Eating Animals

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  This demand for animal products, the report continues, leads to “changes in farming practices.” Lest we have any confusion about the “changes” that are relevant, poultry factory farms are singled out.

  Similar conclusions were reached by the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, which brought together industry experts and experts from the WHO, OIE, and USDA. Their 2005 report argued that a major impact of factory farming is “the rapid selection and amplification of pathogens that arise from a virulent ancestor (frequently by subtle mutation), thus there is increasing risk for disease entrance and/or dissemination.” Breeding genetically uniform and sickness-prone birds in the overcrowded, stressful, feces-infested, and artificially lit conditions of factory farms promotes the growth and mutation of pathogens. The “cost of increased efficiency,” the report concludes, is increased global risk for diseases. Our choice is simple: cheap chicken or our health.

  Today the factory farm–pandemic link couldn’t be more lucid. The primary ancestor of the recent H1N1 swine flu outbreak originated at a hog factory farm in America’s most hog-factory-rich state, North Carolina, and then quickly spread throughout the Americas. It was in these factory farms that scientists saw, for the first time, viruses that combined genetic material from bird, pig, and human viruses. Scientists at Columbia and Princeton Universities have actually been able to trace six of the eight genetic segments of the (currently) most feared virus in the world directly to US factory farms.

  Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I’ve discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory — disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

  More Influences

  BEYOND THE UNHEALTHY INFLUENCE THAT our demand for factory-farmed meat has in the area of food-borne illness and communicable diseases, we could cite many other influences on public health: most obviously the now widely recognized relationship between the nation’s major killers (heart disease, number one; cancer, number two; and stroke, number three) and meat consumption or, much less obviously, the distorting influence of the meat industry on the information about nutrition we receive from the government and medical professionals.

  In 1917, while World War I devastated Europe and just before the Spanish flu devastated the world, a group of women, in part motivated to make maximal use of America’s food resources during wartime, founded what is now the nation’s premier group of food and nutrition professionals, the American Dietetic Association (ADA). Since the 1990s, the ADA has issued what has become the standard we-definitely-know-this-much summary of the healthfulness of a vegetarian diet. The ADA takes a conservative stand, leaving out many well-documented health benefits attributable to reducing the consumption of animal products. Here are the three key sentences from the summary of their summary of the relevant scientific literature. One:

  Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.

  TWO:

  Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and other phytochemicals.

  Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) “meet and exceed requirements” for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.

  Finally, we have the really important news, based not on speculation (however well-grounded in basic science such speculation might be), but on the definitive gold standard of nutritional research: studies on actual human populations.

  Three:

  Vegetarian diets are often associated with a number of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease [which alone accounts for more than 25 percent of all annual deaths in the nation], lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI) [that is, they are not as fat] and lower overall cancer rates [cancers account for nearly another 25 percent of all annual deaths in the nation].

  I don’t think that individual health is necessarily a reason to become vegetarian, but certainly if it were unhealthy to stop eating animals, that might be a reason not to be vegetarian. It would most certainly be a reason to feed my son animals.

  I talked to several of the leading American nutritionists about this — taking both adults and children as the subjects of my questions — and heard the same thing again and again: vegetarianism is at least as healthy as a diet that includes meat.

  If it’s sometimes hard to believe that eschewing animal products will make it easier to eat healthfully, there is a reason: we are constantly lied to about nutrition. Let me be precise. When I say we are being lied to, I’m not impugning the scientific literature, but relying upon it. What the public learns of the scientific data on nutrition and health (especially from the government’s nutritional guidelines) comes to us by way of many hands. Since the rise of science itself, those who produce meat have made sure that they are among those who influence how nutritional data will be presented to the likes of you and me.

  Consider, for example, the National Dairy Council (NDC), a marketing arm of Dairy Management Inc., an industry body whose sole purpose, according to its website, is to “drive increased sales of and demand for U.S. dairy products.” The NDC promotes dairy consumption without regard for negative public-health consequences and even markets dairy to communities incapable of digesting the stuff. As it is a trade group, the NDC’s behavior is at least understandable. What is hard to comprehend is why educators and government have, since the 1950s, allowed the NDC to become arguably the largest and most important supplier of nutritional-education materials in the nation. Worse, our present federal “nutritional” guidelines come to us from the very same government department that has worked so hard to make factory farming the norm in America, the USDA.

  The USDA has a monopoly on the most important advertising space in the nation — those little nutritional boxes we find on virtually everything we eat. Founded the same year that the ADA opened its offices, the USDA was charged with providing nutritional information to the nation and ultimately with creating guidelines that would serve public health. At the same time, though, the USDA was charged with promoting industry.

  The conflict of interest is not subtle: our nation gets its federally endorsed nutritional information from an agency that must support the food industry, which today means supporting factory farms. The details of misinformation that dribble into our lives (like fears about “enough protein”) follow naturally from this fact and have been reflected upon in detail by writers like Marion Nestle. As a public-health expert, Nestle has worked extensively with government, including on “The Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health,” and has had decades of interaction with the food industry. In many ways, her conclusions are banal, confirming what we already expected, but the insider’s perspective she brings has lent a new clarity to the picture of just how much influence the food industry — especially animal agriculture — has on national nutrition policy. She argues that food companies, like cigarette companies (her analogy), will say and do whatever works to sell products. They will “lobby Congress to eliminate regulations perceived as unfavorable; they press federal r
egulatory agencies not to enforce such regulations; and when they don’t like regulatory decisions, they file lawsuits. Like cigarette companies, food companies co-opt food and nutrition experts by supporting professional organizations and research, and they expand sales by marketing directly to children.” Regarding US government recommendations that tend to encourage dairy consumption in the name of preventing osteoporosis, Nestle notes that in parts of the world where milk is not a staple of the diet, people often have less osteoporosis and fewer bone fractures than Americans do. The highest rates of osteoporosis are seen in countries where people consume the most dairy foods.

  In a striking example of food industry influence, Nestle argues that the USDA currently has an informal policy to avoid saying that we should “eat less” of any food no matter how damaging its health impact may be. Thus, instead of saying “eat less meat” (which might be helpful), they advise us to “keep fat intake to less than 30 percent of total calories” (which is obscure to say the least). The institution we have put in charge of telling us when foods are dangerous has a policy of not (directly) telling us when foods (especially if they are animal products) are dangerous.

  We have let the food industry craft our national nutrition policy, which influences everything from what foods are stocked in the health-food aisle at the local grocery store to what our children eat at school. In the National School Lunch Program, for example, more than half a billion of our tax dollars are given to the dairy, beef, egg, and poultry industries to provide animal products to children despite the fact that nutritional data would suggest we should reduce these foods in our diets. Meanwhile, a modest $161 million is offered to buy fruits and vegetables that even the USDA admits we should eat more of. Wouldn’t it make more sense (and be more ethical) for the National Institutes of Health — an organization specializing in human health and having nothing to gain beyond it — to have this responsibility?

  The global implications of the growth of the factory farm, especially given the problems of food-borne illness, antimicrobial resistance, and potential pandemics, are genuinely terrifying. India’s and China’s poultry industries have grown somewhere between 5 and 13 percent annually since the 1980s. If India and China started to eat poultry in the same quantities as Americans (twenty-seven to twenty-eight birds annually), they alone would consume as many chickens as the entire world does today. If the world followed America’s lead, it would consume over 165 billion chickens annually (even if the world population didn’t increase). And then what? Two hundred billion? Five hundred? Will the cages stack higher or grow smaller or both? On what date will we accept the loss of antibiotics as a tool to prevent human suffering? How many days of the week will our grandchildren be ill? Where does it end?

  One-third of the land surface of the planet is dedicated to livestock.

  1.

  Ha Ha, Weep Weep

  PARADISE LOCKER MEATS USED TO be located somewhat closer to Smithville Lake, in northwestern Missouri. The original plant burned down in 2002 when a fire broke out as a result of a ham smoking gone awry. In the new facility is a painting of the old plant, with the image of a cow running from the back. This is a depiction of an actual event. Four years before the fire, in the summer of ’98, a cow escaped the slaughterhouse. She ran for miles — which, if the story had ended there, would have been remarkable enough to justify its telling. But this was some cow. She managed to cross roads, trample or otherwise disregard fences, and elude the farmers who were searching for her. And when she came to Smithville’s shore, she didn’t test the water, think twice, or look back. She attempted to swim to safety — the second leg of her triathlon — wherever that might be. At the very least, she seemed to know what she was swimming from. Mario Fantasma — the owner of Paradise Locker Meats — received a phone call from a friend who saw the cow take the dive. The getaway finally ended when Mario caught up with her on the other side of the lake. Boom boom, curtain. Whether this is a comedy or a tragedy depends on who you think the hero is.

  I learned about this escape from Patrick Martins, cofounder of Heritage Foods (a boutique meat distributor), who put me in touch with Mario. “It’s amazing how many people root for a great escape,” Patrick wrote of the episode on his blog. “I am perfectly comfortable eating meat, yet there is part of me that wants to hear of a pig that made it out and maybe even settled down in the forest to start a colony of free feral pigs.” To Patrick the story has two heroes, and thus is both a comedy and a tragedy.

  If Fantasma sounds like a made-up name, that’s because it is. Mario’s father was left on a doorstep in Calabria, Italy. The family took the baby in and gave him the last name “Phantom.”

  In person, there’s nothing remotely spectral about Mario. He has an imposing physical presence — “a thick neck and bone-in hams for arms” is how Patrick put it — and speaks directly and loudly. He is the kind of person who must accidentally wake up sleeping babies all the time. I found his manner to be hugely pleasant, especially given all of the silence and misdirection I’d encountered in every other slaughterer I’d spoken (or tried to speak) to.

  Monday and Tuesday are kill days at Paradise. Wednesday and Thursday are cut/pack days, and Friday is when locals have their animals custom slaughtered and/or butchered. (Mario told me, “In a two-week period, during hunting season, we’d get anywhere from five hundred to eight hundred deer. It gets pretty crazy.”) Today is a Tuesday. I pull into a spot, turn off the car, and hear squealing.

  The front door of Paradise opens into a small sales area, lined with refrigerator cases containing some products I’ve eaten (bacon, steak), some I’ve never knowingly eaten (blood, snout), and some I can’t identify. High on the walls are taxidermied animals: two deer heads, a longhorn, a ram, fish, numerous pairs of antlers. Lower down are crayoned notes from elementary school students: “Thank you very much for the pig eyeballs. I had a fun time dissecting them and learning the different parts of the eye!” “They were slimy, but I had a lot of fun!” “Thanks for the eyes!” By the cash register is a business card holder advertising half a dozen taxidermists and a Swedish masseuse.

  Paradise Locker Meats is one of the last bastions of independent slaughtering in the Midwest and is a godsend for the local farming community. Large corporations have bought out and closed virtually all of the independent slaughterhouses, forcing farmers into their system. The upshot is that smaller customers — farmers still outside of the factory system — have to pay a premium for processing (if the slaughterhouse will take them at all, which is always precarious), and hardly any can have a say about how they want their animals treated.

  Paradise gets calls at all hours from neighbors during hunting season. Its retail shop offers things no longer available in supermarkets, like bone-in cuts, custom butchering, and a smokehouse, and it has served as a voting station during local elections. Paradise is known for cleanliness, butchering expertise, and sensitivity to animal welfare issues. It is, in short, as close to an “ideal” slaughterhouse as I could hope to find and doesn’t, statistically speaking, represent slaughter at all. Trying to fathom high-speed industrial slaughter by visiting Paradise would be like evaluating the fuel efficiency of Hummers by looking at bicycling (both are, after all, means of transport).

  There are several areas of the facility — the shop, the office, two massive coolers, a smoking room, a butchering room, a pen out back for animals awaiting slaughter — but all of the actual killing and primary breaking down takes place in one large high-ceilinged room. Mario has me put on a white paper suit and hat before passing through the swinging doors. Holding up a thick hand toward the far corner of the kill floor, he begins to explain their chosen methods: “The guy over there is bringing the hog in. And he’s gonna use a shocker [a stun gun that renders animals unconscious quickly]. Once they’re shocked, we pull ’em up on the winch and bleed ’em. What our goal is, what we have to do under the Humane [Methods of Slaughter] Act, is that the animal has to go down and it can’t be blink
ing. It has to be put out of commission.”

  Unlike at massive factory slaughterhouses, where there is a nonstop disassembly line, the pigs of Paradise are processed one at a time. The company doesn’t hire only wageworkers who are unlikely to stay in their jobs even for a year; Mario’s son is among those who work on the kill floor. The pigs are herded from semi-outdoor pens in the rear into a rubber-lined chute that opens onto the kill floor. As soon as a pig is inside, a door drops behind it so that the waiting pigs can’t see what’s going on. This makes sense not only from a humane perspective but from an efficiency one: a pig that fears death — or however you want to put its panic — is going to be hard, if not dangerous, to deal with. And stress is known to adversely affect the quality of the pork.

  In the far corner of the kill room are two doors, one for workers and one for pigs, which open onto the holding pen in the back of the slaughterhouse. The doors are somewhat difficult to see, as this area is partly walled off from the rest of the room. Located in this obscured corner is an enormous machine that temporarily holds the pig in place when the animal enters, and allows the “knocker” — the worker who operates the stun gun (the “shocker”) — to discharge the device on the top of the pig’s head, ideally rendering it immediately unconscious. No one is willing to give me a justification for why this machine and its operation are hidden from the view of everyone save the knocker, but it’s easy to make guesses. No doubt some of it has to do with allowing the workers to go about their business without having constantly to be reminded that their business is the taking apart of recently living beings. By the time a pig comes into view, he or she is already a thing.

  The blocked line of sight also prevents the USDA inspector, Doc, from being able to see the slaughter. This seems problematic, as it is his responsibility to inspect the living animal for any illnesses or defects that would make it unsuitable for human consumption. Also — and this is a big also, if you happen to be a pig — it is his job, and no one else’s, to ensure that slaughter is humane. According to Dave Carney, former USDA inspector and chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, “The way the plants are physically laid out, meat inspection is way down the line. A lot of times, inspectors can’t even see the slaughter area from their stations. It’s virtually impossible for them to monitor the slaughter area when they’re trying to detect diseases and abnormalities in the carcasses that are whizzing by.” An inspector in Indiana echoed this: “We aren’t in a position to see what’s going on. In a lot of plants, the slaughter area is walled off from the rest of the kill floor. Yes, we should be monitoring slaughter. But how can you monitor something like that if you’re not allowed to leave your station to see what’s going on?”