Buying meat online is weird

I bought a new watch at Target yesterday. I lost my watch over last weekend, and spent the week out of synch with my life and the campus (which is out of synch with itself already, so it's hard enough when you can time it). I had been thinking of buying one, but this felt stupid, because I have an old watch with a dead battery and broken band. Isn't it more sensible to get a new battery and band? Well, no, because (1) the band and battery together cost 75% of what a new watch would cost, and (2) the new battery made the watch run for ten seconds before it revealed that it's broken.

But then I bought meat today online. This isn't something I think of as normal. Books or CDs, sure. Guitar strings, definitely. Meat seemed a little too, I dunno, perishable.

The story is, Lauren and I have decided that we're meat-eaters, since we're omnivores, since we're humans. But being meat-eaters doesn't, or at least shouldn't, mean that we willingly support the practices of the Big Food industry, which are too often harmful to the environment, cruel to the animals, and unhealthy for consumers. We've switched to free range organic chicken, which is worlds apart from those bizarrobirds Foster Farms sells. But range-fed, grass-fed, humanely-raised beef is rare to find. We've seen it exactly twice at Trader Joe's, bought it both times, and decided that this is what beef really tastes like.

I used meat production as an example in class earlier in the semester, having found some interesting facts online that might be the basis of a moral judgment that eating meat is a terrible thing to do. One page had a link to a company selling the genuine article, even emphasizing the butchering and dry-aging techniques that are critical to good beef production.

Today I found several others, but then bought from US Wellness meats, because they had lamb as well (this ain't an endorsement, obviously). It should ship out tomorrow, and be here by Thursday at the latest.