Covid-19 Will Save the Planet!
Once you understand that the modern Left hates every single thing about your lifestyle and would be happier if you'd just stop driving your cars, heating your houses, cease eating yummy roast beef, and just die already, then you're ready to handle the American mainstream media, led by such publications as the The New York Times. Once a newspaper of repute, it's gradually mutated from a center-left, socialism-sympathetic daily bible for those who don't practice a real religion into a full-throated woke manifesto of craziness. Case in point, this precious PC essay by the poetaster novelist and food crank Jonathan Safran Foer, who teaches creative writing at NYU:
Most everyone has been doing more cooking these days, more documenting of the cooking, and more thinking about food in general. The combination of meat shortages and President Trump’s decision to order slaughterhouses open despite the protestations of endangered workers has inspired many Americans to consider just how essential meat is.
After some bien-pensant blather about conditions in the slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants that socialist agitator Upton Sinclair breathlessly reported in his novel, The Jungle, 114 years ago, we get this:
Despite this grisly reality — and the widely reported effects of the factory-farm industry on America’s lands, communities, animals and human health long before this pandemic hit — only around half of Americans say they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Meat is embedded in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hot dog. Meat comes with uniquely wonderful smells and tastes, with satisfactions that can almost feel like home itself. And what, if not the feeling of home, is essential?
And yet, an increasing number of people sense the inevitability of impending change.
This is where you BS meter ought to hit the red zone. "An increasing number of people." Who? Where?
Animal agriculture is now recognized as a leading cause of global warming. According to The Economist, a quarter of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 say they are vegetarians or vegans, which is perhaps one reason sales of plant-based “meats” have skyrocketed, with Impossible and Beyond Burgers available everywhere from Whole Foods to White Castle.
Interesting that the vegans are always having to hide the icky stuff they eat and want to shove down our throats by disguising it as "meat." But here comes the kicker:
Our hand has been reaching for the doorknob for the last few years. Covid-19 has kicked open the door.
By this he means, of course, a panoply of Leftist prescriptions, including "climate change," animal rights, the working poor, the usefulness of pandemics to effect social change, the comparison of big American "factory farms" to Chinese "wet markets," our "broken relationship with animals," and our lack of physical need for animal protein, among other things.
With the horror of pandemic pressing from behind, and the new questioning of what is essential, we can now see the door that was always there. As in a dream where our homes have rooms unknown to our waking selves, we can sense there is a better way of eating, a life closer to our values. On the other side is not something new, but something that calls from the past — a world in which farmers were not myths, tortured bodies were not food and the planet was not the bill at the end of the meal.
One meal in front of the other, it’s time to cross the threshold. On the other side is home.
Unfortunately, that way also lies serfdom, lunacy and death.