Happy & Healthy
Am I going to become a vegetarian?
My mother was a convinced vegetarian but never fully managed to pass that belief on to me. As in: I have always eaten meat, and still do. croquette nearby and it was just meat that ruled the clock.
It won't happen often that I cook extensively, but if I do buy food, I just get it at Albert Heijn or HEMA. At Appie, I do try to choose organic often, but to be honest, I don't always do that very well. Especially not when I was still studying, I just always bought the cheapest there was. In recent years, I have become increasingly aware, just like the world, that the meat industry is terrible, and since my love for animals is so great, it becomes an increasingly complicated story in my head.
Because giving up meat? Wow, how difficult. Or even further, becoming completely vegan, I'm not sure if I could do that. Moreover, you limit yourself so much in life and I'm just not principled enough to maintain that. But last week I saw a video on Facebook that literally made me cry on the couch and I immediately wanted to throw all the meat products in my house out the window. Maybe you've seen it too, it's a video showing how a broiler chicken comes to be.
Thousands of small sweet fluffy chicks are thrown into large automatic machines without any form of compassion, thrown away alive, trampled and crushed, and then fattened at a ridiculous speed to be shipped to supermarket shelves. I've never seen anything so terrible, so disgusting, so intensely unfriendly to animals. You can watch the video here. Be warned, it's really very intense.
But do watch it. I seriously had no idea that those chickens came to be in such a way. That they were treated like that. You know it's ‘bad’, but what is bad? How bad is it really? That becomes crystal clear through that video.
But for those who, like me, are not ready for a vegetarian or vegan life, how, what, where should we buy animal products to not contribute to this? I asked that to Nina Pierson, founder of salad bar SLA and editor-in-chief of the brand new Bedrock, the online (and beautifully designed) magazine for a conscious and healthy lifestyle. Nina: “Choose quality over quantity, so if you eat chicken, always choose organic. You can just buy that at Marqt or Ekoplaza, and even Albert Heijn has organic chicken. Veggie chicken from the butcher is a delicious alternative and I think that's even vegan. Even better is when you find a farmer in your neighborhood who produces chicken. Because if something is not organic, it doesn't always mean that the quality of life of the chicken is bad. Many Dutch farmers don't have the ‘organic’ label, but do have chickens that have lived under good conditions. And although it tastes a bit different, you can also choose tempeh, which, like chicken, is packed with protein.”
Okay. I hereby solemnly promise to never buy meat, chicken, or eggs that are NOT organic again. And now everyone watch that video , then you won't do it anymore either.
