Yesterday I spent like 2 hours working on my menu for this week and my shopping list with plans to go shopping last night after my kids went to bed. I had alot of great chicken and beef recipes that I was going to try out from my low fat cookbook I have and was really excited about them.

I popped on the roku (netflix instant player) and desided to watch and episode from season 3 of "30 days" .... I absolutly love morgan spurlock and have been watching 30 days when ever it comes out on video since the show started 5 years ago. If you have never watched it before it takes someone usually of an opposite oppion on a subject and makes them spend 30 days learning about what they are opposed to... for example placeing a person who is pro-choice into a pro-life halfway house for women who have been talked out of having abortions.

Usually the people on both sides end up learning something really valuable from the opposing side... sometimes not.

Anyway last night I watched one about a guy from NC who was a hunter and loved meat and just dident understand vegans or animal rights activist.... They had him for 30 days move into a household of all vegans/active animal rights activists/peta members. They had him go on protests and eat the vegan diet and watch some of there peta shock videos and none of that seemed to faze him much.

Then they sent him to this animal rescue place that rescues sick and dieing farm animals from the huge farms. Wow I never knew how bad those places were. They said that they just pack the cows in there and they dont even have room to move because there are sooo many cows. Thats how they keep prices cheap and move them on to the customers. So basically that is my sams club / walmart beef standing out there in piles of there own poo. Then they said that the milk cows they have to be pregnant all the time to keep them producing milk... so they get them pregnant and then imediatly after the calf is born they take it away from the mother and put it in these boxes that are only as big as the calf its self and it cant walk or anything... they put rope around the calfs necks and tie there heads down to the ground so they cant move. They showed them rounding up some of the calfs to take to slaughter and it made me start crying because they are so rough with them... like 3 big guys grabing there tails and ears.... it was so sad.

Then the absolute worst part is that when the cows get sick (which most of them do living in conditions like that) and die they just take the dead cow and grind it up for hamburger. OMG.... I dont know if thats really true but I can see it with these big companys expcially since all the meat is found to be deseised every 6 months anyway (mad cow and all that).

Well after watching that I seriously did not want to eat that crap anymore. I love meat and all that and I dont really want to go vegitarian but I am not in the possition to buy meat that I know was well cared for when it was living and is not full of nasty stuff that I dont want going into my family and myself. The only thing that I can afford is sams club meat (which is what I have been buying) and I just dont want to eat that crap anymore.

So last night I found myself up untill after midnight changing my menu around, trying to find meat substatutions for the same recipes... which wasent too easy. I ended up with tofu for a few things which scares me because I have only had tofu once and my mom cooked it... and she obviously did not know how to cook tofu. yuck! Im gonna try a few things though and hopefully find a happy medium in some form.

The chickens dident bother me as much as the cows but they werent treated much better and I know they are injected with a whole bunch of crap too. So Im just going to go ahead and cut out chicken too.

So I geuss Im going to try to go vegitarian... Im still going to eat dairy and prob sea food (if all the seafood isent killed by the oil spill that is ::hang head::) I Just cant see myself eating this meat that I dont know what happened to it before it came to me or how horribly it was treated. I dont want to end up making my family sick and I cant get the imagies of how thouse animals are most likely treated while living and after they are slautered.

~ Jess