Nama, thank you for your thoughts. I agree wholeheartedly that we should not close our eyes to how meat is produced and how animals are treated.

Charles, I agree that the kosher meat business (and meat production in general) isn’t pretty or easy. The turkey shechita I organized was not meant to pretend otherwise. Rather, it was meant to give a group of participants (and, by extension, readers of the articles and blog posts on the event) an understanding of what it takes to produce meat and to let them take responsibility for the meat for their Shabbos dinner. It was also meant to suggest an alternative to the existing model of kosher meat production.

Jewish law requires kashrut, but it also prohibits tza’ar ba’alei chayim, causing suffering to living creatures. The current system of factory farming and feedlot production is terribly cruel to the animals that give us our meat, dairy, and eggs. It is also disastrous for the environment, depleting the fertility of cropland and producing a large amount of greenhouse gasses and toxic waste. My argument is that it would be worth the extra dollar cost to produce meat in a way that did not impose cruelty on animals or degradation of the environment. (Jewish law, in my understanding, requires this.) Doing so would mean eating less meat than we currently do, which, in turn, would mean eating meat with more intention and with kavod for hashem’s creations (both for the land and for the animals).

It’s a fairly common business principle that before you attempt to affect a system that you must actually look at it clearly in every single step.

These people are among a small group who can actually say they know what they are eating.

I think it’s admirable!  We all know we have to consume less, waste less and recyle more. When are we going to start doing that? After the planet is uninhabitable?

How long are we going to be happy to have a “servant class” who is in touch with all the workings of our lives and just hope that someone somewhere figures it all out so we can go on in dreamland?

Talmudic reality included eating meat, for most people, three times a year at holiday times when they could afford to kill a cow. Keeping Americans in red meat has huge consequences and we all know it, we just don’t want to look.

As a person who actually grew up in a rural setting, I can picture all those steps and I’d like to align my life with those realities. In fact, most people who have the average American yard could have chickens and learn to kill and clean them themselves. Maybe if we did that we’d satisfy ourselves with slow food and respect the food we eat more.

If we persist, as Orthodox Jews in being “city people” we will get what we deserve. The problem with that is that we won’t be a light to anyone, just more darkness.

I would hope such an elitist, arrogant, authoritarian position is not typical of this movement. There is nothing wrong with choosing one’s own food preferences, but only Hashem can impose them on others.

What do you want to bet that the speaker has no plans to “give” meat to the Jewish community.Instead his wishes will cost others.