Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

Saturday ~ Pasta with fresh homemade tomato sauce and meatballs

  * * *

  14 • YOU CAN’T RUN AWAY ON HARVEST DAY

  September

  The Saturday of Labor Day weekend dawned with a sweet, translucent bite, like a Golden Delicious apple. I always seem to harbor a childlike hope through the berry-stained months of June and July that summer will be for keeps. But then a day comes in early fall to remind me why it should end, after all. In September the quality of daylight shifts toward flirtation. The green berries on the spicebush shrubs along our lane begin to blink red, first one and then another, like faltering but resolute holiday lights. The woods fill with the restless singing of migrant birds warming up to the proposition of flying south. The cool air makes us restless too: jeans and sweater weather, perfect for a hike. Steven and I rose early that morning, looked out the window, looked at each other, and started in on the time-honored marital grumble: Was this your idea?

  We weren’t going on a hike today. Nor would we have the postsummer Saturday luxury of sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee and watching the farm wake up. On the docket instead was a hard day of work we could not postpone. The previous morning we’d sequestered half a dozen roosters and as many tom turkeys in a room of the barn we call “death row.” We hold poultry there, clean and comfortable with water but no food, for a twenty-four-hour fast prior to harvest. It makes the processing cleaner and seems to calm the animals also. I could tell you it gives them time to get their emotional affairs in order, if that helps. But they have limited emotional affairs, and no idea what’s coming.

  We had a lot more of both. Our plan for this gorgeous day was the removal of some of our animals from the world of the living into the realm of food. At five months of age our roosters had put on a good harvest weight, and had lately opened rounds of cockfighting, venting their rising hormonal angst against any moving target, including us. When a rooster flies up at you with his spurs, he leaves marks. Lily now had to arm herself with a length of pipe in order to gather the eggs. Our barnyard wasn’t big enough for this much machismo. We would certainly take no pleasure in the chore, but it was high time for the testosterone-reduction program. We sighed at the lovely weather and pulled out our old, bloody sneakers for harvest day.

  There was probably a time when I thought it euphemistic to speak of “harvesting” animals. Now I don’t. We calculate “months to harvest” when planning for the right time to start poultry. We invite friends to “harvest parties,” whether we’ll be gleaning vegetable or animal. A harvest implies planning, respect, and effort. With animals, both the planning and physical effort are often greater, and respect for the enterprise is substantially more complex. It’s a lot less fun than spending an autumn day picking apples off trees, but it’s a similar operation on principle and the same word.

  Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, “Thou shalt not.” Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes. Who among us has never killed living creatures on purpose? When a child is sick with an infection we rush for the medicine spoon, committing an eager and purposeful streptococcus massacre. We sprinkle boric acid or grab a spray can to rid our kitchens of cockroaches. What we mean by “killing” is to take a life cruelly, as in murder—or else more accidentally, as in “Oops, looks like I killed my African violet.” Though the results are incomparable, what these different “killings” have in common is needless waste and some presumed measure of regret.

  Most of us, if we know even a little about where our food comes from, understand that every bite put into our mouths since infancy (barring the odd rock or marble) was formerly alive. The blunt biological truth is that we animals can only remain alive by eating other life. Plants are inherently more blameless, having been born with the talent of whipping up their own food, peacefully and without noise, out of sunshine, water, and the odd mineral ingredient sucked up through their toes. Strangely enough, it’s the animals to which we’ve assigned some rights, while the saintly plants we maim and behead with moral impunity. Who thinks to beg forgiveness while mowing the lawn?

  The moral rules of destroying our fellow biota get even more tangled, the deeper we go. If we draw the okay-to-kill line between “animal” and “plant,” and thus exclude meat, fowl, and fish from our diet on moral grounds, we still must live with the fact that every sack of flour and every soybean-based block of tofu came from a field where countless winged and furry lives were extinguished in the plowing, cultivating, and harvest. An estimated 67 million birds die each year from pesticide exposure on U.S. farms. Butterflies, too, are universally killed on contact in larval form by the genetically modified pollen contained in most U.S. corn. Foxes, rabbits, and bobolinks are starved out of their homes or dismembered by the sickle mower. Insects are “controlled” even by organic pesticides; earthworms are cut in half by the plow. Contrary to lore, they won’t grow into two; both halves die.

  To believe we can live without taking life is delusional. Humans may only cultivate nonviolence in our diets by degree. I’ve heard a Buddhist monk suggest the number of food-caused deaths is minimized in steak dinners, which share one death over many meals, whereas the equation is reversed for a bowl of clams. Others of us have lost heart for eating any steak dinner that’s been shoved through the assembly line of feedlot life—however broadly we might share that responsibility. I take my gospel from Wendell Berry, who writes in What Are People For, “I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me.

  If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants.”

  I find myself fundamentally allied with a vegetarian position in every way except one: however selectively, I eat meat. I’m unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods. Uncountable deaths by pesticide and habitat removal—the beetles and bunnies that die collaterally for our bread and veggie-burgers—are lives plumb wasted. Animal harvest is at least not gratuitous, as part of a plan involving labor and recompense. We raise these creatures for a reason. Such premeditation may be presumed unkind, but without it our gentle domestic beasts in their picturesque shapes, colors, and finely tuned purposes would never have had the distinction of existing. To envision a vegan version of civilization, start by erasing from all time the Three Little Pigs, the boy who cried wolf, Charlotte’s Web, the golden calf, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Next, erase civilization, brought to you by the people who learned to domesticate animals. Finally, rewrite our evolutionary history, since Homo sapiens became the species we are by means of regular binges of carnivory.

  Most confounding of all, in the vegan revision, are the chapters addressing the future. If farm animals have civil rights, what aspect of their bondage to humans shall they overcome? Most wouldn’t last two days without it. Recently while I was cooking eggs, my kids sat at the kitchen table entertaining me with readings from a magazine profile of a famous, rather young vegan movie star. Her dream was to create a safe-haven ranch where the cows and chickens could live free, happy lives and die natural deaths. “Wait till those cows start bawling to be milked,” I warned. Having nursed and weaned my own young, I can tell you there is no pain to compare with an overfilled udder. We wondered what the starlet might do for those bursting Jerseys, not to mention the eggs the chickens would keep dropping everywhere. What a life’s work for that poor gal: traipsing about the farm in her strappy heels, weaving among the cow flops, bending gracefully to pick up eggs and stick them in an incubator where they would maddeningly hatch, and grow up bent on laying more eggs. It’s dirty work, trying to save an endless chain of uneaten lives. Realistically, my kids observed, she’d hire somebody.
>
  Forgive us. We know she meant well, and as fantasies of the super-rich go, it’s more inspired than most. It’s just the high-mindedness that rankles; when moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that’s awfully hard not to poke. The farm-liberation fantasy simply reflects a modern cultural confusion about farm animals. They’re human property, not just legally but biologically. Over the millennia of our clever history, we created from wild progenitors whole new classes of beasts whose sole purpose was to feed us. If turned loose in the wild, they would haplessly starve, succumb to predation, and destroy the habitats and lives of most or all natural things. If housed at the public expense they would pose a more immense civic burden than our public schools and prisons combined. No thoughtful person really wants those things to happen. But living at a remove from the actual workings of a farm, most humans no longer learn appropriate modes of thinking about animal harvest. Knowing that our family raises meat animals, many friends have told us—not judgmentally, just confessionally—“I don’t think I could kill an animal myself.” I find myself explaining: It’s not what you think. It’s nothing like putting down your dog.

  Most nonfarmers are intimate with animal life in only three categories: people; pets (i.e., junior people); and wildlife (as seen on nature shows, presumed beautiful and rare). Purposely beheading any of the above is unthinkable, for obvious reasons. No other categories present themselves at close range for consideration. So I understand why it’s hard to think about harvest, a categorical act that includes cutting the heads off living lettuces, extended to crops that blink their beady eyes. On our farm we don’t especially enjoy processing our animals, but we do value it, as an important ritual for ourselves and any friends adventurous enough to come and help, because of what we learn from it. We reconnect with the purpose for which these animals were bred. We dispense with all delusions about who put the live in livestock, and who must take it away.

  A friend from whom we buy pasture-grazed lamb and poultry has concurred with us on this point. Kirsty Zahnke grew up in the U.K., and observes that American attitudes toward life and death probably add to the misgivings. “People in this country do everything to cheat death, it seems. Instead of being happy with each moment, they worry so much about what comes next. I think this gets transposed to animals—the preoccupation with ‘taking a life.’ My animals have all had a good life, with death as its natural end. It’s not without thought and gratitude that I slaughter my animals, it is a hard thing to do. It’s taken me time to be able to eat my own lambs that I had played with. But I always think of Kahlil Gibran’s words:

  “‘When you kill a beast, say to him in your heart:

  By the same power that slays you, I too am slain, and I too shall be consumed.

  For the law that delivers you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.

  Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.’”

  Kirsty works with a local environmental organization and frequently hosts its out-of-town volunteers, who camp at her farm while working in the area. Many of these activists had not eaten meat for many years before arriving on the Zahnkes’ meat farm—a formula not for disaster, she notes, but for education. “If one gets to know the mantras of the farm owners, it can change one’s viewpoint. I would venture to say that seventy-five percent of the vegans and vegetarians who stayed at least a week here began to eat our meat or animal products, simply because they see what I am doing as right—for the animals, for the environment, for humans.”

  I respect every diner who makes morally motivated choices about consumption. And I stand with nonviolence, as one of those extremist moms who doesn’t let kids at her house pretend to shoot each other, ever, or make any game out of human murder. But I’ve come to different conclusions about livestock. The ve-vangelical pamphlets showing jam-packed chickens and sick downer-cows usually declare, as their first principle, that all meat is factory-farmed. That is false, and an affront to those of us who work to raise animals humanely, or who support such practices with our buying power. I don’t want to cause any creature misery, so I won’t knowingly eat anything that has stood belly deep in its own poop wishing it was dead until bam, one day it was. (In restaurants I go for the fish, or the vegetarian option.)

  But meat, poultry, and eggs from animals raised on open pasture are the traditional winter fare of my grandparents, and they serve us well here in the months when it would cost a lot of fossil fuels to keep us in tofu. Should I overlook the suffering of victims of hurricanes, famines, and wars brought on this world by profligate fuel consumption? Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator-trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

  To breed fewer meat animals in the future is possible; phasing out those types destined for confinement lots is a plan I’m assisting myself, by raising heirloom breeds. Most humans could well consume more vegetable foods, and less meat. But globally speaking, the vegetarian option is a luxury. The oft-cited energetic argument for vegetarianism, that it takes ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain, only applies to the kind of land where rain falls abundantly on rich topsoil. Many of the world’s poor live in marginal lands that can’t support plant-based agriculture. Those not blessed with the fruited plain and amber waves of grain must make do with woody tree pods, tough-leaved shrubs, or sparse grasses. Camels, reindeer, sheep, goats, cattle, and other ruminants are uniquely adapted to transform all those types of indigestible cellulose into edible milk and meat. The fringes of desert, tundra, and marginal grasslands on every continent—coastal Peru, the southwestern United States, the Kalahari, the Gobi, the Australian outback, northern Scandinavia—are inhabited by herders. The Navajo, Mongols, Lapps, Masai, and countless other resourceful tribes would starve without their animals.

  Domestic herds can also carry problems into these habitats. Overgrazing has damaged plenty of the world’s landscapes, as has clearing rain forests to make way for cattle ranches. But well-managed grazing can actually benefit natural habitats where native grazers exist or formerly existed. Environmental research in North and South American deserts has shown that careful introduction of cattle, sheep, or goats into some grasslands helps return the balance of their native vegetation, especially mesquite trees and their kin, which coevolved for millennia with large grazing mammals (mastodons and camels) that are now extinct. Mesquite seeds germinate best after passing through the stomach of a ruminant. Then the habitat also needs the return of fire, and prairie dog predation on the mesquite seedlings—granted, it’s complicated. But grazers do belong.

  In northwestern Peru, in the extremely arid, deforested region of Piura, an innovative project is using a four-legged tool for widespread reforestation: goats. This grassless place lost most of its native mesquite forests to human refugees who were pushed out of greener places, settled here, and cut down most of the trees for firewood. Goats can subsist on the seedpods of the remaining mesquites (without damaging the thorny trees) and spread the seeds, depositing them across the land inside neat fertilizer pellets. The goats also provide their keepers with meat and milk, in a place where rainfall is so scarce (zero, in some years), it’s impossible to subsist on vegetable crops. The herds forage freely when mesquite beans are in season, and live the rest of the year on pods stored in cement-block granaries. These low-maintenance animals also reproduce themselves free of charge, so the project broadens its reforesting and hunger-relief capacities throughout the region, year by year.

  We cranky environmentalists tend to nurture a hunch that humans and our food systems are always dange
rous to the earth. But when I visited Piura to study the mesquite-goat project, I could not name any measure by which the project was anything but successful. The “before” scenario involved malnourished families in a desiccated brown landscape. Within a few years after receiving goats, the families still lived in simple mud-and-lath homes, but their villages were shaded by green oases of fast-growing native vegetation. They milked the goats, made cheese, burned mesquite pods for cooking fuel, and looked forward to eating meat several times each month. Small, irrigated gardens of beans and leafy greens provided supplementary nutrition, but in this climate it’s animal products that can offer the prospect of ending malnutrition. Each goat-owning family makes an agreement with the donor organizations (Heifer International and the local group ACBIODESA) to give the first female offspring to another family, thus moving their own status from “poor” to “benefactor”—a powerfully important distinction in terms of local decision-making and further stewardship of the land. For the same money, a shipment of donated wheat, rice, or corn would only have maintained the region’s widespread poverty through another few months, and deepened its environmental crisis. Between vegetable or animal solutions to that region’s problems, my vote goes to the goats.

  The mountainous part of the United States where I live, though neither destitute nor desiccated, has its own challenges. The farms here are small and steep. Using diesel tractors to turn the earth every spring (where that’s even possible) sends our topsoil downhill into the creeks with every rain, creating many problems at once. One of the region’s best options for feeding ourselves and our city neighbors may be pasture-based hoof stock and poultry. Cattle, goats, sheep, turkeys, and chickens all have their own efficient ways of turning steep, grass-covered hillsides into food, while fertilizing the land discreetly with their manure. They do it without drinking a drop of gasoline.