Animals not sitting well in the stomach

Against my better judgement, I bought a package of sushi the other day from Tulane in an impulse rush-buy, and as I was in line to pay for it, I looked down and read the tuna had been treated with carbon monoxide for preservation of color. It was too late to leave the line to get something else, I had to get to work, and I struggled deciding if I should eat nothing or force it down and try to put it out of my mind (it was hard enough conceding to eat fish to begin with). The line grew shorter and shorter (I thought again of Animals), like I was waiting for my doom. It was the worst sushi I've ever eaten--it felt like a punishment for eating flesh of an animal--and I am confident I will never get processed packaged sushi again.

Since reading Animals, I have not been able to look at or consider eating meat without a sense of uneasiness. When I go to the grocery store, the pale and slimy enlarged body parts in bulk stare up at me eerily from their plastic packages in remembrance of their harvest. When I see ground beef, all I can think of is flesh oozing through a grinder. Meat is no longer an object, a block of the food pyramid to me, I look at the chicken "wing" and see it for the limb it once was. It's not that I find it disgusting that one animal should consume another, I have accepted and been a part of predation my whole life, but the mechanized processing of it has become all too estranged and horrific to swallow without lump. Part of the curse of realizing how things are made from cradle to grave is a sort of x-ray vision that accompanies: I look at a food prospect, and now "see through it"--see what it's made of at molecule (plastic, carbon, faint moo), how it was made or grew or grazed (or didn't), what's in it that shouldn't be, whether or not it should actually be considered food. In a way, it "takes the fun out of" eating. In another, I am less of a fool for being able to choose to not participate in a culture of synthetics and mindless mass slaughter. But then again, I guess I am even more of a fool then for knowing and doing it anyway.