What's a cow without legs?

Answer- Ground beef!

Our gift- a cow! We watched him go from mooing to collapsing. In a span
of four hours it went from being a pet to being our food.

It was our forth day in Zambia. We spent three days just to to Chama, Zambia after already spending fifty hours in travel to Lusaka alone. A village other Zambian’s rarely go to and even fewer foreigners venture too. Our presence brought about an air of excitement in the village and a sense of celebration. After breakfast our first morning, we were began our journey over to the church where we were teaching at and no sooner had we started then were we stopped.

The village, church and youth had given us, the three Azungu's (white people) a cow, a pig and a chicken! After accepting and ‘re-gifting’ our gifts we were led to meet the cow. The cow was a sense of pride and the elders wanted us to see the cow. Not only did they make us see the cow and touch it, they proceeded to kill it in front of us. My mind reeled from the killing of the cow. It was not humane (I’ll spare those details!), but is there really a humane way to kill anything?

After four intense hours of teaching, singing, shakes hands and turning down marriage proposals it was time for lunch! Take a stab at what we were served for lunch. Besides the local shema and encabagi we also had cow liver. The cow we had to meet, touch and then watch as it was killed. No later then ten minutes into lunch I was crying. We had to eat what was just killed.

Cow!

These days I do not eat beef on my own- it must be served to me. To say I am a bit traumatized is, well, a bit of an understatement. Just maybe my distaste of cows isn’t such a bad thing. After digging into this cow thing a bit more and watching Food Inc., it turns out that cows are not the best thing for our environment. Cows alone produce more then one thirds of the carbon dioxide produced today along with many other harmful fumes. Now this effect combined with the corn shortage from this summer we have a bigger problem on our hands.

How would our environment be today if each American consumed less beef? According to the USDA, Americans’ consumed 61 pounds of beef in 2009. Imagine the sustainability we could obtain with this reduction. Just how could we convince American’s to reduce this habit?