Feeling like a caged animal? Bon appetit
MAY Day was only a few days ago, but May Day, as in a state of emergency, has been going on since March. Eating out in this country town now means standing in a socially distanced queue outside the chipper.
Thankfully, Barrows Keep, the new restaurant which had barely got on its feet before being knocked off them, is providing locals with a much-appreciated taste of luxury during this lockdown, by selling gourmet takeaway pizzas at the weekend. Ring in your order and just pick them up.
For food is about all that most of us are buying these days, bringing into focus just how hugely dependant we are on importing most of our fruit and vegetables.
This lack of food security is worrying, given experts predict more pandemics are coming down the tracks. What if trucks carrying provisions are not able to follow? Our next government needs to protect Irish growers, thereby also protecting Irish jobs, reducing our transport carbon emissions, and ensuring we have access to truly fresh, local food.
Highlighting how this virus is teaching us that virtue is not just its own reward but also the only viable way forward.
And with the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi calling for a commission into the future, perhaps instead of believing we can go back to business as usual, we need to go back to the future. By evaluating how we live to ensure it works in harmony with the environment, so we have one. That means acknowledging the elephant in the room (and heaven knows we’re spending way too much time in them) that fighting the virus means fighting its cause: the fact that animal cruelty leads to human catastrophe.
Which, like charity, begins not in Wuhan but right here, at home.
For intensively farming animals is as problematic for our health as any hideous goings on in Asian food markets. The only difference is that our Government keeps telling us that everything is fine.
Despite the fact that most infectious diseases are zoonotic, meaning they start in animals and jump to humans. And as the current avian flu and other diseases here remind us, they aren’t all made in China. Who can say when this ecological time bomb might go off ?
Isn’t it absurd that we are socially distancing, avoiding those who are sick, keeping our stress levels down and exercising — yet we continue to eat animals that are forced to endure the opposite conditions?
No wonder disease flourishes when 99pc of
Irish pigs never see the light of day, are castrated and have their tails cut off — with no anaesthetic — to stop these intelligent creatures biting each other because of stress.
Intensively farmed animals are routinely pumped full of antibiotics and other drugs, which we in turn imbibe, leading to antibiotic-resistant diseases — that in turn make us vulnerable to ever-evolving contagions. Surely the way cruelly confining animals has made us prisoners in our homes is food for thought.