Today I went to a pizzeria near the Pergamon musem in Berlin called “Twelve Apostles.” Each pizza is named after one of the apostles: I recommend the Tomasso (Thomas). It has bell peppers, zucchini, onions, and hot peppers. Though my guidebook says that the Judas is possibly the most delectable.
Category: Food
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Factory farming: bad for animals, bad for people
See here for the story on the meat recall. Here for the Humane Society’s statement on their investigations into the ways sick animals are dealt with on the slaughterhouse floor. This seems like a fairly direct result of treating animals as units of production rather than living beings. (But I would say that, wouldn’t I?)
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The quest for the happy meal
Here’s a look at the lengths people are going to to get humanely-raised meat. Mostly I want to applaud this, but at the same time I continue to have this nagging feeling that there’s something incongruous about going to such lengths to treat animals well in order to kill and eat them.
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The vegan’s dilemma
Someone in my neighborhood was getting rid of a bunch of old magazines and I picked up from their stack an old issue of the unfortunately now-defunct magazine Satya, which billed itself as a journal of “vegetarianism, environmentalism, animal advocacy, and social justice.” Happily a lot of their archives are online, and I found this 2006 review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma scored some points. The reviewer complains, with justice I think, that Pollan didn’t put the same investigative effort into exploring the world of vegetarian eating as he did the worlds of factory, organic, and pasture-based farming, as well as his experiment in being a hunter-gatherer:
Pollan becomes a vegetarian temporarily, but most of the discussion is a mental debate with Peter Singer. Compared to other chapters of in-depth investigative research and practical experience, this journey to vegetarianism is mostly academic, and poorly so. While Pollan found Joel Salatin and Angelo Garro to be his guides to grass farming and hunting, he had no such vegan guru to show him the ropes of plant-based eating.
Pollan scrambles to find justification for eating meat, writing off animal rights ideology as urban, parochial and, in some cases, puritanical. He asserts with no further backing, “To think of domestication as a form of slavery or even exploitation is to misconstrue that whole relationship—to project a human idea of power onto what is in fact a symbiosis between the species.” This statement, to me, highlights other flaws in the book, in that there are very few female voices, with interviews being almost entirely men. Also, the dairy and egg industries are not fully explored. Given that women are responsible for 70 percent of world food production, and that female layer hens and dairy cows endure the most suffering, had Pollan incorporated more women’s voices and explored the lives of the female animals, perhaps he would have construed a different view of domestication and symbiosis.
Pollan explains when people “dare to look” at the wrongs of industrial animal agriculture, they are often left with two choices: ignore it, or become vegetarian. Neither of which was acceptable for him. He leaves looking for a new descriptive, an omnivore that still eats meat but from animals less egregiously raised. In the letter response to his original article, one reader coined an appropriate term—“Excusavor.”
Pollan subtly dismisses vegetarianism: “I have to say there is part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.” Had he spent time really experiencing vegetarianism, he might realize that it’s not about moral purity, but trying to make the best decisions with the least amount of harm—the vegan’s dilemma. Searching for a kinder, gentler meat is perhaps where the real denial of reality sets in.
I find that this accusation – that vegetarians are more interested in personal purity than in the effects of their dietary decisions – comes up a lot. It’s kind of a strange argument when you think about it, as though trying to do what one believes is the right thing is the same as an unwholesome concern with ritual “purity.” As Andrew Linzey, the Christian theologian of animal rights, never tires of pointing out, there is no “pure land” on which to stand. All of us are complicit to some degree or another with the suffering in the world, even the most conscientious vegan. But it hardly seems to follow from this that it’s somehow wrong or unsavory to try and reduce the harm one is directly responsible for.
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Crunchy cons, Pollan, Scully and meat-eating
Rod Dreher of Crunchy Cons fame reflects on the morality of meat-eating, prompted by a discussion with a Christian friend about The Omnivore’s Dilemma (permalinks don’t seem to be working – scroll down to “Re-thinking the meat guzzler”). He also refers to Matthew Scully’s Dominion, an indictment of the factory farming system (and other practices of animal exploitation) written from an explicitly conservative point of view (Scully is a former speechwriter for President Bush). He also links to this interesting article by Mark Bittman.
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A vegan critique of Pollan
Erik Marcus, vegan and animal rights activist, has a review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that is appreciative, but critical in key places. Key quote:
Pollan’s book convincingly shows that animal agriculture can, in fact, operate in a way that respects the environment. For a reader who’s acquainted with the staggering wastefulness of animal agriculture, it’s hard not to get caught up in Pollan’s account of the Polyface [Farms] alternative.
What Polyface has accomplished is a genuine achievement. However, Pollan never points out that there’s a reason why Polyface is plunked down in rural Virginia-hardly the heart of cattle country. This model of farming could simply never be transplanted to the arid, near-dessert landscape of America’s western states-the region that produces nearly all American beef. It’s one thing to practice boutique farming and to raise 50 grass-fed cattle a year on lush, rain-soaked land in rural Virginia. It’s quite another to imply that Polyface could be anything like a model for transforming America’s beef industry. You simply can’t scale up what’s happening on a 50-steer farm in Virginia to positively transform the way that more than 20 million cattle are raised in the American West.
I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of animal agriculture to know if this is right or not, but it does support my hunch that a world of humane animal agriculture would necessitate less meat eating, even if it wouldn’t eliminate it.
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More on Pollan and vegetarianism: vegetarianism as vocation
I have to admit that I find Pollan’s argument that the domestication of certain animals entails a real gain both for the animals and for us pretty convincing. He points out that animal husbandry may be a necessary part of a sustainable agriculture since relying on animal fertilization is the chief alternative to the chemical variety. In other words, a strictly vegetarian agriculture might end up being more industrialized and centralized than a pastoral and diversified agriculture that includes plants andanimals.
The issue of vegetarianism breaks down into at least two components: the question of suffering and the question of killing. Almost everyone will admit, at least theoretically, that it’s wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering on animals. So, in theory, you could get most people to concede, I think, that the conditions of factory farms are wicked. However, things start getting much murkier when we talk about what evil, if any, is involved in killing animals for food, if, for the sake of argument, we suppose they were raised humanely and killed painlessly. Even Peter Singer allows that painlessly killing animals for food can be ok if it results in greater overall utility.
Pollan argues that there’s no great evil in killing animals as such. He gives two reasons for this. First, the species is more important than the individual. Animal rightists are wrong, he says, to focus so much on individual animals. For instance, if we took it upon ourselves to protect animals in the wild from predators we would end up condemning the predators to starvation and, ultimately, the prey to overpopulation and eventual starvation. What’s more important, Pollan says, is to preserve the natural balance of species.
This leads to Pollan’s second argument against animal rights perspectives: they are, he maintains, too sentimental and squeamish about predation in nature. Morality, for Pollan, is a human social construct, not a standard that can be applied to the facts of nature. Deracinated urban vegetarians need to take a better look at the actual workings of nature and recognize that death is part of the cycle of life. Indeed, he contends that a strictly vegetarian world might well result in a greater number of animals killed (because of the necessity of cultivating crops on animal pasture and rangeland to feed all the new vegetarians), and that many existing human habitations would have to be given up since they’re only suited for raising animals.
Pollan is right, I think, to point out the futility of trying to live completely “cruelty-free”; human life and civilization inherently lead to the deaths of animals. We compete for resources, for food, and for habitat. The philosopher Stephen R. L. Clark is perhaps on firmer ground when he writes:
The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organised around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-themselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all self-owners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures whom they prey upon from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault. (Stephen R. L. Clark, “Animals, Ecosystems and the Liberal Ethic” in Animals and their Moral Standing, p. 83)
However, Clark continues, this perspective:
requires that no one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures their are can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. (pp. 83-4)
I don’t think Pollan would really disagree with this, and it suggests an approach to vegetarianism that’s more vocational than deontological. It can be one way of not taking more than our “due share of the fruits of the earth” and of allowing other creatures their “allotted portion of the sun.” But humane and sustainable farming can also be a way of doing this. In fact, if, as seems likely, a sustainable and humane animal husbandry might result in considerably less meat being produced, there would seem to be a need for people who forgo flesh-food altogether, or at least most of the time.
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Against the globalized food chain
And why should a nation produce its own food when others can produce it more cheaply? A dozen reasons leap to mind, but most of them the Steven Blanks of the world–and they are legion–are quick to dismiss as sentimental. I’m thinking of the sense of security that comes from knowing that your community, or country, can feed itself; the beauty of an agricultural landscape; the outlook and kinds of local knowledge that farmers bring to a community; the satisfaction of buying food from a farmer you know rather than the supermarket; the locally inflected flavor of a raw-milk cheese or honey. All those things–all those pastoral values–globalization proposes to sacrifice in the name of efficiency and economic growth.
Though you do begin to wonder who is truly the realist in this debate, and who the romantic. We live, as [Wendell] Berry has written (in an essay called “The Total Economy”), in an era of “sentimental economics,” since the promise of global capitalism, much like the promise of communism before it, ultimately demands an act of faith: that if we permit the destruction of certain things we value here and now we will achieve a greater happiness and prosperity at some unspecified future time. As Lenin put it, in a sentiment the WTO endorses in its rulings every day, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. — Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, p. 256
I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma back-to-back with Pollan’s new book, In Defense of Food, and hope to have some more to say about them soon.
A Thinking Reed 