Imagine yourself waiting in line to make your order at your favorite burger restaurant. You can already picture it, your tongue can almost taste it — the succulent juices and the tender texture of your favorite delicacy — a delicious burger. You’ve placed the order, and it is now just a waiting game.
A few minutes after you seat yourself, a worker approaches you. They inform you that their restaurant has the freshest food, which you already know. They then ask you to come around to the back of the restaurant and choose the cow of your choice and slaughter it yourself.
You pause for a moment and ask if this is a practical joke. The worker ensures you with a genuine smile that it’s no joke — that they’ve just changed their policy for people ordering meat. Everyone must pick out and slaughter their animal prior to it being cooked.
You decide that you can’t deal with it, and you leave disappointed and frustrated.
Our society is run on the idea of convenience. Not many people would be comfortable with slaughtering the animal they intend to consume. We can walk into a grocery store and buy any meat we want, pre-killed and pre-cut for us.
This convenience allows us to detach ourselves from the death involved in the meat industry. I’ve talked to many people about this over the years, and a few wouldn’t mind killing their own animals to eat. But the majority usually want me to change the subject and don’t take the mention of slaughterhouse cruelty well. 
Last week, PETA paid a visit to campus. It set up a dark tent that you had to walk through with grotesque images and lastly, a disturbing video revealing the truth behind the animal cruelty that goes on in many slaughterhouses. 
I don’t agree with many of PETA’s approaches to this touchy topic, but I’m sure some of the people who walked into that tent left feeling a sense of guilt or disgust.
This isn’t aimed at making people feel guilt over their meat consumption, nor is it an assault to try to pressure people into the lifestyle of a non-meat eater. I just want to reveal some truths and clear some myths.
Too many people get uncomfortable or even irritable at the mention of slaughterhouse cruelty. We’re Americans — we like our Big Macs and our Chik-Fil-A and our value meals. No one is complaining about buying a burger for $1, so there doesn’t seem to be a need to complain about the source producing it.
I find it interesting that one of the most consumed foods in America is also the one that people would rather not know the details about. When sitting down to a dinner with fresh greens, asking the cook where they got the delicious ingredients isn’t a rare thing. But how often does anyone question the meat they’re eating?
The sad and unfortunate reality is that chickens, cows, pigs and many other animals we eat are stuffed so tightly in tiny cages, pins and dark rooms that they can’t move. 
They sit in filth and are force-fed hormone-injected food to make them fat so fast that their legs usually break under the weight of their oversized bodies.
As college students, many of us survive on fast food and don’t have the time to think about where it’s coming from, but there are cheap ways to eat healthy, even if they aren’t as convenient as some of the options in the Union.
I urge people to look into this issue of animal cruelty and the gross processes our meat goes through before it reaches our plates.
Mariel Gates is a 20-year-old mass communication sophomore from Baton Rouge.