Speaking of sacrificed animals and meat

Customs are important but let me remind you of a few things on the animals to be sacrificed during Eid al Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice).

You may have seen extremely strange posters prepared by the Humanitarian Aid Foundation: “Sacrifice means making good deeds to live long!” The presumption is that meat of the animals sacrificed for God are supposed to be distributed among the poor and in order to spread mercy and good deeds among all.

One naturally expects a picture about such distribution on the poster, but instead sees a pretty little girl hugging a cute lamb. The concept of charity among humans is oddly associated with the death of a living creature. Apparently, a serious communication flaw is at issue in this foundation.

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Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, Rajendra K. Pachauri says that every man on earth can fight with climate change by reducing meat consumption on his own account. In fact, stock farming is one of the most important reasons behind climate change. Pachauri won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 together with former U.S. Vice President and environmental activist Al Gore.

According to the data released by the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, hosting an international conference on food security recently, stock farming has a critical share in greenhouse emissions; one fifth of the emissions come from stock farming. This is more than what transportation contributes to emissions. Recent estimations show that the figure will double by 2050. In order to obtain one animal protein, eight plant proteins are needed.

If six billion people had eaten as much as the French eat meat, we would’ve needed 36 billion animals and a 70 million square kilometer field to feed them. But, we only have 19 billion animals and a total of 50 million square kilometers of agricultural fields to meet the needs of all living creatures.

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If you still want to eat meat, I recommend the Web site www.karabasan.net close to Çiftçi-Sen (Farmers Union), using the motto “Land, Honor and Life.” In addition to plenty of information on our dying agriculture and farming, scientific information on healthy eating is also posted on the site.

“Our grandfathers and grandmothers were eating fatty meat but had no cancer or cardiovascular illnesses because animals were fed in meadows, not fed artificially, or rarely fed, by corn, barley, wheat and beet remains or oily seed pulps. Greens such as meadow grass and alfalfa have omega-3 fatty acid. Animal fat contains stearic acid, a form of saturated fat acid, if the animal is grass-fed in meadows. In other words, fat our grandfathers used in let’s say Adana kebap was in fact a sort of olive oil. But fats of animals fed by feeds enriched with starch and glucose are in the form of palmitic acid. Palmitic acid is absorbed by intestines in lower temperatures. Palmitic acid is one of the three saturated fatty acids causing arteriosclerosis by oxidizing cholesterol. Among death reasons, meat consumption holds the second place following alcohol and tobacco put together.”

“What should we do? We have to take action to improve meadows. Studies on the subject have revealed that capacity can be increased by 20-30 fold. Model of feeding should be included in the subject of organic stock farming. It is also necessary to set up marketing networks based on farmers’ cooperation that will help sales of milk, cheese, yogurt and meat of grass-fed animals.”

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Renown French gourmet Brillat-Savarin, who lived in the 18th century, used the aphorism, “Tell me what you eat I’ll tell you who you are.” That can be translated today as “You are what you eat.” It means every food you eat affects your health directly. If we consider this for sacrificed animals or any animals that are slaughtered in slaughterhouses, toxins they are discharging throughout the panic, fear and death they feel, are directly transferred into people who eat their meat.

Greetings for Kurban Bayram!