A Thinking Reed

Category: Vegetarianism/veganism

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Pollan on the ethics of meat eating

    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.

  • October reading notes

    A smattering of theology, philosophy, and even some fiction this month:

    The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael Northcott. This is part of Cambridge University Press’s “New Studies in Christian Ethics” series. Northcott is (at least at the time of this book’s publication) a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh. This text is a nice overview of environmental problems, a survey of the common philosophical and theological approaches to environmental ethics, and a defense of the notion that a traditional Christian outlook can ground concern for, and fairly radical positions on, the environment (as opposed to approaches of a lot of eco-theology which are fairly revisionist). Northcott also argues that social justice for human beings is not in opposition to care for the earth, but an essential component of it.

    Small Is Still Beautiful, Joseph Pearce. Reviewed here.

    Animals and Their Moral Standing, Stephen R. L. Clark. A collection of papers dealing with various aspects of the moral problems associated with non-human animals. Hits most of the uniquely Clarkean themes: a traditionalist philosophical and theological orientation combined with radicial views on animal welfare. (A nice companion to Northcott’s book come to think of it.)

    A Case of Conscience by James Blish. I mentioned this book here. I’ve also just started The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, who seems, to say the least, to have borrowed some ideas from Blish as both books revolve around Jesuit priests who have disastrous encounters with alien civilizations. Russell’s book is contemporary, while Blish wrote his in the 50s. It’ll be interesting to compare the two.

    Early this mont the Templeton Foundation Press reissued Keith Ward’s Divine Action, which had been out of print virtually from the time of its original publication due to a publishing acquisition. This is his account of how modern science and philosophy allow us to give a coherent account of how God can act in the world. While taking some ideas from process thought, Ward goes beyond the view of many process theologians that God acts sheerly “persuasively” on the world. Ward argues that modern physics has given us a picture of the physical world that is much “looser” than that of classical Newtonian physics, and that, in principle, God can act in the world in ways that would make a real difference, but be undetectable by the methods of science. He also offers persuasive and insightful accounts of miracles, the Incarnation, and the relation of Christianity to other religions under the rubric of ways that God acts in the world.

    Also currently working on Wandering Home by Bill McKibben, which narrates his hike from the Champlain river valley in Vermont into the Adiorondacks in New York. Along the way McKibben encounters various friends and acquaintances trying to find new ways of living sustainably, from localist vinters making wine for the region to an Earth First!-er living in an electricity- and plumbing-free shack in the woods. All of this provides much fodder for McKibben’s ruminations on possibilities of treading more lightly on the earth.

    On deck is James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. I blogged about Alison’s Raising Abel a bit here. Although impressed by the way Alison’s Girard-inspired exegesis sheds new light on the biblical texts, I expressed some skepticism about aspects of his project. But, inspired in part by this review of Alison’s work from Charles Hefling that Christopher tipped me off to, I decided it was worth delving in more deeply.

  • August reading notes

    Some highlights from the past month:

    I blogged a bit about Keith Ward’s latest, Re-Thinking Christianity here, here and here. Ward continues his streak of intelligent, accessible theology that straddles the popular and the academic. The takeaway lesson from RC is that there isn’t exactly an unchanging core of doctrine, but that Christianity has changed throughout its history, sometimes in quite radical ways. And yet, Ward doesn’t draw the conclusion that therefore Christianity is a sham; he maintains that the history of Christianity is properly seen as an ongoing response to the God disclosed and incarnate in Jesus.

    Andrew Linzey’s Christianity and the Rights of Animals is an earlier work (published in the late 80s) that anticipates many of the themes in his Animal Theology and Animal Gospel, but it delves more into the underlying assumptions of his theology: creation as gift with intrinsic value, God as fellow-sufferer and redeemer of all creation, animals as bearers of “theos-rights.” As such it’s a bit more systematic and synoptic, while being a relatively easy read. A good place to start for someone looking for an “animal-friendly” take on Christianity, though the conclusions Linzey draws are quite radical.

    I’m still working my way through George Monbiot’s Heat. Monbiot is both extremely pessimistic about the dangers of climate change and optimistic that it’s possible to actually cut our carbon emissions by the requisite 90% or so while still retaining something like a modern industrial economy. Monbiot is a very engaging writer, willing to admit when he’s not sure about something, unafraid to take on shibboleths, including those of environmentalists, and passionate about his cause. I may post some more about this in the near future.

  • Who is my neighbor?

    *Christopher has posted the text of a talk he recently gave on Christianity and the environment. It’s terrific stuff, with a very Lutheran and Benedictine flavor.

    I think that rooting our ethics (including our environmental ethics) in our response to what God has first done for us is exactly right and it’s one of the insights of Reformational Christianity that I resonate the most with.

    Andrew Linzey has written that one of the things that Christians can contribute to the movements for animal and environmental well-being is a sense of our solidarity in sin and our dependence upon grace. This can provide a powerful counterweight to temptations toward self-righteousness, as well as a motivation for doing good without falling into despair or utopianism.

  • Beyond the meat (or “meat”) centered diet

    This article makes a fair point that meat substitutes are not automatically healthier than actual meat, but it also seems to presuppose a fairly unimaginative version of vegetarian eating.

    Personally I eat very little in the way of meat substitutes. Sure I enjoy the occasional veggie burger or Quorn pattie, but I would say that 90% of my meals don’t involve any “fake meat” products, including tofu.

    I think vegetarian eating will get boring (and therefore harder to sustain) if you think of it as essentially the same as the “classic” American meal (slab o’ meat, potatoes, anemic overcooked vegetable of some sort) with the meat simply swapped out for some kind of substitute. I think you’re much better off, in terms of variety and tastiness of food, if you try to get away from that model, or at least don’t make it the staple of your diet.

    For instance, one of our favorite cookbooks is both completely vegan and none of the recipes make us of meat-substitues. They’re all based on traditional Mediterranean recipes. Indian and Thai food are also very veggie-friendly cuisines that don’t involve making a lot of substitutions. Relying too much on meat substitutes ironically reinforces the idea that meat is central to good eating.

    I’m not saying that vegetarians should avoid meat substitues, as I’ve heard some suggest. The point is to reduce cruelty to animals, not cleanse oneself of the “taint” of liking the taste of meat. Often in a pinch a veggie burger is the best alternative for me (the ones sold by Burger King are actually pretty good). But I think that giving up meat can actually open new horizons of good food that one might not have considered otherwise, since it can require you to be a little more creative about what you eat.