Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat

by Hal Herzog

  You sometimes hear that if we had to kill our own meat, everyone would be a vegetarian. The students on the farm crew offered an opportunity to test this theory. Most of them were raised in middle-class suburbs and had never been around a cow or hog until they came to college. To assess the validity of the slaughter-leads-to-meat-rejection hypothesis, Sandy and I distributed questionnaires to the students who had participated in the killing and butchering. I also interviewed most of them.

  Our results refuted the idea that slaughtering in and of itself creates vegetarians: None of the student slaughterers gave up meat. Their responses to slaughtering were, however, complicated. While nearly all of them said they found the killing and butchering process an interesting and valuable experience, most of them admitted that they sometimes felt nauseous during or after butchering a cow. Half of the farm crew said they sometimes avoided eating meat for a day or two after they had slaughtered a cow or pig, but most of them felt they had benefited from the experience. Some of their reasons were mundane. For instance, a few said they enjoyed learning about different cuts of meat and felt it would make them better shoppers. A couple of pre–veterinary medicine majors said that butchering had helped them learn anatomy. But for others, the experience had deeper meaning. It was an exercise in values clarification. They had learned where meat comes from. That it is dead.

  Food psychologist Paul Rozin believes that animals and death are intimately connected in the human psyche. Rozin believes that people find many animal products, including their flesh, disgusting because animals are an uncomfortable reminder of our mortality. He writes, “Humans must eat, excrete, and have sex, just like animals. Each culture prescribes the proper way to perform these actions—by, for example, placing most animals off-limits as potential foods, and all animals and most people off-limits as potential sexual partners. Furthermore, we humans are like animals in having frail body envelopes that, when breached, reveal blood and soft viscera that display our commonalities with animals. Human bodies, like animal bodies, die.”

  Do people actually find animal flesh disgusting? Increasingly, the answer is yes. For instance, Scandinavian market researchers have found that the redder and more “animalized” a cut of meat is—the more it resembles a carcass—the more it turns the average consumer off. These findings pose a conundrum for the meat industry. Usually, shoppers are drawn to foods that appear fresh, juicy, and natural. But in the case of meat, fresh, juicy, and natural is seen as gross, particularly to women. The researchers recommended that the meat industry develop products that look less fleshlike—small, ready-to-cook cuts that are marinated to mask the meat’s color; in short, meat that is less disgusting.

  Chicken producers caught on to this a long time ago. In 1962, almost all the chickens sold in the United States were purchased as an intact carcass with heart, liver, and gizzard tucked neatly into the body cavity. You had to hack them up yourself. Not anymore. Today, fewer than 10% of chickens sold in supermarkets bear any resemblance to the body of an animal. The fastest growing segment of the retail chicken industry is officially referred to as “further processed”—translucent boneless pieces of flesh that look as if they had been grown in a Petri dish and labeled something like “tenders” or, my favorite oxymoron, “chicken fingers.”

  IF MEAT IS SO DISGUSTING, WHY ARE

  THERE SO FEW VEGETARIANS?

  The process by which neutral preference comes to be regarded as immoral is called moralization. Attitudes toward slavery have been moralized; and-more recently cigarette smoking. You would think that meat would be easy to moralize. The floor of my office is piled with books telling me why I should not eat animals. The case against meat comes down to four claims that are hard to dispute. First, to eat an animal, you have to take its life. Second, the conditions under which nearly all meat animals are raised, transported, and slaughtered involve great suffering for the animals and horrible conditions for the people who do the dirty work. Third, the conversion of plants to meat is inefficient and environmentally destructive. Fourth, eating animals causes obesity, cancer, and heart disease. Add the yuck factor to the moral and health arguments against meat, and you would think it would be easy to convince people not to eat flesh. But you would be wrong. The campaign to moralize meat has largely been a failure.

  These days, it is fashionable—especially among young people—to claim “I don’t eat meat.” In a recent survey, 30% of college students said that having a vegan option at every meal was important to them, and sales of faux “meats” in the United States are growing at a rate of 35% a year. There is, however, little evidence that a wave of vegetarianism is sweeping across America. The best estimate of the number of vegetarians in the United States comes from a series of surveys commissioned over the last fifteen years by the Vegetarian Resource Group. They asked random samples of adults what foods they actually ate. These polls consistently show that between 97% and 99% of Americans sometimes eat flesh.

  The animal rights movement has been successful in changing the attitudes of Americans toward the treatment of other species. But, ironically, as our collective interest in the welfare of animals has gone up, so has our desire to eat them. In 1975, when the modern animal rights movement first emerged as a legitimate social movement, the average American ate 176 pounds of meat a year. Now we are up to almost 240 pounds a year. The change in the number of meat animals slaughtered annually is even more astounding. Over the last thirty years, the number of creatures killed for human consumption jumped from 3 billion to 10 billion; from 56 animals a year for a family of four to 132 animals.

  Why has the animal protection movement had so little effect on our predilection to eat other creatures? Ironically, the efforts by animal protectionists to improve the well-being of farm animals have made the consumption of flesh more, rather than less, morally palatable. Retail sales of poultry labeled organic, for example, quadrupled between 2003 and 2007. Socially conscious consumers can now purchase meat touted as hormone-free, antibiotic-free, cruelty-free, and free-range. In other words, guilt-free. Even the supermarket in my tiny town (population 2,454) is stocked with flesh that has been given the moral thumbs-up by the American Humane Association. I can buy chickens that, I am told, led the good life: “100% all-natural,” “fed an all-vegetable diet!” under “low-stress growing practices” with “no debeaking,” “tunnel ventilation for fresh air,” and “multiple feed bins to ensure fresh feed.” The fast-food chains have jumped on the animal welfare bandwagon. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, KFC, and Hardee’s have established high-powered animal welfare advisory boards and adopted animal care and slaughter standards.

  However, the biggest reason for the jump in the number of animals killed in American slaughterhouses is the shift from eating mammals to eating birds. For many years, one of my guilty pleasures was diving into a Burger King Whopper with cheese. I loved the gooey mayonnaise sauce, iceberg lettuce, juicy fat, and charbroiled flavor I figured came from a chemical plant. My Whopper habit evaporated immediately after I read Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation. It did not take much to convince me that Coke was as addictive as heroin, that McDonald’s executives had conspired to hold down the minimum wage, and that the fast-food industry has done more to harm America’s youth than Columbian drug lords. A Whopper did not taste nearly as good to me after I found out that a single ground beef patty contains bits and pieces of hundreds of cows, any one of which could be sick, and all of which spent the last weeks of their lives standing knee-deep in manure.

  I was not alone in reducing my intake of steaks and burgers. Per capita beef consumption in the United States began a twenty-year slide in the 1970s when the Food and Drug Administration told us to cut down on saturated fats. The drop in our enthusiasm for beef, however, was more than compensated for by an extraordinary increase in our desire to eat chicken. While the number of cattle slaughtered each year in the United States dropped 20% between 1975 and 2009, the number of chickens killed increased 200%. The watershed year was 19
90 when for the first time in history Americans ate more chicken than beef. When Herbert Hoover ran for president on a campaign of “a chicken in every pot,” the average American ate a half pound of chicken a year. Today, the figure is close to ninety pounds.

  There are several reasons for our shift from eating cows to eating birds, and they have little to do with our growing concern for animal welfare. Advances in poultry science and the vertical integration of the chicken industry since the end of World War II have made chicken a better deal than beef. In 1960, a pound of chicken cost half as much as a pound of beef; now it is only a quarter of the price of beef. Beef also became linked with obesity, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. While some early claims against the hazards of red meat were based on shoddy science, recent epidemiological studies have confirmed that eating cow is bad for you. A 2009 multisite study of half a million people found that the individuals who consumed a lot of red and/or processed meat were more likely to die from cancer and cardiovascular disorders than people who ate little red meat. The authors of the report estimated that death rates of Americans would drop 11% in men and 16% in women if they ate less red meat.

  Cathy Calloway, a nutritionist, tells me that her solution to these health issues is to tell her clients to eat only animals that swim or fly. But from an animal welfare perspective, the movement away from cattle has been a disaster. The average steer weighs about 1,100 pounds at slaughter, 62% of which is useable meat. A Cobb 500 broiler chicken, in contrast, yields about three pounds of meat. This means that you need to kill 221 chickens to get one cow’s worth of meat. In addition, cattle enjoy longer and more pleasant lives than factory-farmed chickens. While a Cobb 500 will breathe ammonia fumes 24/7, the average steer will spend a year and half munching grass in a sunny pasture before it is hauled off to a feedlot for “finishing.” A McDonald’s Caesar salad with grilled chicken might be better for your health, but in terms of animal suffering, the moral scales tip toward a Big Mac.

  Of course, by this logic, the food of choice for the 40% of animal activists who indicate that they eat meat would be a whale. There are 70,000 chickens worth of flesh in a single 100-ton blue whale. Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder and president of PETA, agrees. In 2001, to the dismay of some PETA supporters, the organization launched a tongue-in-cheek campaign urging people to eat whales. Newkirk explained PETA’s logic to me. “We started the ‘Eat the Whales’ campaign to draw attention to the fact that the bigger the animal, the more meals that could be obtained from just one animal’s suffering and death. In the case of whales, there is the added benefit that the animals lived free, didn’t have their ears notched or their tails cut off, weren’t castrated or debeaked, were never crammed into a cage that rubbed their flesh raw, never stuffed into a transport crate in all weather extremes, and so on. So, yes, to spare the greatest number of animals from suffering, if you can’t (or won’t) shake off that meat addiction, if you will not abandon that fleeting taste of meat for the sake of compassion and decency, your own health, and the environment, then it is better to eat body parts from the largest animal you can get your hands on.”

  Makes sense to me. But my daughter Betsy, who lived for a year in rural Japan, says whale meat is tough, greasy, and gross.

  WHAT PEOPLE SAY VERSUS WHAT THEY DO:

  THE CASE OF MEAT-EATING VEGETARIANS

  While the movement to moralize meat has not been particularly successful, millions of Americans call themselves vegetarians. Michele is one of them. While chewing on a piece of seared ahi tuna, she tells me that she does not eat meat. She is not unusual; most “vegetarians” in the United States eat animal flesh.

  Not Che Green. Che, who was once an investment banker, is the founder and executive director of the Humane Research Council, a nonprofit organization that uses market research techniques to assess public attitudes about the treatment of animals. Like most animal protectionists, Che developed a soft spot for other creatures when he was a little kid. He ate meat as a child, though he much preferred dishes that did not remind him that he was actually eating an animal. His attitude toward meat changed in high school when he landed a summer job in an Alaskan cannery. His task was to feed the carcasses of big fish into a processing machine where they were spit out a few seconds later as canned salmon. He made it through the summer, but the carnage got to him. Within two months he was a vegetarian and two years later, a vegan.

  Che knows a lot about what Americans eat. He has collected every national survey on rates of vegetarianism in the United States. His data illustrate a fundamental principle of human psychology—what people say is often different from what they do. For instance, in 2002, Time reported that 6% of Americans claim they are vegetarians. However, the same article pointed out that nearly 60% of the “vegetarians” they surveyed admitted they had eaten red meat, poultry, or seafood within the last twenty-four hours. A telephone poll conducted by the Department of Agriculture also found that two-thirds of vegetarians had eaten animal flesh on the day of the survey. And one study found that teenage “vegetarians” actually eat more chicken than non-vegetarian teens do.

  The Humane Research Council puts the number of true vegetarians and vegans in the United States at between 2 and 6 million. (A team of researchers from the Yale University School of Medicine concluded that fewer than one-tenth of one percent of Americans are true vegetarians.) People give up meat for a variety of reasons. Most studies have found that health concerns are the primary motivator for most vegetarians with moral/environmental concerns coming in a close second. Che’s initial reason for giving up meat was first visceral and later moral disgust.

  Pete Henderson’s route to vegetarianism was completely different. Pete’s parents were Seventh-day Adventists who did not eat meat for religious reasons, and now he is convinced of the health advantages of a plant-based diet. Unlike Che, Pete’s commitment to vegetarianism has little to do with concern with the rights or suffering of other creatures. He does use a large Havahart live trap to humanely capture the animals that raid his garden.

  But then he shoots them.

  Pete lives on a minifarm north of Asheville, where he raises much of the food his family consumes. Five years ago, he grew tired of sharing his corn, squash, peas, beans, and blueberries with the growing population of animals that also relished fresh vegetables. He purchased a couple of live traps and would catch the animal invaders and release them a couple of miles away. When that did not work, he bought a gun. So far this year he has killed two raccoons, several turkeys, and a possum. Pete takes no pleasure in the killing, and he is constantly trying to improve the fencing and netting around his garden so he will not have to shoot the animals raiding his veggies. But at this point, the raccoons still manage to wreak havoc on his corn, and he remains a vegetarian hunter.

  Che and Pete show that vegetarians do not necessarily think alike about the morality of eating flesh. Paul Rozin and his colleagues found moral-origin vegetarians are more disgusted by meat than health-origin vegetarians, and they are more upset at the prospect of chewing and swallowing it. Unlike health vegetarians, moral vegetarians tend to see meat as morally contaminating and view meat-eaters as aggressive. They also tend to have more extensive rationales for eschewing flesh and reject more animal products than health-origin vegetarians. In other words, ethical vegetarians moralize meat more than health vegetarians do.

  Why do some people quit eating animals while most of us manage to suppress our qualms about the morality of our food choices? According to Donna Maurer, author of the book Vegetarianism: Movement or Moment?, the typical vegetarian is a liberal, white, well-educated, middle-or upper-class female who is less likely than the average person to adhere to traditional values. She usually gives up red meat first, and then expands her list of rejected foods to chicken and fish, and, in the case of vegans, eggs and dairy products. The motivations of vegetarians can change over the years. A person who initially gives up meat for health reasons may subsequently internalize the moral arguments against ea
ting animals. Similarly, vegetarians who are at first concerned with animal suffering may find that an all-plant diet makes them feel healthier.

  Personality also affects whether you stop eating meat. Lauren Golden and I investigated the relationship between personality and attitudes toward the use of animals. Through MySpace and Facebook, we solicited animal activists, members of groups devoted to the use of animals (hunters, farmers, researchers), and people not particularly concerned with animal issues to take an online survey that contained questions about their diet and beliefs about the treatment of animals. Nearly 500 people participated in the research, 40% of whom were vegetarians. Compared to the meat-eaters, the vegetarians were more creative, more imaginative, and more open to new experiences. But they were also more likely to be anxious and worried.

  These findings raise an interesting issue. Most research shows that vegetarians are in better physical shape than people who eat meat, and some studies indicate that many vegetarians feel they have a better quality of life and higher psychological well-being. But is giving up meat a good idea for everyone?

  MEAT AVOIDANCE AND EATING DISORDERS:

  THE DARK SIDE OF VEGETARIANISM

  I don’t know if Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin are bitches, but they do look skinny. These two Los Angeles fashion-industry types (Rory was an agent, Kim a model) went vegan, and in 2005 wrote Skinny Bitch, an irreverent diet book that became a New York Times bestseller. With catchy chapter titles like “Sugar Is the Devil, and “The Dead, Rotting, Decomposing Flesh Diet,” the book and its sequels became a media phenomenon. Skinny Bitch is aimed at teenage girls and young women who want to look like the authors, who are gorgeous. The book starts by asking, “Are you sick and tired of being fat?” If the answer is yes—which it usually is for young women in America—they have the answer: Stop Eating Animals.