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PETA Using Games To Spread Its Message
Cooking Mama is a series of games for the Wii and the DS in which players go through a number of steps to prepare meals using a variety of recipes. Last week, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) created their own Flash-based parody of the game, highlighting the use of meat products by having a more bloody-minded Mama do things like pull the internal organs from a Thanksgiving turkey. Cooking Mama's maker, Majesco, issued a light-hearted response, pointing out the vegetarian meals in the game. PETA then said they plan to continue making parody games as a way of "engaging the public."
Vegetables are what food eats.
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Of course it would be based on the actual experiences of PETA staffers: http://www.petakillsanimals.com/
I grew up with a love of animals and I'm also a culinary student and an aspiring chef. As such, I eat meat. Lots of meat. I can't get enough of it.
I satisfy my moral issues by caring about where my meat comes from. I won't give money to super farms that raise animals in poor conditions and give them antibiotics, steroids and cheap feed. These farms also often employ workers who really don't give a rats ass about the treatment of the animals or the quality of the meat that they're producing. They're getting paid crap and they follow the procedures in order to keep their jobs without any kind of care what-so-ever. A close friend of mine worked on such a farm when he was a teenager and went vegetarian.
I prefer free-range, organic. Before I started cooking I used to think those were just buzz-words. But in Canada, the US and the UK they're not just random marketing gibberish. They're regulated. You can't advertise a product as organic unless it's been certified (and in Canada, where I'm from, the packaging has to state the name of the certification body that certified the product - I can't say for other countries). Free-range means the animals aren't confined in cages and are free to roam around the farm etc. I firmly believe that this meat is better for you and far better quality. It's produced by people who care. They care about the product that they're selling you and thus they care about the animal. The end result is meat that tastes better and comes from an animal that wasn't mistreated.
The abattoirs are also important. In countries that regulate, animals need to be slaughtered in licensed abattoirs that slaughter the animal in a humane method. Cows are slaughtered by injecting them with a powerful sedative to knock them unconscious and then their throat is cut and the animal is drained. It's over very fast. Most other animals are slaughtered via a powerful electrical current through the brain, followed by draining.
If you can't get over raising an animal and killing it for food then it won't matter how the animal is raised or slaughtered. The way I see it, the earth is extremely brutal. If you look at animals that use venom to subdue their prey sometimes it's terrifying what the prey goes through. Humans can be better but in the end we're just another animal. Everything eats other life, even vegetarians. If we want to take a moral high ground then I believe we can do that with how we treat our food before it becomes food. Not all farms mistreat their livestock and there's a whole industry growing around farms that give their livestock better lives than many humans get.