Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving weekend is upon us. It is such a great time where families come together and spend some quality time around the table. Thanksgiving revolves so much around food, as it is such an important part of our lives. Food is a common denominator that brings us all together. This will be my first Thanksgiving without turkey; without a dead animal on my plate. I am so excited to celebrate my new vegan lifestyle and stuff my face full of goodies. I think some people are afraid if they change their food choices on holidays, it just won’t be the same-or that their family will be uncomfortable or unhappy. But, I think we need to remind ourselves that while food is a great part of the holidays, family is the most important part. Being there for each other and realizing how thankful you are for everything in your life. And, I am so lucky to have a family that supports my new lifestyle. I am also very proud of my vegetarian friends and my vegetarian Mom!
We still haven’t got the specifics down for the meal this weekend, but I will be trying some new recipes. Also, I am very excited to try a Tofurkey with the works! I’d like to leave you with an excerpt from the book “Eating Animals”. Here, the author explains why turkeys are one of the most unloved animals and are killed in the millions each year for our holiday meals.

"All but a negligible number of the 45 million turkeys that find their way to our Thanksgiving tables were unhealthy, unhappy, and-this is a radical understatement- unloved. If people come to different conclusions about the turkey’s place on the Thanksgiving table, at least we can all agree on those three things.

Today’s turkeys are natural insectivores fed a grossly unnatural diet, which can include “meat, sawdust, leather tannery by-products.” And other things, whose mention, while widely documented, would probably push your beliefs too far. Given their vulnerability to disease, turkeys are perhaps the worst fit of any animal for the factory model. So they are given more antibiotics than any other farmed animals. Which encourages antibiotic resistance. Which makes these indispensable drugs less effective for humans. In a perfectly direct way, the turkeys on 0ur tables are making it harder to cure human illness.

It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what's kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead pant, or aerosols and chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.

However much we obfuscate or ignore it, we know that the factory farm is inhumane in the deepest sense of the word. And we know that there is something that matters in a deep way about lives we create for the living beings within our power. Our response to the factory farm is ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, to the most distant, to the voiceless-it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another. Consistency is not required, but engagement with the problem is.

Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept to-night if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.” He did not make (though he might have) a case for the moral value of the birds, their worth to themselves or the ecosystem or God. Instead he observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came in his view, a moral burden had been assumed. He could not be himself if he walked away. Lincoln was a hugely inconsistent personality, and of course he ate birds far more often than he aided them. But presented with the suffering of a fellow creature, he responded.

Whether I sit at the global table, with my family or with my conscience, the factory farm, for me, doesn’t merely appear unreasonable. To accept the factory farm feels inhuman, to accept the factory farm- to feed the food it produces to my family, to support it with my money- would make me less myself, less my grandmother’s grandson, less my son’s father.”
Jonathan Safran Foer