Burger King to Serve Some Happy Meat

Burger King (BK) has joined the happy meat brigade. Sort of. The world’s second-largest hamburger chain’s goal for the next few months is to buying 2% of  its eggs from cage-free producers, and 10% of its pork from farms that don’t crate their sows. BK purchases over 40,000,000 eggs annually and 35,000,000 pounds of pork, and blames lack of supply for their minuscule goal (which they plan to double by the end of the year).

Is this a victory? Sure, for BK, who will now attract people who actually believe that they can eat well and do right. It’s a PR coup. One glance at the Readers’ Comments page regarding the BK story demonstrates that most people are entirely onboard with happy meat. With that said, I’m thrilled to read the responses of people who are able to see through the smokescreen and always go to the fundamental issue that regardless of how food animals are treated when they are alive, they are all being bred and raised for slaughter, and there’s nothing humane about that.

Read through the comments. It’s addictive. And there’s some funny stuff, including:

• someone who calls herself a "semi-vegetarian"
• actual vegetarians saying it’s "pretty fantastic"
• honesty from people who simply don’t care about animals ("As long as it doesn’t increase the price of the whopper, I’m fine with it")
• several people lacking in rationality, including a fellow who says he doesn’t "patronize restaurants who kowtow (sic) to animal extremists/terrorists"

I think my favorite is a longer post by Derek V. Oatis, whose last sentence is: "Sometimes I don’t know who to despise more, the industries that torture and kill these animals, or the Animal ‘Rights’ industries that lie and facilitate their business." Couldn’t have said it better myself. These are not animal rights people–they are animal welfare people who are merely trying to regulate institutionalized use and abuse of animals. They are not trying to stop it.