I will forgo my usual cussing shitstorm and let the pictures do the talking for me, but while I was out and about today driving people to the grocery store and to their appointments, I had to assist an elderly lady into the grocery store and I thought I’d just take some pictures of the animal products that were for sale. The pictures are so gross, they fair turn my stomach, they do. The ‘meat’ section is SO disgusting, I avoid it usually. But I wanted to make a point and so, I toughed it out.
Why oh why would you want to put something this disgusting looking inside your body and not expect your body to fuck you up? Oh damn! My bad! I promised not to cuss. I’ll just let the pictures speak for me.
Just looking at that makes me want to throw up and yet I have to haul around shit like that because even though I try and get people to understand that they “are what they eat,” many tell me that it is cheaper to buy this mess than to buy fresh fruits and vegetables and though this may be true to some extent, I still think that more of an effort could be made to try and eat healthier. I am not rich and yet I am able to buy fresh lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, onions, squash, kale, spinach, turnips, apples, pears, berries and though I hate bananas, I still buy them for the potassium. What I must confess to is the fact that I love nothing more than a fresh salad. With balsamic vinaigrette, oh yummmmmm.
And if this next picture does not speak volumes, I don’t know what will!
How can you eat that shit on the right? Because I need a ‘barf bag’ just looking at it!
So, are you ready to eat some ‘animal products’ now? An animal was bred for this, slaughtered in a most vile manner and then its parts were strewn here and there in order for this part to go in this bin, another part to go into yet a different bin and yet, if someone were to do this to your dog or cat, you’d be calling the cops, quick, fast and in a goddamn hurry. But that cow and that pig and even bison and chickens are fair ‘game’, eh? This is why your medicine cabinet is full of pills. This is why you are taking anti-cholesterol medications and high blood pressure pills and a whole slew of other prescriptions because if this is what you eat, this is what you are, death warmed over.
So, what’s it going to be? This?
Or this?
This was just one meat department. Can you imagine how many animals were slaughtered in order for their ‘meat’ to end up here? Oh gawd, just look at that. It’s sickening!
Bon Appétit
shelbycourtland 
Thanks for the mordant photographs, Shelby. They scream a thousand rants and each of them hit the mark(et). The whole sick charade begins with children’s books about barnyard animals living happy lives from cover to cover, the meal that isn’t a meal unless it has a meat entree, the propagandists in the advertising world, the willingness of consumers to suspend disbelief… No mention of the factory death camps that kill by the billions (trillions of fish at the seafood corner of the stupormarket). I’m writing a post about the geography of “meat”, you inspire me to finish it. Actually, you inspire me always: whether by words or by photographs. Your rants are well directed and well deserved by the rantees. A great blog indeed.
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Bill, I would have posted pictures of the dead marine life, ‘seafood’, but, alas, I never keep the device I use to take pictures, charged and it went dead before I could make it over to the ‘seafood’ section, but rest assured, I will continue to share more of the like and the next time I post about this, ‘seafood’ will be featured because there are stores that suggest that they use ‘sustainable means’ by which to provide seafood for the dinner table. What that means, I don’t know because so-called wild caught is no better than farm raised since it means killing tons of live fish, shrimp, lobster, scallops, clams, mussels and I still cannot get over how people have no problem boiling what’s living in order to kill it and eat it. How would they like it if someone put them in a pot of boiling water until they were dead? They wouldn’t. And people have the nerve to castigate me for using ‘foul language’ on here. Believe me, I started off blogging, gentle as a lamb, but I could see that it was not going to last, for how could it with what gets my goat up to no end and that would include injustice, murder of helpless land animals and marine life and the fact that people feel that they are backed into a corner by those who have too much money and no compassion, empathy, love, heart or soul?
I am just a small voice screaming into a void, but I scream just the same. And you are so right, the brainwashing starts in grade school and continues. You have such a way with words, ‘stupormarket’, oh how appropriate because that is exactly the case.
I sincerely appreciate your kind words. They mean the world to me, you have no idea. I know that I come across as a harsh, overbearing, belligerent harridan and that’s as may be, but when I go to bed at night, I sleep soundly knowing that my conscious is clear. No animal died to end up on my dinner plate. No lobster was boiled alive so that I could dip it in butter sauce. No mussel’s shell opened to the searing heat of a boiling pot of water. No slaughterhouse and supermarket ‘meat’ section benefits from my patronage. There are certainly more horrible things that I could be doing that’s much worse than cussing and yet for that, I am lambasted. Would that they would take to the woodshed, those who dismiss life and the right to live that every living creature should have. I am not perfect, for who is? But I tell the truth as I see it and damn the consequences.
Bill, again, I thank you most kindly for your thoughtful and right on point comment.
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Thanks most kindly for the great response, Shelby. I am not a fan of “shut up and sit down” schooling. The American classroom was designed after the19th-century Prussian model — critical-thinking skills were something to yank out and beat to death at the earliest possible moment. That way you have nice submissive minds that all learn the same soundbites, bites that synch to the awful marching music.
Maggot-brained stuff for zombies: “Reconstruction was a period in American history when dishonest characters from the North came down South to take advantage of people and to sell their plunder in the black market. They put their spoils in big bags made from carpets, so they were called carpetbaggers. After a while, they gave up this nefarious activity and went back to where they came from.”
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Bill I was outspoken before I even knew what being outspoken meant. I took to books at an early age and never could stop reading. The world can just pass me by so long as I have a real book in my hands. Books fed the adventuress in me. I was never content to be told about something, I had to go see for myself. I was so headstrong that when my parents refused to take us beyond the mountains I would so wistfully gaze up at, I bravely took, not to the rails, but to the bus and ventured forth. In my teens, I was leaving home and visiting other cities, on my own and things just came natural to me. It was assumed that the books I read had given me an urge to wander. They only fed my hunger and thirst for other places and knowledge of what was beyond my insular little world. No, I cannot lay claim to having traveled the world, but at least I can say that I did venture beyond that which was ‘my comfort zone’. And not many in my small town ever did. But there was something different about me. One thing I notice though is that no matter where I am, I want to be somewhere else.
I once met an an Irishman in Atlantic City. I was standing, looking out at the ocean and he walked up to me, clutching his shillelagh and we had a long talk and he turned to me and he said, “I am an old man, but if I were younger, I would pick you up and take you across the ocean to wherever is calling you for it is a fact that your bloodline begins in a place across the sea and when I look into your eyes, I see the Emerald Isle staring back at me. One day, heed that call, cross that sea.”
I have not heeded his words, but I’m certainly hoping to get the opportunity. Maybe, this Southern belle will find her way.
Bill, I thank you for your comment!
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I’m one of the few who never found meat appetizing, I’m also allergic to seafood, so I was restricted to eating certain meats when I was kid, like beef pork chicken and turkey, and that’s only because that is what I was fed as a kid, and what I was used. Once you continuously do the same thing like eating meat for example, it becomes a habit ( albeit not a good habit, but a habit nonetheless.) that you have to be willing to change if you want your health to improve but not many are willing to change. The average person enjoys the mundane pleasures of doing the same things over and over even when they feel or know it’s bad. I’m currently a vegetarian, and starting next month I’ll be vegan. And my mother still eats meat knowing how bad it is, and that it is causing her many issues with her weight and health, and unlike my mom I said I would stopping eat meat eventually, and I did, my mom said she would but she still hasn’t, and now she has high blood pressure hypertension, and diabetes, but she still won’t change her diet. I swear some people are so darn stubborn it feels like talking to a brick wall. Anyway this was a well written article. I wonder how many people will read this and consider their own lifestyle choices when it comes to eating meat.
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Mary, thank you so much for your comment and for having a beautiful soul. I do understand that we are conditioned from birth quite actually to just accept everything that’s handed to us and run with it. And that it is up to the individual as to whether or not they can see for themselves, just what is more beneficial for them, their health and well-being. Sometimes, it takes a horrifying medical diagnosis to change peoples’ habits and sometimes, even a loaded down medicine cabinet will not get a person to change because, just as you say, “not too many are willing to change.”
In my hometown, everyone smokes and I mean EVERYONE. And my mother used to smoke in front of us. Belair cigarettes, they were and every time she would try to quit, she’d re-start and her reason was, “You kids are getting on my nerves so bad, I need a cigarette.” We weren’t getting on her nerves, but that was her excuse. What finally got her to quit was, one day she called me and asked me to go with her to the hospital to visit one of her friends. The lady was in the ICU with emphysema so bad, she was hooked up to all kinds of machines and could only blink once for yes and twice for no when asked questions. After we left, as we were driving away, my mother handed me her pack of Belair cigarettes and told me to throw them away. I hate to admit to littering, but I threw them out the car window, right then and there and she never picked up another cigarette in her life. I have never smoked in my life and I get quite perturbed at people who want to legalize weed because there are too many children living in apartments who are already subjected to cigarette smoke, add to that weed and the chemicals they are putting into that and children don’t stand a chance since their lungs are still developing and that is why they are often diagnosed with multiple, chronic upper respiratory problems and we just don’t care.
What got me to stop eating meat was because my uncle raised hogs and my daddy bought one from him. They brought it over to our house and took it down in the basement and cut it up and I was standing at the top of the stairs when they were putting the pig’s head inside a bag, which they then took up to my sister’s room and set it out on her balcony to await disposal of it because someone wanted parts of the pig’s head for some reason. I vowed then and there to never eat animal products again and despite every attempt by my mother to encourage me to continue eating meat, I was that much more adamant that I was not going to eat meat and she finally gave it up.
I am glad I did because whenever I go home for the holidays or because someone has died, those people do indeed, look like death warmed over and they are dropping like flies. We just buried another aunt, who did not even make it to 70. The woman smoked her life away. My mother has congestive heart failure, diabetes and high blood pressure and is still somewhere asking people to cook her some pork chittlins which some people maybe unaware that that’s the pig’s intestines. She even states that they can throw in ‘hog maw’ which is the pig’s stomach. And then she has the nerve to wonder why she’s sick and hobbling across the floor? I am having a time trying to get her into assisted living because her house is falling down. Her sister is already in assisted living almost dead because she had to have open heart surgery, she has diabetes so bad they have to keep taking her back to the hospital every other day because they cannot control it and she ate the same things my mother did and still would be eating that mess if she could stand up and cook it. It is sad that this is actually a generational thing and that people just don’t understand that sometimes, what could save them from a short, painful existence is change.
Mary, again, I thank you for your comment. I often use my life experiences to get people to understand that they are not alone and that it is very hard since we are all subjected to the same shit, but we must try and get past what we are used to because it is killing us and in a most horrifying way.
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Wow. These are absolute marvels, Shelby. Vivid, dramatic, coherent and true to every detail of memory. Not a phony word in your entire riveting account. Most people do not even participate in their own lives, they just repeat what they have heard, what they believe to be true but that get parroted over and over, then passed on as a “truth” to others who then repeat it again until it becomes mushy drivel. That was an actual pack of Belair cigarettes, those ICU experience happened, that pig’s head was in an actual bag, the half-dead walk and zombies never learn. The incredibly credible, the inexplicable made explicable in every way. My parents suffered agonies clearly related to diet, diabetes, high blood pressure, that look of the undead. Thank you so much for sharing this with us!
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Bill, are you a writer? You have a gift for writing and that is for sure. This comment, so moved me, literally. From your very first comment on this blog, I knew that you were a special kind of human being. You were no run-of-the-mill conformist. Not a bit of that. I am almost at a loss for words, really. Because what you just said, made me sit back and a smile just lit up my face. I often wonder why I do this, thank you for making me understand why. There are precious few like you and I mean that.
Thank you!
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Great expose, Shelby. I’m not sure people tell you that meat is cheaper than fresh veggies. In my experience fresh fruits and veggies cost more than processed junk foods but they’re definitely cheaper than meat.
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That’s just an excuse Dr. Bramhall, just an excuse. Just like when my mother used to tell us that we were the cause for why she was smoking cigarettes, people need something to blame their behavior on. I don’t know what the price of meat is and so they can tell me anything. I only took pictures yesterday and one of the pictures states that some of that disgusting, vile looking dead animal costs $1.79 a pound. Now I will admit that cherries, out-of-season cost $5.99 a pound. Apples are $3.99 a pound and since you are in New Zealand, maybe things are a bit cheaper where you are, but over here, prices are skyrocketing.
I was out today taking people to where they needed to go and this one woman told me that she has two grandchildren living with her and she hates the sight of food because it is so expensive. She doesn’t know what she is going to do and it’s only going to get worse. The price of organic fruits and vegetables are even higher than non-organic. Everything is outrageous. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this volunteer thing up because today when I filled up the gas tank on the van I drive, it cost me $29.00. I have another volunteer who drives my other van and she filled that one up yesterday and it cost almost the same and so I bought a small Scion xB to haul folks around who just need to go to appointments and not haul groceries or children and even that guzzles gas. Things are getting tougher by the second, Dr. Bramhall. But I do get what you are saying in that you would think that fresh fruits and veggies would be less costly than meat, but people may see that a pound of cherries are $5.99 and see some meat that’s selling for $1.79 a pound and think that’s a better deal. Like I said, I don’t know about the price of meat, I’m just going by that yuck in one of the above pictures.
Dr. Bramhall, I thank you for your comment.
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My homie Shelby. I want to thank you so very much. I was enjoying a late delicious lunch of lentil soup, sauteed kale, and a bowl of fresh mango. I saw the pictures in your post and accidentally spit a piece of mango across the room lol.
Your post was straight to the point and filled with truth. Thank you for sharing this story with us. It’s always beautiful to hear the sistas discussing health. Greatly appreciated.
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Cory, your comment made me bust out laughing, loudly! LOL! I do what I can. If it does no good, so be it, but I can’t be condemned for not trying. There are so many delicious options available other than dead animals, that there really is no excuse. Delicious recipes can be found online. There are sites where people can get vegan recipes, vegetarian recipes and there is nothing dull in eating after having given up dead land animals and dead marine life.
I will be the first to admit that I can’t cook, but I am getting better at putting recipes together even though some people tell me that I should try out for that show, “Worst Cooks In America.” I have managed to over steam broccoli to the point that the pan boiled over and set off the smoke alarm. So, I’d be no good, just get laughed off the show.
We’ve only got this one body and if we don’t take care of it, it won’t take care of us. And we’d not appreciate when it starts to get really pissed off at what we are feeding it to keep it going. It is not a car. We cannot take it to the dealership, have the bad part removed and get a brand spanking new one. Doesn’t work like that, but unfortunately, people learn this fact, too late.
Cory, again, thank you so much for that funny as hell comment. It made my day!
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LOL! No you just gave me my laugh for the day! Sis, you can’t boil broccoli?! Lol. We are going to have to work on you. Does your man do all of the cooking?
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You are TOO much! LOL! I wish I had time for a man. Between my volunteer agency and the fact that I am also trying to get my, stubborn as hell mother to move into assisted living because she keeps hiring ‘jacklegs’ otherwise known as folks who don’t have a license to do any kind of handyman work, to do repairs on the house and while putting up a wall, they made the ceiling fall down in the living room. Not to mention, add burying folks who eat ALL the wrong things and I’m busy as hell. I don’t think men like to take a back seat and with all of that going down, he’d have to do that. Maybe, if things settle down some, I’d have the time, but right now, I’m already cross-eyed, I wish I was cross-eyed in ‘luv’, but that ain’t it. LMAO!!! You a mess!
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I hate hearing that but we still have to work on your broccoli game Sis..LOL. I am going to email you later.
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LOL! Okay!
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Then there is what a meaty diet does to the only planet available, you can’t buy a replacement planet on Amazon Prime. 7.7 billion people eat 77 billion land-based animals and trillions of fish per year. This is the same species that drove the Passenger Pigeon into extinction, simply because it was the fast food of the day. Shoot into the air, bring home, dress, cook. Go out for more the next day. Martha, the last surviving one died at the Cincinnati Zoo: about 10 miles from this keyboard.
Meat means greenhouse gases. Here is a graphic representation of the role played by meat:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/greenhouse-gas-emissions-per-kilocalorie-of-food-production
As if that were not daunting enough, there are very many graphic representations from the same amazing website “our world in data”:
https://ourworldindata.org/meat-and-seafood-production-consumption
Meat is death.
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Bill, thank you for posting that; the links and all. People need to know. Those who WANT to know. But ALL need to know. Will there ever be a mass awakening? I can only hope and continue to put it out there. I am already working on part 2 of this. People don’t understand that we don’t have a lot of time to get our act together and I am not sure if we actually have time for that, we’ve done so much damage even as we continue to do more. There is a price to be paid for every foul thing we do. And for every animal and fish that dies and/or goes extinct by our hands, so too, must we. I am no fan of people suffering, but I am equally no fan of land animals and marine life suffering. And we could all have existed together here, but so-called ‘humans’ make that impossible.
I hear you Bill, believe me, I hear you and others do as well. Keep talking and never stop. You have something important to say. And it needs to be heard.
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