Did you read the story? The headline almost made me spit out my cashew milk: “The surprising number of American adults who think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.”
No, it wasn’t in The Onion.
Citing a survey by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy, The Washington Post recently reported that 7 percent of voting-age Americans—that’s about 16.4 million people, more than the populations of Michigan and Maryland combined—believe that brown cows produce chocolate milk.
The story went on to say that the surprising thing about this figure is actually that it isn’t higher, given that our food literacy hasn’t improved much since the 1990s, when a U.S. Department of Agriculture study found that nearly one in five adults didn’t know that hamburgers are made of the flesh of slaughtered cows.
What’s genuinely far-fetched is that the American Farm Bureau Foundation and other outfits with more than a casual interest in keeping people blissfully ignorant about the way milk, meat and eggs are produced want to sharpen the nation’s food IQ. To do so, they claim, they’re working with teachers to add information about farming to lesson plans.
However, any lesson courtesy of the meat, egg and dairy industries should be taken with a large grain of salt, because odds are that they’ll gloss over the deprivation and cruelty that define the lives of cows, pigs, chickens and other animals on factory farms—and the way these gentle animals are horrifically killed.
If people knew how animals suffer for their fleeting mealtime enjoyment, most would be so appalled that they’d make the compassionate decision to stop piling their plates with meat, dairy foods and eggs and to start saving animals’ lives by going vegan.
Let’s give that theory a test run.
First, the facts about animals used in the food industry:
Inquisitive and intelligent, cows form close friendships, preferring the company of just a few other cows. They like to sleep near their families (arrangements are determined by their rank in the social hierarchy), get excited when they solve problems, and have been known to walk miles to find their calves. “The cow,” Mahatma Gandhi said, “is a poem of compassion.”
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Yet cows raised for their flesh and milk aren’t treated compassionately.
Crammed onto filthy feedlots, those raised for meat are given no painkillers when they’re castrated and their horns are gouged out. Before being slaughtered, they are shot in the head with a bolt gun but are often still conscious when their throats are slit.
In the dairy industry, calves are torn from their distraught mothers when they’re only a day old—males often end up in veal crates or pens, while females are slaughtered immediately or condemned to a life tethered to a milking machine. Their bodies give out after a few years, and then they’re trucked to the slaughterhouse.
Pigs aren’t just smart—they enjoy listening to music, can play video games, respond to their names, form strong bonds with other pigs and protect their young.
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That pack of bacon has a story, too. Pigs aren’t just smart—they enjoy listening to music, can play video games, respond to their names, form strong bonds with other pigs and protect their young.
But piglets born on factory farms are only days old when they’re taken from their mothers. Because the stress of confinement often leads to cannibalism and tail-biting, farmers break off the ends of their teeth with pliers and chop off their tails. They receive no painkillers.
Those neatly wrapped chicken breasts once belonged to smart, sensitive birds who could understand cause and effect and recognize more than 100 animal and human faces. Chickens experience REM sleep, meaning that they dream, and like cows and pigs, they love their young: Hens cluck to their eggs, and the chicks peep back from inside the shells.
More than 8 billion chickens—who spent their lives crowded into windowless, ammonia-filled sheds—are slaughtered for their flesh each year, typically when they’re not even 2 months old.
Deemed useless by the egg industry, millions of day-old male chicks are crushed to death in high-speed grinders each year. Once hens can no longer produce eggs, they’re shackled upside-down, machines slit their throats and they’re immersed in scalding-hot water to remove their feathers—often while still conscious.
But when children are actually taught what happens to animals used for food, many want no part of it—after all, they understand better than most adults that animals are their friends, not their food. Harvey Diamond, who co-wrote the best-selling diet and lifestyle book Fit for Life, was onto something when he proposed putting a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit.
“If [the baby] eats the rabbit and plays with the apple,” he said, “I’ll buy you a new car.”
There is no way he’d lose that wager, but if you aren’t the betting type, try this: Teach your kids where food comes from—don’t shield them from the truth.
They’ll take it from there.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock