Growing up in Albania, much of our food didn’t reach us in the ‘conventional’ way. I remember a family from the nearby slums giving us one of their prized chickens. After my mother (with the help of a friendly neighbor) plucked the poulty and prepared it for dinner, we were all tasked with eating the little bit of tough meat of what turned out to be a tasteless scrawny, elderly chicken.

Then there was the lamb we ate to celebrate a more-or-less authentic Jewish passover.I still remember my sister posing for a photo next to the stripped, cute and beheaded little lamb. Fortunately, she was still too young to be horrified by the sight of a lamb’s severed head staring at her with its bulging eyes and protruding tongue. We ate the lamb, which didn’t taste that great either.

On a slightly more morbid note, at some point our neighbors decided to get dinosaur-sized pig, kill it themselves, and eat it. We watched from across the street as they performed the superhuman task of killing it by repeatedly stabbing it in the neck. It took about thirty stabs (I didn’t actually count) and much squealing before it ‘passed away’.

Still, despite these negative experiences and culinary letdowns, the thought of eating what was actually slaughtered nearby, by people I knew, was surprisingly satisfying.

Fast-forward to now. I’ve seen the documentary ‘Our Daily Bread’. It wasn’t all that horrifying, but it did showcase the incongruity between our mechanical, impersonal approach to food, and the preceding organic life that we can love, give names, and get attached to. Worse, I’ve watched the video on www.meat.org, which shows quite graphically how some slaughterhouses treat their animals.

All this really made me wonder to what degree I should start to care about the origins of my food. Sure, injustice and poverty in the world eclipse this ‘problem’ from a humanitarian view, but unlike those large-scale problems, this one is very personal and it’s relatively easy to solve my share of the blame.

Should I become a vegetarian? Start hugging trees? Can I still get the occasional Whopper? And to what degree are fruits, vegetables and other food products part of the problem? How would I afford buying ‘certified’ hippy-friendly products? Where will it end? So many questions remain…but at least the aforementioned films have prompted me to give them consideration. Be sure to watch them, and form your own opinion!

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