Gene Baur: What's Eating Us?

By Gene Baur, Huffington Post

I grew up eating animals, as did the vast majority of us living in the U.S. today. But, I never really made a conscious choice to eat animals. I just picked up the habit without thinking about it. Everybody around me was engaged in the practice and we assumed it to be normal. As Jonathan Safran Foer points out in his timely and compelling book, Eating Animals, we "have a strong impulse to do what others around us are doing especially when it comes to food."

Unfortunately, bad has become normal in terms of how we eat and how we produce food. Our health, our planet, and other animals suffer by our harmful and illogical habit of consuming meat, milk and eggs. Despite agribusiness asserting that an animal-based food system is scientifically sound, our food choices are more about feelings and custom than about reason.

In fact, a growing bed of scientific evidence is making it clear that animal agriculture makes no sense. Why do we eat foods that make us sick? And why do we buy into an agricultural system that is responsible for the most significant environmental threats of our time, including global warming? Science can show us how to produce meat, milk and eggs in vast quantities, but that doesn't mean we should.

Most consumers don't like thinking about how farm animals are treated, and they are quick to turn away when gruesome pictures show the reality of factory farming. It is the rare miscreant who openly celebrates cruelty and slaughter, but...

Click here to read the entire article...