A Veggie's Tale

A little more backstory because I think that why I became a vegetarian in the first place has to fit in somewhere. For most of my life before becoming a vegetarian, I ate mostly chicken, some beef, some pork, but mainly chicken. I'd buy it at the supermarket, getting the best price I could. Never really a thought about where the meat came from. It couldn't really matter that much right?

In 1998, I was working for a company that did phone support for animal pharmaceuticals, mainly those used with large animals in the chicken, pig and cattle industries. This included growth hormones and antibiotics. The more phone calls I dealt with, the more I was realizing how these substances were not only universally used in industrial meat production, which is where most of the meat that America eats comes from, but also misused, overused, etc. The kicker, was being sent out with a sales rep to a factory production hog farm in Eastern North Carolina.

The farm was contracted by the largest hog production company in the US and raised hogs from piglets to slaughter. The pigs were confined in pens in huge warehouses which we toured.
The first thing that hit me was the smell and the second thing that hit me was the smell. I've never smelled anything like that. Worse than anything, and as some of you know, I've smelled a lot of horrendous things most people haven't (including decomposing tissue). This was different, it was like hitting a nauseating brick wall. It was in my throat, in my lungs.

We entered the first building and saw the sows. The sows are kept in a variety of small stalls. They spent the majority of their lives not being able to move freely, never seeing the sun, never feeling grass. The tour only got worse from here.
I don't know how many shades of green I had turned, but one of the employees came up to me and asked if this was the first large production farm I had visited. I told him that I was a bit shocked by it. He said that he had worked at several places before this one, and that it was cleaner here than anywhere else he had been. He also said that if I really wanted to see the worst of the worst, I should visit a chicken facility.

I came home, drank half a bottle of wine, threw out every piece of meat in my house, and vowed to never eat meat again. That smell was in my hair, my clothes and stuck in my throat for days.

My decision to give up meat was set off by the horror of the conditions that the animals existed in and thinking that the meat I was eating every day was coming from facilities just like the one I visited or worse, much worse. But also the knowledge that everything I was eating had been influence by mass amounts of unchecked hormones and antibiotics.

When I decided to start eating meat again, I knew that the meat I was going to eat was going to come from outside of industrial meat production.