I love to eat meat.

I know for some of you alfalfa-loving, salad sympathizers what I just said is akin to admitting I gleefully beat nuns with large bags of electric eels (which I don’t, and would never condone — so please don’t write letters), but I can’t help myself.

Other life forms are delicious.

What can I say?

I can completely understand and empathize with vegetarians.

I married one, for gosh sakes.

I get the idea people don’t want to harm animals, or it completely grosses them out to even consider eating another creature.

I get it. I really do.

I’m not like you… but I can totally understand.

I worked on dairy and cattle farms as a youth, and saw animals I cared for head off to the abattoir, only to happily munch steak that night without the slightest bit of guilt.

Am I a monster? Possibly in the eyes of those who draw some anthropomorphic line in the sand when it comes to consuming other life forms… because although a carrot has no eyes or guts or cute fuzziness, it’s still a living thing, right?

And I’ve happily shared my red meat eating — and admittedly more than likely cholesterol-laden — opinions with anyone who dared to question my lifestyle choices.

I’m the guy who wanted to open a restaurant where you pick your own cow (like when you pick a lobster in a tank at a seafood restaurant) for your steak, but so far no investors have been beating a path to my door.

I’m the guy who said our beef industry was far superior to that of our neighbour to the south, with their pink-slime hamburger meat, whenever someone throws a book in my face deriding the food industry (all those books talk about the terrible U.S. food industry). But I’ve been eating humble pie, and not much red meat, ever since the XL Foods scandal broke.

After the biggest meat recall in Canadian history — and strangely enough, seemingly no repercussions and business as usual at XL these days, apparently — the biggest carnivore is a bit gun shy now about where he’s getting his protein.

I thought we were better than that. But apparently we aren’t, and we can’t expect things to change all that much either, considering XL is one of two producers that account for most of Canada’s meat.

I can’t go vegetarian, or my free-range… er, vegetarian wife may end up missing some fingers in the middle of the night during a particular vivid barbecued wing dream.

We need to rethink the current inspection rules if seemingly minor slip-ups can allow tonnes of tainted meat to slip through. And we certainly need to punish those involved and those who turned a blind eye.

Perhaps we could have nuns beat them with large bags of eels, or something.

OK, maybe we should just leave that up to our lawmakers. But you get the idea.