Eating Animals

by Eating Animals (retail) (epub)

  CFE

  Common Farming Exemptions make legal any method of raising farmed animals so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry. In other words, farmers — corporations is the right word — have the power to define cruelty. If the industry adopts a practice — hacking off unwanted appendages with no painkillers, for example, but you can let your imagination run with this — it automatically becomes legal.

  CFEs are enacted state by state and range from the disturbing to the absurd. Take Nevada. Under its CFE, the state’s welfare laws cannot be enforced to “prohibit or interfere with established methods of animal husbandry, including the raising, handling, feeding, housing, and transporting, of livestock or farm animals.” What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

  Lawyers David Wolfson and Mariann Sullivan, experts on the issue, explain:

  Certain states exempt specific practices, rather than all customary farming practices. . . . Ohio exempts farmed animals from requirements for “wholesome exercise and a change of air,” and Vermont exempts farmed animals from the section in its criminal anticruelty statute that deems it illegal to “tie, tether and restrain” an animal in a manner that is “inhumane or detrimental to its welfare.” One cannot help but assume that in Ohio farmed animals are denied exercise and air, and that in Vermont they are tied, tethered or restrained in a manner that is inhumane.

  COMFORT FOOD

  One night, when my son was four weeks old, he developed a slight fever. By the next morning he was having trouble breathing. On our pediatrician’s recommendation, we took him to the emergency room, where he was diagnosed with RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), which often expresses itself in adults as the common cold, but in babies can be extremely dangerous, even life threatening. We ended up spending a week in the pediatric intensive-care unit, my wife and I taking turns sleeping in the armchair in our son’s room, and on the waiting-room recliner.

  On the second, third, fourth, and fifth days, our friends Sam and Eleanor brought us food. Lots of food, far more than we could eat: lentil salad, chocolate truffles, roasted vegetables, nuts and berries, mushroom risotto, potato pancakes, green beans, nachos, wild rice, oatmeal, dried mango, pasta primavera, chili — all of it comfort food. We could have eaten in the cafeteria or ordered in. And they could have expressed their love with visits and kind words. But they brought all of that food, and it was a small, good thing that we needed. That, more than any other reason — and there are many other reasons — is why this book is dedicated to them.

  COMFORT FOOD, CONT.

  On the sixth day, my wife and I were able, for the first time since arriving, to leave the hospital together. Our son was clearly over the hump, and doctors thought we’d be able to take him home the following morning. We could hear the bullet we’d dodged whistle past. So as soon as he’d fallen asleep (with my in-laws by his bedside), we took the elevator down and reemerged into the world.

  It was snowing. The snowflakes were surreally large, distinct and durable: like the ones children cut out of white paper. We glided like sleepwalkers down Second Avenue, no destination in mind, and ended up in a Polish diner. Massive glass windows faced the street, and the snowflakes clung for several seconds before descending. I can’t remember what I ordered. I can’t remember if the food was any good. It was the best meal of my life.

  CRUELTY

  Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it. It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.

  It’s often said that nature, “red in tooth and claw,” is cruel. I heard this again and again from ranchers, who tried to persuade me that they were protecting their animals from what lay outside the enclosures. Nature is no picnic, true. (Picnics are rarely picnics.) And it’s also true that animals on the very best farms often have better lives than they would in the wild. But nature isn’t cruel. And neither are the animals in nature that kill and occasionally even torture one another. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

  DESPERATION

  There are sixty pounds of flour in my grandmother’s basement. On a recent weekend visit, I was sent down to retrieve a bottle of Coke and discovered the sacks lining the wall, like sandbags on the banks of a rising river. Why would a ninety-year-old woman need so much flour? And why the several dozen two-liter bottles of Coke, or the pyramid of Uncle Ben’s, or the wall of pumpernickel loaves in the freezer?

  “I noticed you have an awful lot of flour in the basement,” I said, returning to the kitchen.

  “Sixty pounds.”

  I couldn’t read her tone. Was that pride I heard? A hint of challenge? Shame?

  “Can I ask why?”

  She opened a cabinet and took down a thick stack of coupons, each of which offered a free sack of flour for every bag purchased.

  “How did you get so many of these?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t a problem.”

  “What are you going to do with all of that flour?”

  “I’ll make some cookies.”

  I tried to imagine how my grandmother, who has never driven a car in her life, managed to schlep all of those sacks from the supermarket to her house. Someone drove her, as always, but did she load down any one car with all sixty, or did she make multiple trips? Knowing my grandmother, she probably calculated how many sacks she could get in one car without overly inconveniencing the driver. She then contacted the necessary number of friends and made that many trips to the supermarket, likely in one day. Was this what she meant by ingenuity, all those times she told me that it was her luck and ingenuity that got her through the Holocaust?

  I’ve been an accomplice on many of my grandmother’s food-acquisition missions. I remember a sale of some pelleted bran cereal, for which the coupon limited three boxes per customer. After buying three boxes herself, my grandmother sent my brother and me to buy three boxes each while she waited at the door. What must I have looked like to the cashier? A five-year-old boy using a coupon to buy multiple boxes of a foodstuff that not even a genuinely starving person would willfully eat? We went back an hour later and did it again.

  The flour demanded answers. For what population was she planning on baking all of these cookies? Where was she hiding the 1,400 cartons of eggs? And most obviously: How did she get all of those sacks into the basement? I’ve met enough of her decrepit chauffeurs to know they weren’t doing the hauling.

  “One bag at a time,” she said, dusting the table with her palm.

  One bag at a time. My grandmother has trouble making it from the car to the front door one step at a time. Her breathing is slow and labored, and on a recent visit to the doctor, it was discovered that she shares a heart rate with the great blue whale.

  Her perpetual wish is to live to the next bar mitzvah, but I expect her to live another decade, at least. She’s not the kind of person who dies. She could live to be 120, and there’s no way she’ll use up half of the flour. And she must know that.

  DISCOMFORT FOOD

  Sharing food generates good feeling and creates social bonds. Michael Pollan, who has written as thoughtfully about food as anyone, calls this “table fellowship” and argues that its importance, which I agree is significant, is a vote against vegetarianism. At one level, he’s right.

  Let’s assume you’re like Pollan and are opposed to factory-farmed meat. If you’re at the guest end, it stinks not to eat food that was prepared for you, especially (although he doesn’t get into this) when the grounds for refusal are ethical. But how much does it stink? It’s a classic dilemma: How much do I value creating a socially comfortable situation, and how much do I value acting socially responsible? The relative importance of ethical eating and table fellowship will be different in different situations (declining my grandmother’s chicken with carrots is different from passing on microwaved buffalo wings).

  More important, though, and what Pollan curiously doesn’t emphasize, is that attempting to be a sel
ective omnivore is a much heavier blow to table fellowship than vegetarianism. Imagine an acquaintance invites you to dinner. You could say, “I’d love to come. And just so you know, I’m a vegetarian.” You could also say, “I’d love to come. But I only eat meat that is produced by family farmers.” Then what do you do? You’ll probably have to send the host a web link or list of local shops to even make the request intelligible, let alone manageable. This effort might be well-placed, but it is certainly more invasive than asking for vegetarian food (which these days requires no explanation). The entire food industry (restaurants, airline and college food services, catering at weddings) is set up to accommodate vegetarians. There is no such infrastructure for the selective omnivore.

  And what about being at the host end of a gathering? Selective omnivores also eat vegetarian fare, but the reverse is obviously not true. What choice promotes greater table fellowship?

  And it isn’t just what we put into our mouths that creates table fellowship, but what comes out. There is also the possibility that a conversation about what we believe would generate more fellowship — even when we believe different things — than any food being served.

  DOWNER

  1) Something or someone depressing.

  2) An animal that collapses from poor health and is unable to stand back up. This does not imply grave illness any more than a fallen person does. Some downed animals are seriously ill or injured, but often enough they require little more than water and rest to be spared a slow, painful death. There aren’t reliable statistics available about downers (who would report them?), but estimates put the number of downed cows at around 200,000 a year — about two cows for every word in this book. When it comes to animal welfare, the absolute bare minimum, the least we could conceivably give, would seem to be euthanizing downed animals. But that costs money, and downers have no use and so earn no regard or mercy. In most of America’s fifty states it is perfectly legal (and perfectly common) to simply let downers die of exposure over days or toss them, live, into dumpsters.

  My first research visit for this book was to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York. Farm Sanctuary is not a farm. Nothing is grown or raised there. Founded in 1986, by Gene Baur and his then-wife, Lorri Houston, it was created as a place for rescued farmed animals to live out their unnatural lives. (Natural lives would be an awkward expression to use in reference to animals designed to be slaughtered in their adolescence. Farmed pigs, for example, are usually slaughtered at about 250 pounds. Let these genetic mutants live on, as they do at Farm Sanctuary, and they can exceed 800 pounds.)

  Farm Sanctuary has become one of the most important animal protection, education, and lobbying organizations in America. Once funded by the sales of veggie hot dogs off the back of a VW van at Grateful Dead concerts — there’s no real need to make a joke here — Farm Sanctuary has expanded to occupy 175 acres in upstate New York and another 300-acre sanctuary in northern California. It has more than 200,000 members, an annual budget of about $6 million, and the ability to help shape local and national legislation. But none of that is why I chose to begin there. I simply wanted to interact with farmed animals. In my thirty years of life, the only pigs, cows, and chickens I had touched were dead and cut up.

  As we walked the pasture, Baur explained that Farm Sanctuary was less his dream or big idea than it was the product of a fortuitous event.

  “I was driving around the Lancaster stockyard, and saw, around back, a pile of downers. I approached, and one of the sheep moved her head. I realized she was still alive, left there to suffer. So I put her in the back of my van. I’d never done anything like that before, but I couldn’t leave her like that. I took her to the vet, expecting she’d be euthanized. But after a bit of prodding, she just stood right up. We took her to our house in Wilmington, and then, when we got the farm, we took her here. She lived ten years. Ten. Good years.”

  I mention this story not to promote additional farm sanctuaries. They do plenty of good, but that good is educational (offering exposure to people like me) and not practical in the sense of actually rescuing and caring for a significant number of animals. Baur would be the first to acknowledge this. I mention the story to illustrate just how close to health downed animals can be. Any individual that close needs either to be saved or mercifully killed.

  ENVIRONMENTALISM

  Concern for the preservation and restoration of natural resources and the ecological systems that sustain human life. There are grander definitions I could get more excited about, but this is in fact what is usually meant by the term, at least for the moment. Some environmentalists include animals as resources. What is meant by animals here is usually endangered or hunted species, rather than those most populous on earth, which are most in need of preservation and restoration.

  A University of Chicago study recently found that our food choices contribute at least as much as our transportation choices to global warming. More recent and authoritative studies by the United Nations and the Pew Commission show conclusively that globally, farmed animals contribute more to climate change than transport. According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector — cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships — combined. Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2, as well as 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the GWP of CO2. The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.

  The UN summarized the environmental effects of the meat industry this way: raising animals for food (whether on factory or traditional farms) “is one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. . . . [Animal agriculture] should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale.” In other words, if one cares about the environment, and if one accepts the scientific results of such sources as the UN (or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the Center for Science in the Public Interest, or the Pew Commission, or the Union of Concerned Scientists, or the Worldwatch Institute . . . ), one must care about eating animals.

  Most simply put, someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.

  FACTORY FARM

  This term is sure to fall out of use in the next generation or so, either because there will be no more factory farms, or because there will be no more family farms to compare them to.

  FAMILY FARM

  A family farm is typically defined as a farm where a family owns the animals, manages the operations, and contributes labor on a day-to-day basis. Two generations ago, virtually all farms were family farms.

  FEED CONVERSION

  By necessity, both factory and family farmers are concerned with the ratio of edible animal flesh, eggs, or milk produced per unit of food a farmed animal is fed. It’s the disparity of their concern — and the very different lengths to which they will go to increase profitability — that distinguishes the two kinds of farmers. For example:

  FOOD AND LIGHT

  Factory farms commonly manipulate food and light to increase productivity, often at the expense of the animals’ welfare. Egg farmers do this to reboot birds’ internal clocks so they start laying valuable eggs faster and, crucially, at the same time. Here’s how one poultry farmer described the situation to me:

  As soon as females mature — in the turkey industry at twenty- three to twenty-six weeks and with chickens sixteen to twenty — they’re put into barns and they lower the light; sometimes it’s total darkness twenty-four/seven. And then they put them on a
very low-protein diet, almost a starvation diet. That will last about two or three weeks. Then they turn the lights on sixteen hours a day, or twenty with chickens, so she thinks it’s spring, and they put her on high-protein feed. She immediately starts laying. They have it down to such a science that they can stop it, start it, and everything. See, in the wild, when spring comes, the bugs come and the grass comes and the days get longer — that’s a key to tell the birds, “Well, I better start laying. Spring is coming.” So man has tapped into that already built-in thing. And by controlling the light, the feed, and when they eat, the industry can force the birds to lay eggs year-round. So that’s what they do. Turkey hens now lay 120 eggs a year and chickens lay over 300. That’s two or even three times as many as in nature. After that first year, they are killed because they won’t lay as many eggs in the second year — the industry figured out that it’s cheaper to slaughter them and start over than it is feed and house birds that lay fewer eggs. These practices are a big part of why poultry meat is so cheap today, but the birds suffer for it.

  While most people know the vague outlines of the cruelty of factory farms — the cages are small, the slaughter is violent — certain widely practiced techniques have eluded the public consciousness. I had never heard about food and light deprivation. And after learning about it, I didn’t want to eat a conventional egg ever again. Thank goodness for free-range. Right?