so i just started a new job as a cashier at a grocery store... this store sells a lot of health food, but also happens to have a rather extensive selection of meat. the health food aspect i love, but am completely grossed out by the meat that comes through my line. it's ridiculous...people buying steak after steak after steak, fried whole chickens, raw meat wrapped up in plastic, paper, and in rolls....sometimes amounting to hundreds of dollars. i rang up a $600+ order the other day, much of which was meat. i honestly hate even touching the meat, especially if it's raw in plastic and i can see it, or if it's cooked and leaking juice out of the package onto me. how can people afford to consume meat like this...or actually...how can they stand to live like this??? i thought i was serious about being a veggie before....but i'm even more sure now =)
lol... I hear ya. The other day I was in the store picking up more raw fruits & veggies... and I think I had a bar of organic dark chocolate in there too. A guy came up behind me in line with his cart literally loaded with frozen meat, raw meat, processed meat and deli meat... I mean TONS of meat; enough to fill a medium sized chest freezer. He took one look at my groceries out there on the belt, and said "I guess someone else is buying the real food for the party then, huh?" When I told him it was all for my family, he just started laughing & informed me that I was a rabbit. I didn't say it, but all I could think was "well if I'm a rabbit, you must be a MOSQUITO!" I have never seen that much meat all in one grocery cart before in my life. It looks like he cleared half a shelf off in the meat department. How can people eat like that? I don't mean the fact that they eat meat... I did that myself until just a short while ago. I mean eat almost nothing BUT meat! What ever happened to balancing a diet??? love, mom
i don't know...i really don't. what really sold me on going vegetarian was seeing the numbers on how much land it takes to produce one lb of meat vs one lb of grain- while i'm not big into animal rights, i am very much into human rights and making the best use of the earth's resources to provide for everyone. i actually haven't been able to find those statistics since i came across them the first time, though...anyone know where i can find them?
Whjen people get a shit load of meat like that they're not necessarily going to it it all at once, they may be sticking it in a freezer and not needing to go shopping again for a few months. Then again they could be having a barbecue.
I once had a guy come through my check out at work and bought $350 worth of sausages, which equates to about $600 US, I asked him if he was freezing any of it and he said "No its for a family barbeque tomorrow...." SHEESH, thats a lot of family
Do you see a parallel between your situation and that of a Catholic pharmacist filling birth control prescriptions? I know my local Coop has continuing discussions among the membership about whether meat should be sold. So far, the profit has tipped the balance to the "sell meat" side. How can they afford it? I don't know. It might console you that those high consumers of meat are probably steeped in debt, worried about money and less able than you to enjoy what money they have left from their expensive habits. Good luck. Maybe the health food section will really take off.
I'm actually more disgusted at the amount of shitty processed meat thatt is sold in my store. Like 'chicken' filits that are virtually giant chicken nuggets and everything battered and crumbed. I cant believe what some people feed themselves and their families, its disgusting!
it's not exactly a dilemma, though i will admit to a bit of a sense of superiority on my part in this regard! i'm pretty passionate about living life in the best way possible and about making the best use of the world's resources i possibly can- and consuming meat doesn't fit into these ideals. when i look at the people buying such outrageous amounts of meat, i see people who are making for the most part poor use of the resources with which they've been blessed. this is not to say that anyone who serves any kind of meat is being wasteful, but there's simply no excuse for consuming meat in the sheer volume we do as a culture. it's not healthy- and when you look at the amount of resources needed to produce 1 lb of beef vs. those needed to grow the same volume of grain, it becomes apparent that it's the very height of selfishness on our part to expect to be able to consume meat as we do when so many in the world live on so little.
Anyone who works regularly with the public can easily find evidence that humans are really, realy stupid.
found out today that one of the sackers is a veggie too...kinda excited about that actually. he's 16 or 17 and has been vegetarian for almost 5 years- kinda makes me wish i'd been one for longer. but anyways, he agrees that it's absolutely revolting how much meat people consume as a whole.
You know what the most disgusting aspect of going grocery shopping, now i see this all the time and it makes me want to throw up, when i got up to the belt and see meat juice all over the belt it makes me sick to my stomach.
yeah that's nastier than the meat itself, and has caused one normally messy and disorganized me to become a bit OCD about cleaning my belt and register with disinfectant! any chance i get, i whip out the spray bottle and paper towels and clean off everything that's been touched by meat or other messy food. now if only i could get this new obsession with clean to carry over to the rest of my life...
