Meat is a major part of many people’s daily diet, but making this part of your diet as humane as possible can benefit everyone! But how do you eat meat humanely?
What Is Your Standpoint On Consuming meat?
Eating meat is a subject that holds many varied and often conflicting opinions.
While eating meat can hold many dietary benefits for those people who regularly consume meat as part of a daily diet, some schools of thought will immediately disregard meat in any disguise to preserve the animals the meat comes from.
In either case, whether you choose to eat meat or whether you don’t (and the reasons for either camp can be extremely varied!), there are indeed ways you can consume meat in the most humane way possible while honouring the animal the meat is sourced from.
Eating meat in any fashion may not be agreeable to those groups of people who are vehemently against consuming meat products, and that is totally OK.
Still, the very least we meat-eaters can do is to try and create that happy balance between our consumption and humanity.
How Can I Tell Whether Meat is Humanely Sourced?
There are many things that will indicate whether your meat has been humanely sourced and produced, and picking up on some of these little things you may not have noticed before can give you an excellent marker on how your meat may have been produced:
Where You Buy it From
This is a biggie and is likely to be the strongest indicator of not only the quality of your meat but also how it has been produced too.
Take supermarkets, for instance; you will see shelves upon shelves of plastic packaging that houses identical pieces of meat that have all been produced en masse for mass consumption at lower prices.
While this is great for your pocket, it’s often the case that the meat you find presented like this is not as humane as you may expect it to be, with factory farms being the primary source of production.
While factory farms are entirely legal and heavily regulated, they are not the best places to find humanely sourced meat.
The uniformity of what’s inside the plastic packaging has often been sourced from heavy routines, which don’t include ethical practices.
What Is The Alternative?
The alternative to indulging in cheap meat daily is to go to your local butcher, an expert on meat handling and production. They only deal in the best quality meat from the most ethical sources, which are often local farms and small meat producers.
The Appearance of the Meat
Now we all know that every person is individual, and we champion everyone in the world for being unique; we also need to afford that same grace to the meat we consume.
Meat that looks like it has been produced in a uniformed fashion unfortunately often is precisely that, uniformed and mass-produced.
Producing meat in a way that fits the specifications for supermarket aesthetics, for instance, would lead you to believe that it has not been produced in the most natural and ethical manner, and you would be correct.
Would you like someone saying to you, “you need to look exactly like the other 5,000 people in the room to be successful, and we will make you that way so you can be the best”?
No, we thought not!
And often, it’s only “the best” when it comes to money.
Price Point
Finances are such a massive concern for a lot of people, given the current global climate, and saving money where possible is on the top of most people’s agendas, and rightly so.
However, cheap meat is certainly not the way to go just to have it in your diet.
Cheap meat really is a huge indicator that points towards the inhumane treatment and production of your meat.
So if the price seems “too good to be true” or unnecessarily low, then you need to be asking questions as to why this is the case and what it could mean for the meat production in the chain of events that got it seen by you.
How do you get around this if the price is a huge concern for you?
The simple solution is to consume better quality meat from reputable butchers but make the meat go further with a bit of creativity and maybe have some meat-free days in your weekly meals (your body will thank you for it, we promise).
Yes, it will be a higher price point, but you will be making sure the meat you buy is humanely sourced.
Just because supermarkets have made it wholly possible to eat cheap meat every day of the week doesn’t mean that it’s necessary!
Meat Certification
Over the past decade, there have been spotlights shone on the humane production of animal products. As such, there are lots of labels you can look out for to indicate whether the meat producer has gone above and beyond the minimum legislation to produce the meat, such as:
- RSPCA Assured
- Red Tractor Certified
- Organic Certification
- Soil Association
These, and other certifications, can indicate that the meat you consume has been produced in an environment that exceeds the basic qualifiers for humane production and the meat has been produced in a way that puts animal welfare as the highest concern.
These are definitely things to look out for when looking to consume meat more humanely.
Conclusion
Eat meat humanely is way more accessible than you may think, and the most significant indicators for meat produced in a not-the-absolute-best way are often the price and the appearance of the meat itself.
Cheap meat is always going to be a warning signal towards the humane production of meat, and the cheaper it is, the more likely it is that the welfare of the animal falls way lower in the priority chart than money, which is very sad.
If you find your the cheap meat “stacked high to sell cheap” with every cut of meat looking the same, just envisage this very same scenario with the live animals before they got to the shelf.
We are sure that the image you have of all of the animals cramped in a tiny space to do the same thing every day will have you reaching for the number of your local butcher.
Call them! Do meat consumption the humane way!
