John Mackey–Whole Foods Meat And Animal Welfare
Written by Vegetarian Star on January 1st, 2010 in Animal Issues, Business, Food & Drink.
As a vegetarian, can you ever agree that some meat is ethical?
John Mackey made the decision to go vegetarian after discovering how some animals farmed for meat were treated.
“I became more conscious of what we were doing to livestock animals and how much those animals were being abused,” he said during a video interview posted on the Whole Foods blog. “The summer of 2003, I read a dozen books or so on the way animals were being treated and I decided in good conscious I didn’t want to eat animals anymore.”
But Whole Foods still sells meat. Does this make Mackey a hypocrite?
“I find the death argument to not be a particularly good one because everything that’s alive dies. At the end of the day it’s the quality of life that you have prior from birth to death that really matters. Not whether you die in the end. Animals are going to die in the end and what matters to them whether the life they have from birth to death is a life that allows them to fulfill their animal potential.”
Mackey says the company has been developing an Animal Welfare 5 Step rating program, which will rate producers based on how they treat their livestock. Ideally, the producers with the highest rating will be the only ones to sell their product at Whole Foods.
Certainly a life full of free movement and fresh air beats being crammed in cages and being forced to reproduce or produce products like milk unnaturally.
Do you agree with Mackey?
Or should Whole Foods aim to stop selling meat entirely?
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