The woes of the ethical and moral tribulations:

Meat not Murder

Hello again! As a member of Food Innovation, I carried out my work placement in The Happy Pear, which boast a vegan and vegetarian ethos. Like the majority of the population, I love meat. I love the saltiness, the umami and for the love of God, chicken nuggets. In contrast, I am also an animal lover. Due to my city - slicker upbringing I have never had the pleasure to meet a real - life cow, pig or chicken, or any farm animal for that matter. The only interaction I have with them is on my plate. 

Despite my love for meat, my love of animals has taken over. My worst fear had come true from working at The Happy Pear - I was converted. Honestly, they just opened my eyes to the variety and flavours of vegetarian food, what really converted me to vegetarianism is the film Okja on Netflix (embarrassingly enough). The film extracted my empathy for pigs and viewed them in a different light- they are intelligent, loving animals that I myself would class them in the same category as dogs or cats, there's not much difference. Becoming a vegetarian is difficult. I miss meat, yet the thoughts of eating pork or beef turns my stomach. Chickens are different, I never really liked them so I have no problem eating them. Anyway, I digress.

My point of sharing my experience with you is to highlight my internal ethical and moral turmoil with this Bioprocessing project. We are looking to extract bioactive peptides from waste meat. My contribution this week was to research statistics and just general background information about the meat industry and the waste it produces. When I decided to become a vegetarian, I understood that if I were to be totally against the concept of meat consumption and processing, I would be eliminating a large part of the industry I will be imminently entering - which is silly. This narrows any possible employment prospects in the future.

The bioprocessing project I am currently involved in is my very first task that allows me to separate my personal beliefs from my professional work. Although I don't agree with the slaughter of animals for consumption, it still happens and probably always will. Therefore my beliefs do include that once the animal has given its life, it may aswell be put to proper use. During my research I was honestly horrified to learn that over 26% of a cow is wasted once it has given itself to the industry. This is certainly a motivator towards our project, if we generate the idea of meat waste as a substrate to extract bioactive peptides, who knows what further research could create in order to utilize meat to its full extent. By all means, it was inherently difficult to read about pig tails, cow brains and chicken gizzards at 9am - but this is just the beginning. If I want to be an active member of the food industry, I have to toughen up so an entire segment of the industry isn't off limits for me.


On that note, I would like you to meet my friend Hank. Please think of him the next time you're tucking into a monstrous fry or a bacon sambo. This video below was created by ViralPaws and shared on YouTube with access to the general public. To my knowledge there are no copyright infringements occurring as the creator has not specified any particular patent or copyright claim to the rights of this video; it is assumed that they belong to the creator.