I feel that I haven’t been true to this blog. My entries are not nearly as corny as the title suggests, so here’s an Easter video corny enough to make up for it. It’s silly, but it makes a good point. Just another item to add to the list of “things I didn’t think about pre-veg.”
Eggs don’t just appear in the grocery store packaged by the dozen, and it’s certainly not like the roosts in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Those birds might be bored, having their whims catered to by small orange-skinned men, but at least they aren’t crammed in cages that are so small they can’t even stand upright, nor are they having their beaks burned off so they won’t peck themselves to death.
This weekend marks the end of Lent and, therefore, the end of my vegan Lenten commitment. I can’t say I followed it perfectly, but I can say it was a sacrifice and that I learned a lot about myself and the world that I live in. My religious commitment may be over, but I’m still going to work on it. I’m still going to push myself to think about my actions and how they affect the world around me.
This might be a bit distasteful, but think about this the next time you paint Easter eggs:
Imagine if it wasn’t a chicken’s egg. See this strange custom from another point of view. What if one day a year we extracted unfertilized human eggs, sucked out their insides and dipped them in paint to entertain our children and display around our houses? What if we sold plastic versions of these eggs and awarded children who found them with candy made from breast milk? And even weirder, imagine if we burned, beat, cut, confined and tortured the women that we took these eggs and milk from?
Do we really celebrate this day, the day that Jesus died for man’s salvation, with these customs that support hurting other creatures? I thought we were done with animal sacrifices?
Just some food for thought.
I’ve heard there are vegan chocolate eggs around, I’ll keep my eyes peeled for them, and I hope you will too.
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March 21, 2008 at 7:32 am
asimplesinner
Your analogy would better hold up if we believed as Catholics that Chicken had souls… We simply don’t.
And the tradition set forth is that as unique among creation we are permitted sustenance in this fashion – Biblical accounts of consuming meat are manifold.
It is all well and good if you opt to not consumer meat. As a Greek Catholic for the better part of Lent we observe basically a vegan fast…
But to compare chicken eggs to human eggs or consumption of chircken to the torture of women… No, as Catholics we simply don’t equate the consumption of eggs as animal sacrifice or on par with murder.
And for the record, the average hen lays 220+ eggs a year, and the eggs we eat from the market are unfertilized. Would you be of the thinking that it is better to have the chicken population grow exponentially covering the earth, or to waste unfertilized eggs that can sustain our life?
March 21, 2008 at 6:34 pm
mkvamme
I think you missed my entire point of this blog.
I was showing another way of looking at what we do every year on Easter.
I wasn’t equating eating chicken with torturing chicken (although I also don’t find that to be harm-free).
I was equating keeping chicken in cages so small they can’t stand up with torture.
I was equating burning their beaks off with torture.
I’d also probably equate refusing them materials to be comfortable a form of torture.
I am trying to be vegan, that doesn’t mean I expect everyone in the world to become vegan. What I do expect is for these animals to be treated with respect.
Just because chickens don’t have souls doesn’t mean we aren’t supposed to take care of them. God gave us dominion over them to protect them, not torture them needlessly.
March 21, 2008 at 10:42 pm
asimplesinner
I didn’t miss the entire point of your blog at all – I was pointing to a difficulty with correlating chicken eggs to human eggs.
I find your Lenten commitment laudible, and as a Catholic praise your desire to live a vegetarian lifestyle – something that puts you in firm solidarity with the monks and nuns of the early church who went into the dessert and lived on bitter herbs and bread so as to remove themselves from the cycle of violence and cause no harm.
When you offer “Just because chickens don’t have souls doesn’t mean we are supposed to take care of them.” And this is true and fair. But please let’s be careful not to create a straw man of my argument (I never said we were to NOT be good stewards or in fact WERE supposed to torture animals) OR create a false dichotomy that either one is a vegan or one does not respect animals.
As a Greek Catholic the paiting of pisanky – those very, very colorful easter eggs that are so well painted with the yolks blown out so as to preserve them for generations – is a big tradition in my family and my church. I can’t help but bristle a bit if it is intimated that the consumption of eggs which is good and life giving is a source of scandal for being considered on par with unfertilized human eggs.
This doesn’t consitute animal sacrifice, and the consumption we take part in as other animals is part of the order of nature in this disordered fallen world.
So I respect and applaud your efforts. But let’s be careful to not fall into logical fallacies or misrepresentations of why we do what we do.
March 24, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Red
“What I do expect is for these animals to be treated with respect.”
Amen.