It happened again. I had to leave my house at 4:35, which means I missed the second half of Tuesday's episode. And then, on Wednesday, I missed the episode entirely. This is what happens when you move to being a one-car family, and your partner gets off work at 4:00 most days. That woman just keeps demanding a ride home.
So, after I picked up Katie last night, we went to Best Buy. And I splurged on a TiVo. I've made a little money lately, and we've done a good job with reducing our debt significantly, so it seemed like if the choice was between just giving up on this project, and shelling out a little cash for the TiVo, I should probably choose the latter. So I did. I came home, set it up with our antenna that receives the HD signal, and we were good to go. TiVo even helped me to learn that Oprah re-airs at 10pm on one of the digital stations. Information that it would have been nice to know, say, on Tuesday. But at least it means that I haven't officially missed Wednesday's episode. I just haven't watched it yet.
I have no idea why I'm so attached to this project. I'm averaging 75 page hits a day, which is nothing. And it's not like I've received any attention over it. So I guess this is just something I'm doing for myself. I'm my harshest critic (except for maybe Erica, of course), and I guess I'm a bit of a taskmaster, too. I would be extremely disappointed in myself if I had to give up something as simple as writing a blog. Which means I'm pushing through. I'm going to keep on keeping on.
But this post is about Tuesday's episode, which was all about Oprah and 378 of her staffers going vegan for a week. Since I missed the second half, I didn't get to see the overall results of the experiment, though we did get a few hints: a bunch of people had gas, and one person lost eleven pounds in the week.
I did get to see enough that I'm considering vegetarianism. I've considered it before, generally after biting down on a piece of gristle in a hamburger, or after watching Food, Inc (if you haven't seen it, rent it or stream it on Netflix immediately). But I've never really thought I could do it. I hardly ever eat red meat, but I do eat a lot of chicken. And now that I'm poor, I can't afford the fancy cage-free, organic, all-our-chickens-get-daily-massages kind of stuff. So that makes it less desirable to eat a chicken breast that's been engineered to be larger than my head, and much more appealing to consider going meat-free.
I'm not going vegan, like Oprah's staff, though. I couldn't do that. It's not that I particularly love cheese or eggs, and there's a chance that if I try vegetarianism, I'll be somewhere between a vegan and a vegetarian. But when Katie makes her famed vegetable barley soup, I'd like to have that chicken stock flavor in it, and I will accept no soy substitutions.
What, exactly, in Tuesday's show pushed me over this edge? Lisa Ling visited a slaughterhouse, and there wasn't a lot that the cameras didn't capture. And while I'd seen a lot of this stuff before, somehow it just affected me more this time around. The thing is, I'm a believer in the fact that the humans are at the top of the food chain for a reason, so I wouldn't be a vegetarian because of the so-called moral aspect of it. As far as I'm concerned, if the cows don't like their lot in life, they could rise up and do something about it. Perhaps that's why we feed them a steady corn diet, so that they're so fat and stupid that they couldn't design and implement a revolution even if they wanted to.
So while I'm not into the whole "if it had a face, I won't eat it" thing, I'm still not too keen on seeing all the gory details Oprah provided on Tuesday. And if I don't want to even see how I get that hamburger, then should I really be eating it? It was weird, because while the slaughterhouse let Ling and the cameras go most everywhere, the one thing they weren't allowed to film was the actual killing of the animal. We got to see Ling's reaction, and hear the sound of the bolt being fired into the cows' skulls, but we couldn't see the act itself.
Which was stupid, because the next part was so much more disturbing. Would I rather watch a cow die in a fairly humane way, or watch the next several steps in its path to your plate, which include taking off its skin, cutting off its hooves (the worst part for me, for some reason), lopping off its head (with what must have been an extremely sharp knife), and then cutting it in half lengthwise? Show me the bolt to the head any day, please.
Yeah, so I know I missed 30 minutes of the show, but I think the slaughterhouse footage was enough for me. I'm not going to make some grand proclamations about my potential vegetarianism, because I haven't figured out exactly what I intend to do. But for right now, I can definitely say that if it's a choice between, say, Tyson chicken and no chicken at all, I'll stick with my vegetables, thank you very much.
Wednesday's episode: American Idol judges, and Jennifer Aniston, Piers Morgan and Adam Sandler.
No comments:
Post a Comment