A Meat Eating Mindset
If you’ve followed my health journey, you may know I used to be a strict vegan, and vegetarian before that. When I began eating meat again for my health, I struggled with my eating guilt with consuming “flesh”, as I had read on oh-so-many social media pages.
So while I struggled with my disordered eating patterns, habits, and mindset, I looked to tradition and ancient history of how our ancestors ate to retrain my brain.
For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors have hunted and killed animals for consumption and nourishment. Bone broths and organ meats were used to cure different aliments and other parts of the animal were used for clothing, shelter, food, and innumerable traditions. The most significant difference between then and today, besides the disturbing nature of factory farming (I’ll get to that later), remains that our meat eating practices have fallen short of gratitude.
Buying meat in a store has desensitized us to the animal’s sacrifice for our health it had once so graciously made. However, all over the world, indigenous tribes and native peoples still practice their hunting rituals as our ancestors once did. In northeastern Canada, the Cree people hunt Caribou – which comes as quite easy considering the animals stand still when caught. The Cree explain that the animal “offers itself up quite intentionally and in a spirit of goodwill, or even love towards the hunter”, as the substance of the caribou is not taken, it is received for good health [1].
In Scotland, hunters observe a custom called the Gralloch Prayer. According to the tradition, saying a prayer of thanks or gratitude for the life of the animal is said just before the first cut of the deer occurs.
Quote: Life given for life. That me and mine may eat with thanks for the gift, that me and mine may give thanks for your own sacrifice of blood and flesh, life given for life.
The Germans, for example, prayed to St. Hubert, the patron saint of all hunters. They built forest chapels on their hunting lands and made worship mandatory [2]. Native Americans famously sprinkled tobacco over a fresh kill to offer respect for its given life, believing that tobacco connected them to the spirit world. From the Ojibway tribe, their beliefs centered around everything existing for a purpose – the circle of life. They believed animals were created to feed their people and give them strength, and that if they stopped hunting, it would be evidence that they were no longer grateful for the gifts their creator had given them.
Countless examples of mindful meat eating practices still exist all over the world, so why are we still so disconnected in America?
Many find hunting grotesque, and with the vegan trend on the rise, we are moving farther and farther away from the way in which our ancestors ate and how that still very strongly dictates our anatomy.
So before eating your next steak, chicken, or salmon dinner, regardless of type or origin, take a moment to express gratitude, say thanks, and humbly receive the nutrients by means of the next stage of the animal’s life – to bring you good health.
As an ex-vegan and still recovering from the malnutrition the lifestyle affected me with, I found this practice to be quite helpful in my own overcoming of self-inflicted “eating guilt”.
Sourcing above all, matters most when it comes to gratitude and eating meat for your health. Factory farming as opposed to pastured farms, has disrupted the natural function and tradition of honoring our food and where it came from to supply us with nourishment. Animals are mistreated, unable to eat their native diets, let alone move about freely or naturally.
However, buying from local farms or farmers markets, becoming a part of a CSA from a pasture farm (even companies like Butcher Box will ship out 100% grass-finished meat), all make it easy to support the farmer rather than the factory. Not to mention, supporting pastured animals and farms also supports sustainability of the environment through something called Carbon Sequestration. But, that’s a big topic for another day.
To learn more about how grazing animals regenerate soil and contribute to a carbon sink (want to save the world, anyone?), continue with this link here.
Before I go, I will leave you with this quote from organic pasture farmer Diana Rogers from the Sacred Cow Project:
What’s the most “moral” way to eat?
If you truly are looking to cause the least harm to animals, be the most sustainable and ethically responsible with your food consumption, then your lens has to open a bit to include some other questions. If you know animals will die for your soy products, is it ok to eat them it? If you know that the spraying of non-organic bananas also means schools and local homes are also sprayed with toxic chemicals, causing incredible illness and birth defects, is it still ok to eat them? Is it ok to eat tomatoes when you don’t know who harvested them? If you knew that a 12-year-old girl had worked a 12-hour day instead of going to school so that you could have red tomatoes in January, are tomatoes more virtuous and cleaner than lamb? If you don’t see “blood” or bones in your plastic wrapped package of chicken, does that make it easier for you to eat it? Is white meat “cleaner” to eat? Are birds less of an animal than a cow? Is it ok to drink milk from a confined dairy cow, but not ok to eat the meat from a cow that has spent its entire life on pasture? Which process allows the cow to live a good life, (ok, maybe a grass-fed cow has one bad day, but that dairy cow will also die.) Which system is better to support? Are Meatless Mondays changing how cows are treated?
It’s important to understand that a meatless diet is not a bloodless diet [3]. But it is important however, to express gratitude when a life is given to make yours a better one, not only for you, but to honor the entire circle of life that made all of it possible.
[1] Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling, and skill: 13
[2] https://www.americanhunter.org/articles/2016/8/14/post-kill-rituals-matters-of-the-heart/
