Thoughts On Being Mostly Vegetarian

One of the things that motivated me to go down the route of being a vegetarian was a need to try and limit the amount of pain and suffering that is in the world, and unfortunately industrialized animal production is a mess of suffering. Because of that I have severely limited my animal consumption. I say mostly vegetarian because I don't read every label to see what small ingredients are included in it. For example McDonalds apparently may have beef extract in their fries.  I wasn't aware of that for quite some time, but then again I also rarely eat them and since it's not actual meat I don't necessarily feel very guilty about it.

Last week when watching The Good Place, they discovered that there is an issue with the way they determine points to get you into the good place. The problem wasn't that no one was good, it was that there were a lot of unintended consequences that even when people tried to make good choices there were so many other things they were making choices about without even knowing it. I thought that it was a very interesting thought about the world we live in today. We are detached from the consequences of our choices because the world is so integrated.

For example, when thinking about eliminating meat to avoid suffering, it probably just results in suffering in other areas. The low paid workers who produce and harvest vegetables are exploited and while it may be different it is still not the best conditions and the choices that I'm making to eat more vegetables is helping to prop up these systems.  The same is true when we purchase the latest iPhone, computer, or other technology.  All of these things that we use we are far from the people who mine the resources used to make the chips, and the people who work low wages to build them for us. We don't know the choices we are making and how it's affecting people because our systems are so separated that we aren't forced to see see them for ourselves.

We live in a complicated world and it's hard to understand what we're doing.

Picture(s) of the Day: 
Picture 15

So I'm going to be a commercial for a minute, but we found this degreaser cleaner by Method. We weren't sure how well it would work but figured we'd give it a try. It really freaking worked well! like two wipes and the entire thing was spotless. I was so excited I took a picture. This is being old.