my pet chicken

pet? food?

so growing up, we had a chicken in my backyard
i don’t think i ever gave her a name
but i knew she really liked me
i could tell because she stopped running away from me when i showed up in front of her

she eventually let me pet her

every day i’d go outside and pick up her egg of the day and my grandma would cook it

one day, i heard a really loud scream from the backyard

my mom had killed her.

that night she was in the pot and i literally could not be in the same room. smelling my cooked friend felt like a crime.

anyways today i went to a farm and there were chickens and goats. the chickens were so happy. when they saw me they immediately started running towards me, and it reminded me of my pet chicken.

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a few months ago in taiwan we walked into a restaurant by the fishing village. as we walked in, i noticed how sad the fish in the tanks looked.

we decided to order a rock fish. i didn’t really know what a rock fish was but quickly learned because as soon as we put in our order, the lady grabs a bucket and scoops up one of the depressed looking fish. my heart dropped. i thought about asking her to dunk the fish back in the tank, but each second i thought about it, i knew the fish was already dying. by the time i had thought it through, it had probably already died.

when the fish came to the table, it tasted really good.

is it bad that it was delicious ;-;

mortality is such a weird thing because you can’t exactly feel something else’s suffering. you can only imagine and choose whether or not to care.

“it was going to die anyway!” i told myself. i still felt bad.

i’ve been really conscious about food the past 2 years because i’m around more vegan and vegetarian people. it’s weird because i grew up in a culture literally intertwined with eating meat. when my sister tried to become vegetarian, my mom thought there was seriously something wrong with her. in china, you literally bond by eating meat at hotpot or barbecue. i never thought about animals dying at all. the only thing that mattered was the taste. i didn’t even think about it as an animal. it was just food. but now that people around me care more, its made me a little more conscious about it. i still eat meat, i just think about it more, i guess.

the other thing i learned a few weeks ago is that cows can only have milk when they’re pregnant. so dairy farms keep the cows pregnant and basically take the milk that was for calves. when i learned that, i didn’t really know how to feel. i guess for eggs i feel a little less bad because one time i saw a duck lay an egg and literally abandon it. so it feels like more like taking the equivalent of the product of their period away.

i saw the same eggs like a week later

to be honest, i just don’t know how to choose what to feel bad for anymore. there’s just so many problems in the world sometimes i think i should just think about it less.