I attended a function this week, where I met a nice young man who turned out to be a commercial butcher for a company that produces specialty meals for a top of the market retailer.
Being a staunch vegetarian (strictly speaking, a non-meat eater, as I do eat dairy, fish and eggs) we had some banter about the merits of eating or not eating meat. When I asked him about his work (in view of the current recession), he informed me that they were working flat out and that they had produced fifty tons of barbecue pork ribs for this particular retailer. When I questioned him further he told me that it took one hundred tons of pork bellies to produce the fifty tons of end product.
I asked him what happened to the waste material and did it go to make pet food? I didn’t like his answer, when he told me it was sold to a major pork sausage manufacturer.
It only reinforced my belief that I had made the correct decision in become vegetarian some ten years ago. I had never been a big believer in sausages as I grew up with stories that butchers recycled everything they could not sell across the counter, as sausages, and in today’s big company strategy, where the bottom line is everything, it is even more likely that profit margins dictate what goes into their production.
It’s so important for people to reduce their consumption of saturated fats and when you are eating processed foods, you have little control over their exact content.
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