all fattening beef cattle, all dairy calves and all adult dairy cows raised conventionally are fed meat and bone meal in the United States
-Under the 1997 feed regulations, the FDA specifically allowed the feeding of chicken litter to cattle to continue, even if the chickens had just been fed meat and bone meal made from cattle remains
-The protein source in milk replacer is most often milk protein (whey), but dairy farmers also suckle their calves with milk replacer made from cattle blood protein which is often cheaper, calves in the U.S. to this day are still drinking up to 3 cups of "red blood cell protein" concentrate every day
-Alisa Harrison is the spokesperson of the USDA,she also happened to work for the National Cattleman’s Beef Association for 15 years previously

Answer 5

I was farm raised, and we ate the meat we grew! When I was 13, I saw an article inthe houston chronicle when I was visiting a friend in the city. It cured me for a long time! The report said that as the inspector checked out the chickens, they were each allowed a certain amount of pus on the skin, and a certain amount of feces as well. This was the tyson factory they were talking about. Eww gross. After that I never ate store bought meat again. I will still eat meat from my family's farm, but nothing else!

Answer 6

No one can convince you , you have to do it for yourself.
Not only trying to help save the animals but just thinking about all that animal blood in the bloody meat before it's cooked is enough for me.And all the bloody hands packaging it. Yukk

Answer 7

If you haven't seen, "Fast food Nation", go rent the DVD. Watch especially that part where the guy working high on speed falls into the meat grinder. (If you can get even that far).
My uncle, runs a dairy megafarm and employs Mexicans almost in the same way as in the movie, because they work cheap. One of them got his arm broken by a bull, and was forced to go back to work the very next day. (I doubt you would even want to go to school the very next day, let alone try to herd cows with a broken arm.) When he begged time off, my uncle fired him. When his friends came to his defense he fired all of them, then a strike ensued.
I don't know what happened after that, but I heard there was a big standoff, and I'm glad I wasn't there. My grandfather would be rolling over in his grave, but that's just the way things are nowadays, thanks to big food profiteers taking over and victimizing the consumer as well as the farmer. And, if they didn't treat workers that way, their competitors would, and possibly edge them out of business.
That is just the state of things, and this condition of labor cheapens us all. You help it along every time you pick up a gallon of cheap milk, or go to Burger King, and we're not even talking the animals living conditions, or the quality of the food we're eating here..

Answer 8

Here's pictures of "good eats." Not!

http://www.all-creatures.org/anex/index.html

Answer 9

Why do people get outraged when
a few animals are tortured....and yet
think its ok for millions at a time to
be tortured & their body parts be literally
torn off so you can eat their legs, rumps,
bellies, hearts?

It takes a small person
to torture a defenseless animal
and an even smaller one to eat it.

Answer 10

You could read this: (From Rolling Stone, not even a vegetarian group)
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters

Or you could watch this (contains graphic footage of undercover cruel treatment of chickens at a major KFC chicken supplier):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=csw4WAMaZDE

Those are the two worst things I've seen in a while. :-/