In general I find Michael Pollan’s indictment of our current industrial food system, which floats on a sea of subsidized corn, fossil fuels, and chemical fertilizers, entirely persuasive. And his account of a week spent at self-described “libertarian Christian environmentalist” Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, where the natural ecosystem of a functioning farm is respected and animals are pasture-fed and humanely slaughtered, is compelling in making the case for a more humane and sustainable agriculture.

In the last part of the book Pollan, who is tracing the origins of four distinct kinds of meals (industrial, big-organic, “beyond organic,” and self-produced), decides to examine the shortest food chain of all: a meal made entirely from ingredients that he hunted, gathered, and grew himself. Pollan, a hunting novice, goes in search of wild boar in northern California to form the centerpiece of his meal.

This leads Pollan to an intellectual excursus on the ethics of meat eating. Pollan concedes much of the case made by animal rights proponents like Peter Singer and Tom Regan: in modern factory farms we inflict a degree and amount of suffering on sentient animals that is impossible to justify merely in order to satisfy our own gustatory pleasures. The industrial forms of agriculture that are, in Pollan’s view, undermining human health, pleasure, and well-being, rob literally billions of animals of any kind of dignified existence.

But Pollan isn’t prepared to go all the way with animal rights-ers who oppose all killing of animals for food. One of his more compelling arguments, I think, is that animal domestication isn’t analogous to slavery, as some of the more overheated animal liberation rhetoric might have it. It’s more like symbiosis: certain animal species realized that they had a better shot at survival by entering into a kind of bargain with us where we feed them, shelter them, and protect them from predators in exchange for them providing us with eggs, milk, and eventually meat. “From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time” (p. 320).

What changed in our own time, of course, is that we radically revised the terms of the “bargain.” Animals confined to tiny cages, denied sunlight, mutilated, and driven to aberrant behaviors are no longer living lives appropriate to their kind. So, even on the most generous reading of the bargain, we aren’t living up to our end. Pollan concludes that “people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and painless” (p. 328).

Pollan makes the interesting suggestion that one of the reasons we’re so confused in our attitudes toward animals, veering from sentimentality to extreme brutality, is that the mechanization of animal husbandry has rendered unnecessary the cultural framework that helped pre-modern people negotiate relations with their non-human fellows. “[I]t was the ritual–the cultural rules and norms–that allowed them to look, and then to eat. We no longer have any rituals governing either the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps explain why we find ourselves in this dilemma, in a place where we feel our only choice is either to look away or give up meat” (pp. 331-2).

A more transparent process of raising and slaughtering food animals, he thinks, would force us to come to terms with what we’re doing in ways analogous to our ancestors’ rituals. Factory farms are invisible and inaccessible to most people, who likely don’t give much thought to the precise process by which that neatly wrapped package of meat ends up in the supermarket. But if we saw what was going on, we would have to make changes.