Day 93

Thoughts: EGGS

Day 93 on the Earth Diet and Day 2 for me on the one week vegan challenge! Another blog from Earth lover Carolyn Wagner “But I buy free range eggs,” is a phrase that I hear often. People try to justify that what they are doing is better than what other people are doing. “Free Range” still doesn’t mean much. The only legal requirement is that chickens have access to the outside. It can still mean that thousands of chickens are crammed in a small shed with maybe a foot of outside running down the side of the shed which is often a strip of mud and still just as crammed as inside. Some people think that by cutting out meat and still consuming eggs (and dairy seen in a previous post) that they are stopping the slaughter of animal. This is false. Factory farming has reached its worst that there are now legal requirements for bigger cages and more food. That still doesn’t mean that they don’t spend their whole life with six other chickens in that cage. And this law has only increased the area needed for each chicken to the size of an A4 piece of paper Male chicks are of no use to the egg industry and are often gassed, thrown into the bin to suffocate or thrown into the grinder alive. The female chicks then have their beaks seared off with a hot blade and put straight into a cage or an over crammed shed. After about 18 months their battered flesh is not fit for human consumption and they are ground down into pet food. There is no happy farm full of retired chickens. In natural circumstances a chicken will live for 10-12 years. Much like a dog. If dogs laid eggs they wouldn’t be treated in this way so what makes chickens so different. Did you know that a chicken can recognize 100 different faces? They have brains and a central nervous system just like we do and if faced with the option of pain or running away you will see that a chicken will run. They have the same desire to remain unharmed as we do. If you consume eggs you are contributing to their deaths. Also from a health perspective one egg has twice as much cholesterol as a hamburger. And eggs are up there with the leading causes of food borne illness. From an environmental perspective we are once again using a lot of water to produce these eggs. We water the grain (which we could just as easily eat.) We water the chickens. The lucky ones get their cages cleaned occasionally. The eggs then have to be washed before they are sent to the shops. By cutting out the middle section and just consuming the grain we could be saving our planet one of its most precious resources. Those are some of the reasons that a Vegan chooses to avoid eggs.

Challenges: I do love my eggs every now and then.

Triumphs: I used to eat 2 eggs a day, now I eat 2 eggs maybe every 2 weeks. Reducing my consumption is important to me.

What I Ate Today:

Breakfast: Beetroot, ginger, celery, carrot juice.

Lunch: The eggplant vegetable dish! Mmmm mmm with garlic and onion and fresh basil and tomato and zucchini and chilli. Recipe below.

Dinner: Nectarines. Cherries. Pineapple.

Dessert: Chocolate balls.

Snacks: Alfalfa sprouts.

Exercise: Run on the beach.

271 Days To Go!!!