My son came home from camp the other day and said that one of his new friends told him that if he decided to start eating meat, that bacon was the way to go.  Ah, bacon, the gateway meat, so delicious that it threatens to bring vegetarianism to its knees.  Salty and fatty, it contains all the elements of other addictive North American staples, like french fries, burgers, potato chips and deep fried chicken – all white or brown foods that we eat too much of that make us fat and unhealthy, but tastes so good that we can barely get the plastic packaging off before we throw the whole bacon rectangle into the frying pan all at once!

As much as our son’s little friend thought he was being helpful, our boy is unlikely to try meat any time soon.  He still takes pride in the fact that he’s the only one of our family of four who was not brought up a meat eater.  Of course, we know that he has eaten meat, albeit inadvertently:  the rogue shrimp buried in his ‘veggie’ spring roll that we watched go into his mouth, or the little bits of chicken that we found out too late were in his vegetable soup.  Alas his body has been sullied by the flesh of others, but we won’t tell.  He is still a non-guilty vegetarian and we are proud of him.

Back to bacon.  I saw a neat little bacon recipe recently where the bacon strips were stretched in a grid over a metal bowl which was turned upside down and placed in the oven.  After the bacon cooked, it was left to cool and then the bacon filigree was removed from the bowl and it became a nifty little vessel for a healthy salad.  Bacon-strip salad bowls!  What do you know?  You can have your greens and not feel guilty about having bacon too! And you can eat the bowl!  Everyone wins!  I haven’t seen anything so ingenious since the cored-out pumpernickle dip holder. Who comes up with these amazing ideas I ask you?

Not this guy.

(photo credit  GABRIELA PANELA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, courtesy of the Toronto Star)

The Toronto Star recently ran two stories about Quality Meat Packers, an abattoir that is situated in the same neighbourhood as our little white squirrels. For the last seven years I’ve been reminded of this as I smell the farm effluvia that overwhelms the Niagara neighbourhood when I drop my kids off just up the street from where the pig trucks come in. They drive down the narrow side streets and bring their tragic loads to the foot of Tecumseth St., where between 5000 and 5500 pigs are slaughtered each day. When it’s quiet and the air is still you can hear the animals shrieking, and the adults who bring their children to the swings and the wading pool in Stanley Park pretend that they’re not hearing what they’re hearing.

Why so much recent coverage on a slaughterhouse that’s been there for decades?  Is it because there’s no place in a gentrifying neighbourhood for a slaughterhouse?  Do we want the slaughterhouse to move to the nether regions of the GTA because the property values of the houses on the west side of Niagara south of King pale in comparison to others in the neighbourhood?  No.  It’s because we should see what our meat looks like before we slaughter it and that factory farm cruelty doesn’t just happen in the country, but right in the heart of downtown Toronto.

It’s easy to criticize hunting as inhumane (and I do), but when we prefer that our meat no longer resembles the animal it belonged to, we become cowards and easily blame the industry for its cruel practices.  Are we not part of that process?  How is the end consumer not complicit in this cruel process of birth, imprisonment, torture, death and dinner?

Thomas Walkom says, “If more people looked pigs directly in the eye, there would be more vegetarians. But they don’t and there are not.”

Please read articles by Thomas Walkom and Catherine Porter, and visit the link to Toronto Pig Save.

Thanks.