On Self-Delusion and Seeking Absolution

A friend of mine sent me a link last week to a small blurb on the ever-inconsistent This Dish Is Veg website. The piece, "Can I make a case for eating eggs?", is the sort of thing you'd expect to see left out as bait by a writer to generate hits and comments. For its writer Shana Kurz, however, it seems more an attempt to garner a little bit of sympathy from readers so that she can feel better about her decision to go back to exploiting other animals.

Kurz begins the short blurb stating outright that giving up eggs was easy -- that she didn't eat them and had otherwise found simple substitutes for them where she might have used them while cooking. Regardless of this, though, Kurz proceeds to try to make a case for her going back to using them. She does so in such an illogical manner that one can't really help but wonder if she's serious.

The eggs from her CSA come from "happy" chickens, she insists, "adopted" from organic farms who'd relinquished them as unproductive. These "adopted" chickens are allowed to roam, she tells her readers. Of course, she also adds that when the chickens go from being less productive to being unproductive altogether, they are either passed on to others or "killed" and that she has no idea of just how these chickens are killed, but is speculating that it must somehow be "humanely". (One almost envisions Kurz crossing her fingers, eyes squeezed tightly shut!)

So someone who had already found substitutes for eggs has a CSA that treats chickens as things and whose slaughter practices for those chickens are unknown to her. So? She views this as triggering some sort of "diet related dilemma" but says so while admitting that she's already made the decision to order them on a weekly basis (i.e. so much for any dilemma). One has to wonder about her self-identifying as having "compassion for animals" considering her eagerness to obtain a sort of absolution from her readers as she informs them of that decision. Even more so, one has to wonder why in the little bio following the blurb, This Dish Is Veg describes her as a "Certified Health Coach (and vegan)".

One also has to wonder if Kurz can really be that oblivious to the fact that the chickens on those original organic farms came from breeding operations where male chicks (deemed worthless) are invariably killed, often simply ground alive or suffocated. It's a shame that -- while not even knowing how the chickens meet their deaths when her CSA deems them useless and disposable little feathered machines -- she still clings to this myth that there is such a thing as a humane way to slaughter another. What's bizarre, however, is that she then chooses to assume -- based on nothing but a hunch -- that the chickens whose eggs she is taking must surely be killed in a manner in which that killing somehow seems more ethical to Kurz.

It's unfortunate that this is the sort of sloppy writing that This Dish Is Veg continues to feature on its website, particularly from someone it presents as being a vegan consultant.