Grocery shopping…


So you are foraging the fridge and there’s not much what looks interesting. Besides, you’ve got a mini-list of “needs.” Off you go to local grossateria, meant in the kindest way.

You want to make, oh let’s say chili, and you're an omnivore. Your favorite chili recipe requires a pound of ground beef.

Where did that sanitized plastic shrink wrapped package come from? The backs of immigrant workers at what we used to call “slaughterhouses” but now the new and improved word is Abattoirs. Sounds oh so French, nu?

Here’s the problem: No one wants to work where hundreds of thousands of animals come down a processing line where YOU, my abattoir employee, get to drive a chamber bolt into her brain. No one wants to watch the reality of it. No one wants to smell blood for 9 hours a day. No one wants to be a party to the potential for a very large, frightened, but not quite dead cow or pig is flailing and complaining about it’s lot in death.

No one happily signs up to stand for hours stripping feathers off the corpses of spent hens - "spent" because they were nothing more than egg production machines for your dining pleasure. For those who work in the poultry processing industry, those who suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome, from constant bladder infections - (you don't get to go pee any time you want to...)this so called employment differs from slavery in only the most minor points. No one wants these jobs. Just some folks have no choice.

Enter the immigrant – preferably illegal, for she/he will be quiet and subservient. She can be threatened with deportation if she reports unwanted sexual advances. She can be terrified into speedy production even though she's sick or pregnant or works double shifts on 2 hours sleep.

As you indicated in your "tea parties" you don’t want to give them health care, acknowledge their needs, provide them with any basic support. That said, you’ve got no compunction to consuming that which they produce. You’ll put them in harm’s way for your chili.