The Nicefication of Eating Meat

[Diana]

I'm not saying this is either good or bad; but I can see how growing up with a more sanitized and 'nice' version of meat dishes (chicken's feet was about the most extreme I got), there was some sort of divorce from the fact that this was an actual animal once.

Plenum, you have opened the can of worms.

The only people who are not completely divorced from the animals they eat are the ones who care for them, and slaughter them, themselves. 

Neat little packages of meat in the grocery stores is a great insulator from how the meat got there and where it came from. 

Native Americans used to hunt the buffalo. They only killed what was needed for their survival, and prayed over that. The ones taken were honored by warriors who respected the buffalo as brothers. They didn't waste anything of the buffalo killed. Compare that to buying meat in the grocery store, and even if one prays over it, it is not the same as the Native American who took down the buffalo after it roamed free on the plains, considered it a brother, and honored it in a ritual that was as important as the food itself. I really don't think anyone not of such an indigenous culture, who is living today in our throw-away society, could really understand this relationship. For one thing, we don't NEED to do this such as things are, so the feelings would not be the same.

Clearly we need to adjust our world food sources. We can not go back in time to kill buffalo on the plains as the Native Americans did long ago. (Especially since the white man decimated the buffalo by shooting at them for fun out of trains.) We factory farm both livestock and plant-based foods—neither is ideal. 

We have a society addicted to factory-farmed, processed, cruelty-laden (for all concerned including the buyer) foods. What to do?