My Year Without Meat

by Richard Cornish

  The takeout from this is that when an animal is slaughtered, you want as much glycogen as possible to remain in its muscles. You want the muscle sugar left in the muscles so it can be turned into lactic acid. This is something that good stockmen know instinctively.

  TWO DEATHS

  Celebrity US farmer Joel Salatin talks about his animals having fulfilling lives with plenty of feed and plenty of other animals to hang around with. Then they have ‘just one bad day’. Their slaughter day. For much of my life I thought the death of the animals we eat was instant and painless. When I was young, about ten years old, there was a bloke called Roy Judd who used to visit the family farm. He was a butcher. He was also the slaughterman. We would choose an animal from the herd of cattle we raised on the bush blocks out the back of the farm. We would cross a Hereford bull over a Friesian cow. A small group of cattle were sequestered away from the main herd and kept in a paddock near the large machinery shed. Roy used to say, ‘Lonely cows don’t make for good eating.’ They were given an extra feed of hay each day around mid-morning, as Roy liked to go fishing early in the morning. The cattle would gather around the hay and quietly chew their way through the pile, one of the older girls occasionally swiping another, giving a firm nudge with the side of her head. Roy would come in his car and set up his block and tackle, lay out his knives and saws, and prepare great tubs for guts and buckets for blood. He kept his gun wrapped in a towel. A twenty-two rifle. The Australian farmer’s gun of choice for dispatching vermin and injured animals. It was old but it was clean. A bit like Roy, I used to think. He was always neatly presented for the job he was about to do. English born, he had that skin that turned honey coloured in the summer sun. He was polite and quite funny, but mostly he had a reassuring calmness about him. The type of bloke you could rely on in times of trouble.

  We would wander over to a post under the shade of a large pine tree by the cattle, the gun pointing down by his side, its silhouette masked by his body. He didn’t want the animals to find any cause for alarm. He rested the barrel on the post and looked down its sight. He whistled once. The cows looked up. There was a loud crack in the mid-morning air, the cows scattered and ran. Except one. She became rigid for a second. If a cow can look dismayed, then that’s how she appeared. Suddenly her head went down and her legs stiffened and seemed to shake. Roy put the safety catch on his gun and deftly opened the gate, pulled out a knife and cut open the arteries in her neck. Bright red blood frothed and flowed out onto the deep green of the pasture. That is the speed and surprise that every slaughterman strives for. If slaughter were ever to be considered humane, this is a contender to be the definitive way.

  THE FRENCH SLAUGHTERMEN

  The firing squad is a method of execution mostly reserved for military punishments and, until recently, an alternative to the ballot box in many South American countries. It is the duty of every member of a firing squad to fire their gun. They are to take aim and fire at the prisoner’s heart. The squad is told, however, that one or more of them has a gun loaded with a blank bullet. This means that none of the men who felt the kick in their shoulder as their gun discharged was able to know for sure which of them fired the fatal round.

  Humans have interesting ways of dealing with the abrogation of responsibility when it comes to taking a life. In ancient Greece there was a ceremonial sacrifice called Buphonia. In it, oxen were taken to the highest point of the Acropolis, where grain was laid in front of them by a member of one of the founding families. The first ox to step forward was considered to have offered itself up for sacrifice. A member of another one of the founding families then came forward and slayed the animal with an axe, before flinging away the axe and fleeing the scene of the crime.

  A crime because, at the time, killing a working ox was a crime. They were essential for the economy. The ancient Greeks had a very clever way of handling this. A trial was held and the axe sharpeners were called up to explain their complicity in the murder. How could they have killed the ox? All they did was sharpen the blade. The water bearers then came forward and denied their responsibility. How could they have killed the ox? All they did was lustrate, or ceremoniously wash, the blade to purify it for the sacrifice. The axe bearer was then asked to defend himself. How could he have killed the ox? It was the axe that caused the contusion and bleeding. So, after they all declared their innocence, the axe was finally called up and tried for the murder. It was found guilty. And then exonerated! In some other circumstances, when a knife was used, the guilty knife was thrown out to sea. So the sacrifice was made, the Gods were appeased, the axeman went without punishment, a feast ensued and life went on.

  Meat eaters have a similar system of complicity. This is how we are able to live with the reality that what is lying on a polystyrene tray was once a living animal. It is a tribal complicity where no one person takes responsibility for the taking of an animal’s life. We didn’t kill the cow. All we did was pay the butcher. The butcher didn’t kill the cow, all he did was cut it up. The deliveryman didn’t kill the cow. All he did was load it up from the abattoir. (To add another layer of disconnection, many of us now do not even pay a human. We pass a polystyrene tray over a barcode reader in a supermarket and put our coins or cards into a machine that seems pre-programmed to randomly say ‘unexpected item in bagging area’.) If we handle meat with tongs when we cook it, the first part of our body to touch the flesh could be our teeth or lips. We take no responsibility for the death of the animal and are completely disconnected from its life.

  The French have a way with words. They used to call slaughterhouses tueries. This roughly translates as ‘massacre’. Tuerie de masse refers to a mass killing or a single act of genocide. Tueries were houses of mass killing. The French now call their slaughterhouses abattoirs. The word comes from the verb abattre, which means to ‘bring down that which is standing’. An abatteur is both a slaughterman and a woodcutter.

  The French are proud of the logic of death they brought to the slaughterhouse. It is arranged a bit like a Greek sacrifice where no one is responsible for killing the animal. Here one person stuns the animal. The other bleeds it. To stun and to bleed, assommer et saigner. When one abatteur gives a blow to an animal’s head with a blunt instrument, he delivers it to the other abatteur in the manner of ‘il est comme mort—it is as if dead’. It doesn’t matter what the man who bleeds the animal does because it’s not going to live after a blow like that but the man who delivers the stunning blow didn’t kill the animal. There’s a neatly crafted complicity in the murder of the animal, where no one takes responsibility. Which for those involved is perhaps a good thing. Killing for a living can be wearing on the soul.

  Our relationship with animals has been defined by the premise that animals are not sentient. It has been as fundamental as the presumption of innocence. But that foundation principle of our society—that animals don’t have emotions or fish don’t feel pain—is slowly being eroded. Scientists are digitally dissecting live animals using magnetic resonance imaging and they are telling us that lobsters do have pain receptors and that cattle do experience fear. These studies bring into question the very tenet on which we allow ourselves to eat meat.

  Livestock use up a lot of their energy stores when their fight or flight instinct kicks in. If an animal is stressed or experiences fear shortly prior to slaughter, it metabolises its glycogen, its muscle sugar. With the muscle sugar gone the meat doesn’t drop in pH and you end up with what is known in the industry as dark cutting meat. This is why the quality end of the meat industry has instituted some back-to-basics animal husbandry to try to achieve premium quality beef.

  Peter Greenham from HW Greenham and Sons is a sixth-generation beef business operator from the western suburbs of Victoria. A few years back he and his family started working with Sydney restaurateur Neil Perry to develop a premium line of beef that was slightly older than the normal young cattle slaughtered for the domestic market, with more developed flavoured flesh and completely grass fed. T
he Greenhams bought the Blue Ribbon abattoir in Smithton in the Circular Head region of north-west Tasmania. There the rainfall reaches around a metre a year and two metres in the hinterland hills, much of which is covered by the Tarkine cool-temperate rainforest. They have a network of around 600 small family farms from whom they buy their cattle. Around there they still raise the old-fashioned Angus, short black stock that were bred to do well on the rolling hills of Aberdeenshire. Which, like Circular Head, is green, wet and often cold. The farmers also raise the English beef breed Hereford, considered by many aficionados to be the king of the beef breeds when it comes to flavour. Head to the feedlots and you’ll find bigger-framed black Angus. The modern Angus look very different from the animals of the same name sixty years ago. Angus were smaller, shorter-legged animals. Modern Angus are often infused with the genetics of the larger-framed European cattle—big frames from which to hang more meat. Greenham, however, likes his animals shorter, stockier and older. If, like most Australians, you’re eating beef from the supermarket, it is probably no more than a year old. That is after sexual maturity, but the animal is still not fully physically developed. Greenham likes his beasts twice as old again, sometimes around two and a half years. That’s a lot of time and feed invested for not a lot of extra weight.

  Greenham’s strategy was to create a brand that delivered superior flavour gained from slaughtering more mature cattle. The brand would offer a guarantee of grass-fed beef, and aim to fulfil all the requirements that fussy foodies would be looking for.

  Peter Greenham said, ‘We have a never, ever policy on hormone growth promotants and antibiotics—both therapeutic and sub-therapeutic.’ He was referring to the practice of using antibiotics. It’s the meat industry’s dirty little secret. Sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics means that they are given to animals not to treat illness, but to prevent it. Animals living in close proximity, in feedlots, chicken sheds or close-quarter pig sheds, are fed antibiotics. Not because they are sick, but because they might get sick. It is one of the reasons we humans are losing the fight against infection. Bugs are so exposed to antibiotics on a day-to-day basis in the places we raise animals for meat that they have gained resistance to antibiotics.

   Forty per cent of the animals that enter the system Greenham’s promotes don’t end up with the company’s Cape Grim label. They can be rejected in the paddock, in the yards at the abattoir or as they are hanging from a hook in the coolroom.

  One of the reasons a carcass would be rejected is stress-induced dark cutting meat. To reduce the stress on the animals, almost all the herds are on farms less than an hour from the abattoir, which means they don’t spend hours or days on a truck. The trucks are single layered as opposed to the larger-capacity two-storey trucks. Herds are kept together and the flooring in the yards is made of a soft, energy-absorbing material. Some of the farmers who grow animals for Greenham’s export programme, which ships to Whole Foods in the United States, have signed up to the Global Animal Partnership, which sees greater emphasis on farm animal welfare such as banning the routine use of cattle prods, and following breeding programmes that do not affect the welfare of the animals. The Greenhams are respected in the business and in the paddock, in the butcher shop and by restaurateurs. They are known to pay 10 to 20 per cent more to farmers than others in the beef game do. Their Cape Grim brand has been recognised as one of the best commercial-scale beef brands in the nation.

  EVERY BIRTH, EVERY DEATH, IS DIFFERENT

  No animal wants to die. We are all hardwired for survival. In an abattoir, animals are trucked in and unloaded. There they are generally left with shelter and water, sometimes not shelter, for twenty-four hours to purge themselves—shit themselves out. They are herded to the door of the abattoir, which opens and lets one in at a time. There is the kill box. The animal is in a small space and cannot move. One slaughterman administers a blow from a bolt gun that stuns the animal—those who have seen the film No Country for Old Men might recall Javier Bardem’s Chigurh and the creepy catch phrase he uses on unsuspecting humans: ‘Would you hold still, please, sir?’ Another slaughterman cuts the animal’s neck to let it bleed out.

  They say animals smell fear. I have watched cattle slaughtered at an abattoir. I have never seen a cow go into the kill box willingly. They need to be goaded and forced. Is it the blood or adrenalin they smell? Either way, they snort, and mucus sprays and swings from the nostrils, their legs splay as they try to get purchase with their hooves. Their eyes roll back in their head as the slaughterman approaches with the bolt gun. There’s a ‘whack’ and the animal is rendered senseless, and the transformation from live animal to meat-in-a tray starts, a lethal reverse transubstantiation from body of life into meaty host.

  12

  The Elephant in the Room

  It was one of those blowy Melbourne days when the wind swings to the north and promises warmer weather, bringing with it lungfuls of pollen and dust from up north. The location was a food festival held in a park and I was there to hear about a ‘green meat’ initiative, being spruiked by Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA). The emcee, an enthusiastic and professional young woman, was describing the important work cattle farmers had done in the Landcare movement, by fencing off native bush, replanting the land along waterways with native bush, creating shelter for cattle, and creating a better, healthier and more attractive environment for the cattle, native fauna and farmers. Then the emcee used the word ‘happy’ to describe the livestock. ‘Happy’.

  This struck me as an unusual use of anthropomorphism. It is a tactic used by animal rights activists to connect people to animals so they won’t eat meat. By giving animals emotions, the MLA was playing a risky card. Happy cows means sentient cows.

  Later, a west coast chef and farmer, Steve Earl, stood up to talk about his new business model of growing rose veal. Veal is from very young calves. Rose veal is from young cattle that are no longer calves but not yet sexually mature. His plan was to inseminate dairy cattle with semen from a beef breed and raise the off spring for several months before sending them off to slaughter. By creating a market for this rose veal, or ‘pale beef’, he would get a better return for the farmer. The other bonus was that no one would have to kill baby calves.

  ‘Most male dairy calves are slaughtered within a few days of being born,’ Earl said. ‘Farmers don’t get much for them. Calves are an essential part of the dairy industry, as a cow needs to calve to produce milk.’

  What happened next was astonishing. Earl was taken aside by a representative of the MLA and told in no uncertain terms that cattle are not ‘slaughtered’. The prescribed word he was to use in public was ‘processed’. ‘I was quite rattled,’ said Earl afterwards. He was also told not to use the word ‘product’ but ‘meat’. ‘It felt like they were having a bet both ways.’

  The avoidance of the word ‘slaughter’ but the promotion of a ‘happy’ life is the foundation lie on which the meat industry exists. For meat to exist, an animal has to die. This is a weakness at the heart of the meat industry that they are struggling to deal with. Death is not something that business is good at marketing.

  THE PIG FARMERS

  One of the new breed of pig farmers who uses the word ‘happy’ is Lauren Mathers. When I first met Mathers, she and her husband, Lachlan, had just embarked on a new life as pig farmers. They showed me with pride their herd of Berkshire sows snorting and grazing on the river flats near the Murray River at Barham in south-west New South Wales. They were bucketing out a special mix of organic legumes and grains, which the pigs were wolfing down. The Berkshire breed are preferred by many small-scale farmers like Mathers, as the animals have a black skin that can handle the harsh Australian sun. They were originally bred for life outdoors in the English county after which they are named, and are prized for their large frames and marbled flesh. The animals shelter from the sun under established river red gums at the height of the sun and sleep at night in wooden shelters insulated with straw. The pigs do not have t
heir noses pierced. This is a practice used on some outdoor farms in some countries to stop the pigs from turning over the soil. Instead, by the time the herd is moved on, the pasture is turned into a field of dirt, fertilised by the pigs’ manure, and ready to be oversown with a pasture crop for the next year.

  We stood by a herd of fifty or so pigs grazing on grass then turning the sods with their snouts. I asked Mathers how she could tell if her pigs are happy. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘They do things that look like they are happy. You look at them for a while and you’ll see the way they hold their heads and their ears, the arch in their back and the way they interact with each other.’ She pointed out random acts of play, when a pig would pick something up and throw it and another pig would take it away, like a game of catch. She explained how she has seen pigs sneaking up on each other, hiding behind one of their shelters and then jumping out to scare another pig. A porky peekaboo. She explained that pigs had different behaviours when they weren’t getting along with the rest of the herd, which resemble behaviours of a sick pig. ‘They become hunched,’ she said. ‘They hang their heads. They look depressed. Thankfully, this is extremely rare in our herd.’ With that, there is a trill squeal as two young pigs chase each other through the grass, taking turns at who is ‘it’.

  I have eaten Mathers’ pork. It is some of the best in the country. She and her like-minded pig growers have been able to achieve extremely high levels of animal welfare. As Mathers recognises herself, the weak link in this process is the abattoir. By law, all animals slaughtered for sale must go through a licensed abattoir. These are fast-moving and violent places of death for animals and this is something that plays on Mathers’ mind.