The Bacon on Your Plate

“Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.” 
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

I am a native of the state of North Carolina where, I am often not so jokingly reminded, there are “more pigs than people” due to the vast industrialized pork industry in the eastern part of the state. Just miles from the largest pork processing plant in the world, my grandfather proudly raised a dozen or so pigs every year, providing his family with meat and subsidizing his retirment from the pigs he sold. 

Even then, my grandfather ate too much pork. He was overweight, and my grandmother constantly fussed at him to eat less and to stop putting so much salt on his food. While he did love his bacon for breakfast, Paw Paw, as we called him, didn’t eat near the amount of bacon that people are consuming today. 

Bacon is everywhere and on everything. From mammoth fast food bacon burgers to bacon wrapped hors d’oeuvres, the smell of cooking bacon is luring people into eating more and more. This is due to a push by the industry and the U.S. government.

I would be willing to let people eat what they please and not take the time to write this post if only this obsession for bacon and “the other white meat” was not causing so much pain and destruction. That is right; eating all of that bacon is wreaking havoc on the environment in my state, it is causing untold suffering of the animals producing it, and it is literally killing people, the ones consuming it. 

What moved me to write this post in the first place, though I have thought about it before, is the fact that many people I know who eat bacon and love it are avid animal lovers, and I began to wonder how an animal lover could turn a blind eye to the pain and suffering at the end of his/her fork. 

Then I thought about the people close to me who eat bacon, and I had to conclude that they just don’t know all the facts, and that would be reasonable to believe because the pork industry doesn’t want us to know what goes on behind their closed doors. In North Carolina, as well as other states, there are Ag-Gag laws that prohibit anyone to film what is happening anyway. 

While no one that I know likes to see any animal suffer, it is time for people to know the truth about their food, especially when it comes to how the animals they eat are treated and killed. If someone consumes meat, it is not good enough to turn away from the suffering and keep on eating. 

Also, it is important for us to know what eating animals does to our bodies. Denial won’t change the science. There is enough science today to show that eating animals is leading to deadly lifestyle diseases such as coronary artery disease or heart disease, diabetes, and even cancer.

My hope, which is the title of the film I am going to recommend readers watch and pass on, H.O.P.E. What You Eat Matters, is that with knowledge, people will stop the suffering by finding something better to eat, better for the animals, better for the planet, and better for their bodies. 

This film doesn’t go into the destruction of the environment that these industries are causing my state, where ground water is polluted, the air is putrid and causes respiratory illnesses, and the run-off pollutes our rivers and causes dead zones at our shores. There are other films that chronical the that destruction. 

However, I believe that people who are compassionate towards domestic animals can awaken their compassion for animals that are being raised for food. I believe that with education, we can turn this Titanic around. I am betting on it because, otherwise, we are in deep pig poop, literally and figuratively. 

So if you eat meat or consume cow’s milk, be responsible and watch this film. Turning a blind eye means that you aren’t willing to account for your choices, and I know you don’t want to do that. Do you?

Photo by Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash