The Artlessness of Slaughter.

There was no moon for weeks it seemed, and then a few days ago it was back. Setting into the ocean, getting brighter and later each night passed. It’s hard to predict these things…

The moon has nothing much to do with this post.

This post about baking bread and killing animals.

Steve is unparalleled at baking bread from scratch, in the oven, and has been swearing up and down that it’s the simplest thing ever to be done in life, actually what he really said was that baking bread is basically the most selfish form of lovemaking and that when people compliment you on the finished product (as they invariably do, when you make homemade bread which doesn't have the consistency of rock) that they might as well be congratulating you on having a great wank.
True story.
So, as he was in India last week, and because of a yearning for home made hot seedy bread, I had to roll up my sleeves and give it a bash, so to speak. And I have to say, now having done it, I realise making dough is indeed a very sexy activity. As the yeast comes to life, it gets warm like flesh and the consistency of flesh and is really the colour of (very pale) flesh. Run Adrian Brody through the googler and you’ll see the hue I mean.

Yeast is incredible. It’s an organism which can be dormant for ages, until you feed it, et voila! it comes to life. So then you end up having to pummel it and fold it with your hands until it starts to form this strong warm shape, like a shoulder, so you’re massaging it, and it’s warm and flesh coloured and lovely but you know that what's going to eventually happen is you’re going to kill all these organisms slowly by putting them in a hot oven, but still, you develop this kind of caring and reverence for them. A little bit sexy with the massaging, or not sexy? 

         ...Maybe I’m weird…

I was thinking about how mind boggling it is that someone discovered this aeons ago, obviously accidentally, and slowly, slowly refined this process into an art form, and how beautiful it is (even with all the slaughter of unsuspecting hapless yeast), and how much we now take it for granted and can access a hundred different versions or more of this art daily if we wanted to,  and how incredible humans actually are.

We are AMAZING. Look at all the incredible things we’ve created.

Penicillin, rocket ships into space, aeroplanes.. We can get giddy and euphoric on potions and elixirs we have perfected. We can see people on the other side of the world talking to us in pretty much real time. We are amazing. We have cured so many diseases, we can make people with no legs walk. Did you even know, you can put a sperm and an egg in a test tube, let them hang out for a bit, stick the resulting foetus in a person and pretty much, fingers crossed, ten months later out pops a baby. Incredible stuff huh? That’s us humans.

But we do some really ugly artless things as well.

I visited a friend the other day. Their house smelled like roast lamb. No reference was made to this, I left before I could be offered dinner.

At home watching the brightening moon sink into the ocean and thinking about that smell of roasting lamb, like a thousand volt bolt to the back of the head I got the feeling an animal must have, gazing around a stock yard with eyes that will be, by evensong, blind and lifeless, and having the awareness they and all their companions, milling anxiously, are to be killed, that there is no other way out.

Hearing them.

I haven’t made up my mind about small fish and chicken as I don’t know enough about killing methods and how much suffering goes into the lead up but I know for a fact that pigs are too smart to be used for meat. They’re smarter and kinder than dogs, and dogs are amazingly smart and kind. Cows are too smart to be used for meat. Horses and donkeys are too smart to be used for meat. Deer and goats and sheep are too smart to be used for meat. Cats and dogs, please. Octopus and squid and tuna are much too smart to be killed for us to eat.

We are causing too much suffering for a pleasant taste in our mouth. We are thoughtless and greedy. We don’t need these animals lives to be ended for ours to continue. Our existence is not dependant on others’ flesh by any means.

Nobody wants to read things like this because it isn’t cheerful and it reminds them of things that the cheerful sterility of a lovely little package at the supermarket,

or a little brown bag at McDonalds, or Burger King, or KFC,

makes us easily and comfortably forget.

As humans and thus in charge of it all, we create so much that is beautiful and honourable. We are incredible beings with a tremendous and surprising capacity for kindness and empathy. This lets us down. This is not art. This is not celebrating life, and the gloriousness of,

this is ugly and artless.

We all need to try and live without our actions causing harm.

Buying meat products, especially the non-free range variety, actively encourages the perpetuation of, the production of, meat products.

Pretty simple really.

Before sitting down to our bacon and eggs, we really should get on youtube and watch how a battery pig lives and dies.

Go on. You’re not chicken. You’re pretty brave normally, and also, I dare you.

If you're going to choose to do something, at least let it be an informed choice.

Let's all try to live without causing suffering to others, shall we? For a week even. And make art and bake bread. I bet we’d be happier for it.