The Absurdity of ‘Mindfully Produced Meat’

I’m not going to blather on too much about this. Lately, I’ve been hearing the phrase ‘mindfully produced meat’ used when discussing the choice to eat meat produced by local CSAs and farmers' markets instead of corporate agribusiness interests that provide most consumers with their meat products.

I want to challenge the popular term ‘mindful’ as it’s being used lately. I’m not sure most people understand what it means. ‘Mindfulness’ means more than most people think, and the term is being as egregiously misused as the terms ‘organic’ and ‘pasture raised’ relative to our food.

It doesn’t take a lot of research or any brilliant insight to fully realize that these are just keen marketing terms that have risen in response to consumers’ growing awareness of the monstrous processes behind the production of meat products of all kinds. We want to keep feeding ourselves and our children animals, but being creatures of conscience, need to ease our minds about it. Language is a great tool to that end.

Rhetoric has been introduced to keep consumers buying animal products while still feeling good about their choices. It’s a straightforward and perfectly legal marketing ploy. And it works beautifully.

The notion of mindfully produced meat is absurd. A cow destined for slaughter who spends her life grazing a pasture on a small farm in my neighborhood will find herself just as slaughtered, in just as much terror of her own suffering, as the cow shackled all her life in a corporate battery facility, producing milk until her body is dry and deadened, then sent to finally die.

In the end, someone must still torture, terrorize, slit the throat of, bleed out, and disembowel a cow in order to sell a steak. And to attach the notion of mindfulness to this abject horror is almost as appalling as the act of slaughtering an animal who, like you and I, wants desperately to be free from suffering, and who wants to live.

And as for what mindfulness is? All I have is a teaching given me by a Rinpoche I had the honor of meeting when I was a graduate student at Wesleyan, before I began ngondro.

There was once a Sufi mystic named Nosreddin. He’d lost the key to his house. That night, he went looking for his house key outside, under a street lamp. A passerby asked him what he was doing.

“I lost my house key somewhere in my house,” he said.

“Why are you looking for your house key outside, when you lost it inside your house?” the woman asked.

“Because it’s dark inside,” he replied.

We need to be looking for what we’re looking for in the right place. Even if it’s hard or fearsome to go there. We can only experience mindfulness internally. We can’t borrow or buy it as part of a marketing policy designed to sell us food that is born in suffering. We must look for this freedom – this thing called mindfulness - within ourselves.

Barbie xo