Chanterelles: the real thing.
Clitocybe illudens: the imposter.
My mother’s mushroom warnings rang in my ears. I couldn’t trust my eyes. I couldn’t quite trust the field guide. So whom could I trust? Angelo! But that meant driving my lone mushroom across the bridge to San Francisco. That seemed a little nuts. I realized if I was that worried, I’d never be able to enjoy it. So I threw it out.
That chanterelle (or was it a false chanterelle?) reminded me of the basic problem that had started me on my food chain journey—the omnivore’s dilemma. My first found mushroom had become a victim of this very dilemma. Not a very promising way to start. Of course, choosing between two boxes of breakfast cereal is a little different from deciding if a mushroom will poison you. But at its heart, the problem is the same—we have to figure out what is safe and good to eat.
By going back to a hunter-gatherer meal, I would have to solve the problem of what to eat the old-fashioned way. There would be no industrial food chain between me and my food. I’d have to gain direct knowledge of the plants, animals, and fungi I was going to eat. I’d see them in their natural state. I would have the help of some friends, but when it came down to it, I would have to solve the omnivore’s dilemma myself.
And speaking of dilemmas, I was about to face another one. In my travels I had learned a lot about where our meat comes from. I had seen the factory farms and feedlots. I had even slaughtered some chickens at Polyface Farm. That experience had left me unsettled. I was beginning to have conflicts about eating animals. How did I feel about it? Was it right? I thought that hunting would bring me face-to-face with those conflicts. I’d either work them out or I’d have to stop eating meat.
19
Eating Animals
THE MEAT EATER’S DILEMMA
Here’s a dilemma for you. I was sitting in the Palm, a famous steakhouse, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare. On the table in front of me, open to the first page, was a copy of a book about animal rights called Animal Liberation. If that sounds like a recipe for indigestion, well, that was sort of the idea. I was a meat eater who was wrestling with the idea of eating meat. I wanted to tackle the problem head-on and so there I was, with a delicious steak and a book that said it was wrong to eat that steak.
It had been a long time since I had felt any dilemma about eating meat, but some things had changed. I had owned (and visited) my own steer. I had worked the killing cones in Joel Salatin’s processing shed. Now I was getting ready to hunt and kill a wild animal. I had a lot to think about.
I was especially thinking about my steer, number 534. I knew that on the next day, he was going to be sent to the slaughterhouse. I had followed his life so far, from when he was a calf on the prairie to his days in the feedlot, but his death was the one event I was not allowed to witness.
This didn’t surprise me. The meat industry does not want Americans to know what happens in a slaughterhouse. Then again, most of us don’t want to know. We don’t want to think about the living animals that become our food. But I had resolved to think about it. Maybe it was a little late, but I wanted to see if I could defend what I had already done and what I was about to do.
TO MEAT OR NOT TO MEAT?
Animal Liberation is one of those rare books that demands you either defend the way you live or change it. It is by Peter Singer, a leader of the animal rights movement. The book has converted countless thousands to vegetarianism. It didn’t take me long to see why: Within a few pages he had thrown me and my meat eating on the defensive.
Singer’s argument is simple. He does not argue that animals are as intelligent as human beings. He doesn’t argue that they should be treated the same as human beings. He merely points out that animals can suffer just as we do.
A cow is different from us in many ways. But Singer says that a cow is not different at all in this one very important way: It feels pain and suffers just as we do. If we think suffering is wrong, how can we allow suffering of animals to go on?
Singer had planted a troubling notion, one that stuck in my mind. In the days that followed, I read other animal rights thinkers: writers like Tom Regan, James Rachels, Joy Williams, and Matthew Scully. These writers all ask: Is it all right to allow animals to suffer just because they are animals? Isn’t that a kind of discrimination? I began to think they might be right. Not too long ago, racism and discrimination against women was accepted by a lot of people. Now those ideas are rejected by most Americans. Maybe some time in the future people will look back at our treatment of animals in the same way.
Singer says we have a simple choice to make. We have to choose between our desire to eat meat and allowing the suffering of animals to continue. Put it that way and it seems you have no choice. You have to stop eating animals.
So that is what I did, at least temporarily. I felt that until I had worked out exactly how I felt about these issues, I had better give up eating meat. So on a September Sunday, after dining on a delicious barbecued tenderloin of pork, I became a reluctant—and, I hoped, temporary—vegetarian.
THE VEGETARIAN’S DILEMMA
Becoming a vegetarian wasn’t as simple as you might think. Like all vegetarians, I had to decide on my rules and exceptions. For one thing, I did not become a vegan (I still ate eggs and dairy). I decided that eggs and milk can be gotten from animals without hurting or killing them—or so, at least, I thought. I was also willing to eat animals without faces, such as clams and oysters. I believe these animals do not have enough of a nervous system to suffer pain. No one knows for certain if this is true, but many scientists and animal rights supporters (Peter Singer included) accept the argument.
Rules in place, I settled into my new vegetarian lifestyle. It was harder than I thought it would be. Cooking a good vegetarian dinner takes a lot more thought and work. (All that chopping of vegetables!) Cooking a steak or a chicken is a lot easier.
I also found that being a vegetarian makes it harder to eat with other people. My friends now had to change their eating plans for me, and this made me uncomfortable. As a guest, if I forget to tell my hosts in advance that I don’t eat meat, they feel bad. But if I do tell them, they’ll make something special for me, and I’ll feel bad. If we go out to a restaurant, it has to be someplace where I can get something to eat. Steakhouses are definitely out.
Being a vegetarian also meant giving up traditions I value: the Thanksgiving turkey, my mother’s beef brisket at Passover, or even franks at the ballpark. Such foods connect us to our family, religion, nation, and history. Meat eating has been a part of human culture for tens of thousands of years. It’s part of our biology too. Our bodies, from our teeth to our brains, evolved to help us hunt, cook, and eat meat. The desire to eat meat may be an instinct, something that is in our genes. Of course, as humans we can and sometimes should learn to rise above our instincts. I’m just saying that giving up meat is not something that comes easily, at least for me.
ANIMAL SUFFERING
But even with all the conflicts I had about being vegetarian, none of the things that bothered me seemed more important than stopping animal suffering. The question that I needed to answer was this: Is there a way to raise farm animals and kill them for food without causing suffering?
Scientists agree that higher animals—mammals like cows or pigs or apes—feel pain pretty much as we do. But suffering is more than pain. A lot of human suffering comes from our emotions—fear, shame, worry, or regret. Animals don’t seem to suffer from emotions the way humans do. Animals can’t feel the same fear of death as a human, because they can’t imagine the future. I’ve watched cows walk up a ramp into a slaughterhouse. They seem to be feeling no fear or panic. They don’t seem to be suffering at all.
So can animals suffer if they can’t think like human beings? After wrestling with the question for some time, I decided that animal suffering is real but different from human suffering. Still, I want to make one thing very clear. Even if animals can’t suffer like human bein
gs, there is no excuse for the cruelty that goes on in our factory farms and feedlots. Believe me, the people who run those places don’t waste any time thinking about animal suffering. If they did, they’d have to go out of business.
So far I’ve told you about how chickens and cows are raised on factory farms. It turns out that conditions are even worse for the chickens in egg farms. I haven’t managed to actually get into one of these places. I tried—journalists are not welcome. But you can read about what happens right in the industry trade magazines. What they tell us is horrifying.
At a factory egg farm, the laying hen spends her brief life jammed into a wire cage with six other hens. The cage is so small that a single page of a newspaper could cover the floor. Being trapped in a tiny cage with six other birds goes against every natural instinct of a chicken. As a result the hens do things no normal chicken would do. They attack and try to eat each other. They rub their breasts against the wire of the cage until they are bald and bleeding. This is the chief reason broilers don’t get put in cages. To scar so much high-value breast meat would be bad business.
Laying hens crammed into cages at a factory egg farm.
Pain? Suffering? Madness? Whatever you want to call it, some of the hens simply can’t take it. Ten percent just die in their cages. The companies that run the farms expect this death rate and figure it into the cost of production.
The fate of the survivors might be worse. When their egg production begins to drop, the hens will be “force-molted”—starved of food, water, and light for several days in order to stimulate a final spurt of egg laying before their life’s work is done.
BLIND BUSINESS
When you refuse to look away from the industrial food system, this is what you see. You see the cruelty required to produce eggs that can be sold for seventy-nine cents a dozen. We don’t look, or we are kept from looking by agribusiness companies. Why don’t they see the cruelty they are causing?
Big business is often blind, except to profit. Morality just doesn’t enter into a spreadsheet. Customs, culture, ideas about right and wrong all fall away under the pressure to increase production and get a higher return on investment. Mercy toward animals is just one of the principles that gets thrown out the window. Mercy to human beings often follows. It is no accident that the non-union workers in these factories receive little more consideration than the animals.
The food industry won’t even use the word suffering. Instead they talk about “stress.” Solutions to stress must be found, because it hurts production and therefore profits. But the solutions often involve more cruelty. If chickens are pecking at each other in cages, the industry doesn’t let them out of their cages. Instead factory farms clip the beaks off their laying hens. When hogs bite each other’s tails because of stress, the industry cuts off their tails. But not the whole tail. They leave a stub so the bite is more painful. That “teaches” the pigs to avoid being bitten.
It’s painful just to write these things and I’m sure it’s painful to read them. It all sounds like a nightmare. But it’s real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born into the industrial food chain. In response to the horrors of the factory farm, becoming a vegetarian seems pretty reasonable.
ANIMAL HAPPINESS
Yet are those our only choices? Must we either take part in the crime of factory farms or give up meat? I have seen other types of farms and other ways to treat farm animals. I’m thinking of the hens I saw at Polyface Farm, fanning out over the cow pasture on a June morning, pecking at the cowpats and the grass. Those chickens were doing everything a chicken naturally wants and needs to do. If there is such a thing as animal happiness, then those animals were happy.
It is true that farms like Polyface are but a tiny speck compared to the industrial food chain. But they do exist. And they show that there is another way to raise and slaughter animals. Of course, many people in the animal rights movement thinks even a farm like Polyface is a “death camp.” They think any use of animals for food is morally wrong, not just killing them for meat, but using their milk or eggs. But comparing a farm like Polyface to a concentration camp is to ignore reality—the reality of domesticated animals.
Chickens and cows are domestic animals. They have evolved to live with human beings. A good life for a chicken or a cow means doing all those things its nature tells it to do. That means chickens need to scratch in the dirt. Cows need to eat grass. And cows and chickens need humans to help them do those things. Animals rights people say we should free domestic animals, but domestic animals cannot survive in the wild. They cannot lead a good life apart from human beings. (Pigs can sometimes survive in the wild, as we will see.)
Animal rights supporters say that raising farm animals is a form of slavery. This is based on the false idea that humans went out and forced animals to be domesticated. But the history of domestication is much more complicated. Zoologists will tell you that certain animals more or less “chose” domestication. Individual wild animals discovered that they could better survive by hanging around human beings, eating their crops or leftovers. A deal was made. It was never written down or spoken, but it was a deal nonetheless. Humans began providing the animals with food and protection. In exchange the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and—yes—their flesh. The animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves in the wild. Humans helped this along by breeding the individuals that were tamer.
From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats, and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have almost disappeared. (There are ten thousand wolves left in North America and fifty million dogs.) For many animals, domestication has been a winning strategy. Some people speak of animal liberation, but what would liberation mean to the millions of cows and chickens on our farms? It would mean a swift and unpleasant death, starvation, or attack by predators. And eventually it would mean the end of chickens, cattle, and many of the other domesticated species that at this point depend on us for their continued existence—depend, that is, on us eating them.
In nature there are always predators and prey. Have chickens, cows, and pigs traded one set of predators for another? Yes. They traded a life of being hunted in the wild for a life of being raised, bred, and eaten by humans. They have no other option now.
A VEGAN WORLD?
There was one other problem I had with being a vegetarian. I just didn’t see how we could have a world in which people ate only plants. It would pose serious problems.
A vegan world could not be fed with local food chains. The globe is full of places where it is much easier to raise animals than crops. The rocky, hilly land of New England is a good example. To put New England on a vegan diet would mean most of its food would have to be imported from elsewhere.
Without animals to supply fertility (through their manure) you can’t have small sustainable farms. You’d have to rely on chemical fertilizer from the industrial food chain.
You have to ask yourself which is better, tofu from an industrial food chain farm, shipped thousands of miles across the country, or an organic chicken raised on a small farm a few miles from my house? I would choose the chicken over the tofu.
As you can probably tell, after a lot of soul-searching I decided to give up my short experiment with being a vegetarian. I was glad I had done it, because it forced me to think hard about these questions. But in the end I decided that killing animals is not wrong in principle. What matters is the way we treat them when they are alive and the way we slaughter them when it’s time for them to be eaten. Perhaps vegetarians and concerned meat eaters can at least agree on this: We have to work much harder to make sure that animals on farms are treated with respect. They have to be allowed to live lives that fit their natures. Then when it is time for the slaughterhouse, their deaths should be swift and painless.
MY STEER BECOMES A STEAK
The day afte
r my steak-and-Singer dinner at the Palm I found myself on a plane flying from Atlanta to Denver. A couple of hours into the flight the pilot came on the public address system to announce that we were passing over Liberal, Kansas. This was very weird. The pilot hadn’t said one word until then. This was the first, last, and only landmark that he pointed out. Why had he chosen that town?
It wasn’t just weird, it was spooky. For Liberal, Kansas, happened to be the town where my steer, possibly that very day, was being slaughtered. I’m not a superstitious person, but this gave me the creeps. I could only wonder what was going on just then, thirty thousand feet below me, on the kill floor of the National Beef Plant. Was steer number 534 about to meet his fate?
I could only wonder because the company had refused to let me see. When I’d visited the plant earlier that spring I watched steers being unloaded from trailers into corrals. I watched them being led up a ramp and through a blue door. I was not allowed to see what happened inside, on what is called the kill floor. But as it turned out, I was able to ask an expert, the person who had actually designed that very ramp and the killing machinery behind the blue door.
A CLEAN KILL
Temple Grandin is an animal handling expert who has consulted for McDonald’s. Her job is to make sure the killing of cows at National Beef is as quick and painless as possible. Before she began her work, there were many stories coming from the plant about cows that were still alive when they were being skinned and butchered. McDonald’s hired Grandin to make sure that sort of thing never happened.
The Omnivore's Dilemma Page 15