Mark Zuckerberg Slaughters His Own Meat

If you think Mark Zuckerberg is a nerd, eat this.

Mark Zuckerberg has a challenge for himself for this year: any meat he eats, he must kill himself. No buying organic meat at Whole Foods or ordering prime cuts from restaurants—all animals he consumes must die at the hands of America’s youngest self-made billionaire.

In a letter to “Fortune” Zuckerberg explained his reasons: “I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I’ve basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I’m eating a lot healthier foods and I’ve learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.”

So far he’s killed lobster, chickens, and a goat, which he slit at the throat. It’s “the most kind way to do it,” said Jesse Ziff Cool, the owner of the Menlo Park restaurant Flea Street Cafe who turned Zuckerberg on to the practice.

I’ve witnessed the slaughter of animals that I later ate. My parents took me to a slaughterhouse when I was young where I saw the expression “a chicken with its head cut off” come to life. It jumps about like a dancing lunatic for a moment with blood squirting from its neck and then collapses. But if I’m honest with myself, I dont’ know if I’d be able to go the extra mile and swing the knife myself.

I would argue that most modern meat eaters don’t have it in them to slit the throat of a yummy young goat, chicken or a cow. In fact, most have probably only seen raw dead cow cut into steaks or ground into red, wormy-looking hamburger meat, packaged in meal-sized styrofoam trays. Supermarket meat resembles what winds up on your plate more than the animal it came from and this abstraction makes it easier for people to consume it in massive quantities without thinking about how it got to them.

But what’s more, today most people aren’t only lacking the guts to cut a chicken’s head off, but also the means. As a California butcher told Fortune of Silicon Valley’s rich, young entrepreneurs: “They all want to learn how to do it; they want to come in and watch us cut it up, because I think these days people who have the means to kill their own food want to see exactly what they’re eating.”

We know we’ve come a long way with technological progress when we can connect with people we’ve haven’t seen in decades on a social network like Facebook. But many have asked, how do we know when we’ve gone too far? Is it when Facebook knows our political views without us having to tell it?

Maybe. Or maybe it’s when the most elitist way to procure a drumstick is by cutting off a chicken’s head yourself.

[Via The Daily Beast]