Vegucated

Vegucated… that was a very gut-checking documentary.
Twin was at Weight Watchers last night, and I was sitting down to eat dinner, play the Sims 2, and since we cancelled our cable I was cruising Netflix to see what documentaries they had available for background stimulation (because there are passive moments while playing the Sims even with 8 sims in the same dormitory). “Vegucated” was one of those. I was just 10 to 20 minutes into watching the documentary when Twin arrived home.
That was a great documentary… it was way more brutally honest than “Food, Inc.” This may be too much information in the rest of the paragraph… but, they showed hens with 2/3rds of their beaks melted off; chickens with a over-strained uterus (basically hens that are unable to push the egg out); dead chicks on the floor; putting male chicks in augers to be ground into food (for cattle, chickens, and pigs); ripping baby calfs away from their mothers and re-inseminating them; the large ponds of fecal waste… and so much more that I fail to describe.
Two stats really stuck with me:
–          Out of 10 Billion (10,000,000,000)farm animals, 9 Billion (9,000,000,000) are chickens
–          19% of our greenhouse gases are from animal farming; Transportation creates 13%

Twin and I are actually pretty good when it comes to eating vegetarian. My breakfast is shredded wheat with vanilla, unsweetened Almond milk. My mid morning snack is a revolving door of clif bars, honey roasted peanuts, and bread with Nutella. Lunch is usually left-overs from dinner…. Dinner has been mostly meat free for the past week or two. When Twin started going back to Weight Watchers, she picked up a cookbook titled “Veg Power!” The recipes are kind of bland, but Twin did say that WW books tend contain bland recipes. We’ll always be vegetarians though, because baked desserts need eggs to be worthwhile… and cheese is pretty good in moderation.

In my personal life, things are moving along. I have done some deconstruction in the house. That has been pulling staples out of the ceiling, taking down some drywall and window dressings and trim. Outside I fill up the yard waste bin weekly and move cut wood out from the backyard and into the front. The backyard is just about ready for leveling. It will be nice to get the dining room to the point where we are putting in the sliding glass door and build our patio in the back yard.