Cow: It's what's for dinner.

Take a gander at this delightful diagram of a cow to the left. Who actually looks at a cow and says, ooooooooh, cut #1 up by the shoulder would be LOVELY for dinner this evening. Think they would say that if they were looking at a REAL cow? What about if they were sitting at the slaughter house watching their dinner bleed out? What if they were told that there was a chance their dinner was harboring the dreaded mad cow disease? Hmmm...not quite as appetizing now, is it? Indeed, just thinking a little too much about where meat comes from causes many people to just turn off their thinking caps and settle back into the comforting messages delivered to us through advertising.

The beef council, the dairy lobby, the chicken industry, and the pork industry have done an amazing job maintaining the public diassociation between the meat on their plate, and the animal it came from. Recall the popular slogans:

Beef, it's what's for dinner. (with the snazzy tunes of Aaron Copland's Rodeo: Hoedown playing)
Pork, the other white meat.
Got Milk?

Then we have the equally disturbing ads for the California Milk Advisory Board (the Happy Cows campaign), and Perdue. In these advertisements, the animals are shown, in the case of the Happy Cow ads, happy and content, with a sassy sense of humor to boot. (http://www.realcaliforniacheese.com/)

And then of course we've got the Perdue empire talking about how they feed their chickens marigold petals to make them that nice yellow color, and then showing rather strange footage of a chicken lifting weights . . .enough to make you think--those animals WANT me to eat them! Look how hard they're working!

What's ironic about many of these ads is that in today's world, the low-volume family farm is a rare find. In fact, the meat production industry has really followed the trends of mass prodcution introduced by Ford in the early part of the last century. The term applied to this type of "farming" is called factory-farming. It's prevalent in cattle, pork, poultry. The basic idea behind factory farming is to produce an animal that is as large as can be, at the lowest cost, and to "grow" them in as great a quantity as possible in the smallest space possible.

Imagine what will happen once the bird flu hits the US, or if the mad-cow disease will hit the cattle population in mass numbers. As with other countries, the US government would most likely insititute mass slaughter to contain the disease. How strong will the poultry and beef lobbies be both in limiting the negative press, and creating advertising that generates demand for a tainted product? If anyone could do it, these powerful lobbies probably could.

Someday, the veg*n concept will go main-stream. Until then, I'll happily be munching on my broccoli, and thank my lucky stars that I don't eat meat.