![\"chickens](\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/chickens-on-truck.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThere was a hard rain falling, and I was driving to Atlanta.\u00a0Got behind a truck. A big semi.<\/p>\n
In the rain, it wasn’t clear at first what the cargo was.<\/p>\n
Then I saw it was chickens. Live chickens.<\/p>\n
They were stuck in there every which way. Didn’t look like they had room to stand up all the way, and they were crammed next to each other. A few looked like they were fighting.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that animals being transported like this get pretty stressed. And animals, like humans, get a flow of chemicals through their system when they’re stressed.<\/p>\n
I always buy organic meat, mostly because I don’t like the idea of eating any animal that’s been injected with antibiotics and hormones for its whole short life. I buy local, free-range chicken when I can because it’s more humane. Of course, they still die in the end – but at least they’ve had a decent life, right?<\/p>\n
My friend Maureen calls this “one bad day” meat.<\/p>\n
But for all I know, these chickens on the truck could have been “organic” chickens. They have to get transported to be slaughtered and processed, right?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Seems like this stressful trip, and the slaughterhouse itself, could undo all the good from having had a great chicken life. Maybe they have more than one bad day.<\/p>\n
When I confront this, I have to think again about my choice to eat animals.<\/p>\n
I view meat-eating as part of the food chain. We’re on top because we\u00a0evolved that way, and\u00a0we eat meat.<\/p>\n
Nature is vicious, and birds in the wild live a damn hard life, too.<\/p>\n
But still: Animals suffer in order to feed us.<\/p>\n
That’s hard to swallow.<\/p>\n
Today’s penny is a 2014, the year that the 40th anniversary edition of the Moosewood Cookbook was published. That was my first vegetarian cookbook.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There was a hard rain falling, and I was driving to Atlanta.\u00a0Got behind a truck. A big semi. In the rain, it wasn’t clear at first what the cargo was. Then I saw it was chickens. Live chickens. They were stuck in there every which way. Didn’t look like they had room to stand up … read more Chickens on a truck<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[321],"tags":[36,795,481,957,34,924,958],"class_list":["post-8031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tress","tag-36","tag-animals","tag-birds","tag-chickens","tag-food","tag-meat","tag-vegetarian"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8031"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8055,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8031\/revisions\/8055"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}