Your examples about seeing live animals and thinking "food" don't resonate with me, because it is neatly packaged by the time it gets to me. I could never, NEVER kill a live animal, skin it, and eat the meat. To me, that's disgusting! :verysick I don't even like to think about it when I'm eating it. I need to remove it from my mind if I want to enjoy my meal.
Several thoughts came to mind on this:
One, this is one of my perennial funny stories, one I'll never tire of telling but I tell it now for a purpose.
Here in good ole' Idaho, when I was working for the computer manufacturing company, we had a girl come in from New Yawk City! We were all just kind of sitting around one day, and I was telling everyone that I had been out earlier explaining to my hens that there were two ways chickens contributed to farm life, and if they didn't want to wind up in the pot, they'd better get to laying. The New Yorker looked at me with horror and disgust and said, "You eat eggs from a chicken!?!" I was like..."Yes, don't you eat eggs?" and she said, "Yeah, but I don't eat eggs from a chicken!" So, I had to ask, "What do you eat eggs from?" and honest to goodness, this 20 something young woman actually said,"From the STORE!"
:o My purpose for telling this story is....people, please, don't lose touch with the reality of where your food comes from.
Two: I grew up on a little ranch, much like the one we have now. We had a milk cow, bred her each year, plus bought a steer and raised meat for butchering and one to auction that just about covered the cost of the cattle, and we raised chickens for eggs and meat as well. I grew up knowing that the cute little calves were going to wind up on a table sooner or later, either our table or someone else's. It was a fact of life. I had to kill and pluck chickens, as well as clean fish sometimes. I also had to help plow, plant, water and weed the garden. I didn't mind doing these things, mainly because the very first winter we lived on that ranch, my father was only working part-time, minimum wage, when he could find work, and we went through a period of time when we would eat oatmeal for breakfast, pinto beans for lunch, and pinto beans with a slice of bread for supper. That truly was all there was for a long while...long enough to help me understand that having a variety of good food is never to be taken for granted. Our animals were well cared for, fed well, had plenty of green pastures to roam around on and a fresh water, mountain creek to drink from. Happy life for them and their end came very quickly and painlessly.
We eventually moved from that ranch to a small town and store bought food and milk became the norm. Where we lived there were many, many Foster Farms chicken and turkey ranches. My brother got work at one of the chicken ranches and sometimes I would go with mom to either drop him off or pick him up. It really was bad, he only worked there for a while. He actually refused to eat chicken for a long, long time. He only started again long after he had married and moved his family out to the country where they could raise their own. Chicken ranches are every bit as bad as PETA makes them out to be. Now, I have been to a number of small, family owned dairys, and honestly, most milk in the stores tend to come from dairys like that, and the cows are happy and well cared for. Your more local egg ranches can be happy enough places for hens as well. But, for the big "brand" names, like Foster Farms....life ain't happy.
Three: Since God didn't create the animals to be food, and they were only given as food when the world was destroyed because of man's sin, I think there is value in at least thinking about where our food comes from, and whether we choose to eat meat or not eat meat (and I choose to eat meat), remembering that the animal has a value to God other than just food for our belly. So perhaps looking into how that steer was treated during it's life should be something to consider rather than just how many minutes to grill it before flipping.