It’s What’s For Dinner

Tags:: animals,; arts & letters,; books,; ethics,; give a damn,; knowledge,; vegans

Food Writing
from M.F.K Fischer, Edna Lewis, Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Pollan, David Foster Wallace, and J. M. Coetzee

Most honest discussions that bring together food and animals are really, at bottom, about suffering and killing and death, topics that we all know have a way of making people feel bad. This is especially true, I’ve found, if those people are young college students whose lives have been relatively unburdened by the kinds of suffering and death—and the increasingly regular thoughts about such things—that go along with honest living in the world.
Each semester for the past five years, I’ve set out to discuss the suffering and killing and deaths of animals as part of a freshman-level food-writing course I call “Setting a Fine Table,” so named for a favorite line from M. F. K.
Fisher. Fisher is the American food writer whose work, which I first read after a few too many years as a vegetarian and then a vegan, suggested how I might return to taking real pleasure in food again. Step one involved admitting I’d been wrong about the supposed pleasure (and joyful pain) I’d been taking all those years in refusing so much of what’s out there to eat. No matter what I thought about how pure and good my diet was as a vegan, how Fisher ate was always better, whether in her youth, when she watched Old Mary the cook “make butter in a great churn between her mountainous knees,” or as an adult, when she took an entire day to eat three or four tangerines, whose sections, resting on the radiator, grew “plumper, hot and full.” She saved the best part of the fruit—the kiss—for her husband Al.

Over time my regimen around food had become a kind of devotional, ascetic practice; I never saved anything for anybody. And though it had the stink of puritanism, there was nothing at all evangelical about it. In fact, refusing meat and dairy and eggs, three meals a day, became a way of distancing myself from those around me, sort of the way abstaining from sex keeps you from the person you love. This approach wasn’t ever intended as a model or lesson for others on how to live better; rather, it offered me my own version of the best of all possible worlds—population, one.

Reading Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me, I was reminded in language no less religious, however, that “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.” The eater lives in the world with others. I took another important lesson in my last days as a vegan from Fisher’s fellow midcentury New Yorker mainstay A. J. Liebling, whose criticism of my approach to food cut just a little sharper: “No ascetic,” he once wrote, “can be considered reliably sane.” Fisher’s ideas about communion—or better, commensality—and Liebling’s barb about sanity have stuck with me over the years and continue to shape a class in which I’m hoping to score a few points for honest living, which, if we’re talking about eating, means living with full awareness of our place in the food chain.

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Comments Post a Comment »

Is it just me, or can this be boiled down to "We can't be perfect, so why should we try to be better than we are?"

"Whoever said eating wouldn't hurt?" So therefore we have no ability (not to bring up, perhaps, obligation) to minimize that hurt, to ourselves and others?

I don't get that.

Posted by Matt on Thu 16 Jun 2011
Matt, I couldn't agree with you more. What makes those rationalizations even more insidious is that you hear them everywhere nowadays: from people who take up hunting in middle age, from new urban farmers who don't want to struggle with the emotional facet of killing their own animals, from people depressed over the state of our planet, looking for a way to justify without rectifying.

Irrespective of one's view on eating meat or not eating meat, the conclusion offered by the author seems disingenuous, because it comes across to the reader as an attempt to justify all the while claiming no justification is necessary. The people I know who've resolved to be "fine" with killing, without remorse, may indeed be fine with it. But it's come at a cost of shutting down a very natural process of compassion and empathy. And that's what worries me most about this new meme in the world of food and slaughter. It has much broader implications than the food we eat.

Posted by Frankie on Mon 20 Jun 2011
Scott,

The notion that you can feed the world with ethically raised animals is a bigger fantasy than the one you accuse vegans and vegetarians of indulging in. You can't feed billions of people with animals raised on charming family farms. Factory farming exists because it's the most efficient and cost-effective way of providing meat to those who want it. The future solution to all-you-can-eat meat will probably be lab-grown flesh.

In the meantime, those with an uneasy conscience, a lack of determination and fortitude, and a good salary can alleviate their guilt by smugly buying their organic meat from what they believe are happy farms run by sweet farmers and big-breasted blonde milkmaids.

It sounds as if you had an ethical lapse and lost your faith but then found a guru (Michael Pollan) who provided you with all the necessary rationalizations to justify your new diet. It sounds like true love.

For me, just because an animal has been treated kindly before it's killed doesn't make it suddenly ethical to eat meat. In the end, the animal still ends up dead. Eating a steak or a chicken breast provides me with 5-15 minutes of pleasure. Twenty-four hours later, I shit that animal out. Is that a fair trade? Is that a good and noble use of that animal? An animal's life exchanged for a few minutes of pleasure and some nutrition that can easily be gotten from plant sources?

Posted by Vic on Fri 24 Jun 2011
I'd like to point out that vegetarians are not off the hook when it comes to factory farming. Dairy farms are just as bad if not worse than meat farms. Moreover, any male calves are automatically meat. Same with eating factory farmed eggs.

The fact is that Americans eat way more meat than is necessary. Everyone probably CAN eat ethically raised meat as long as we don't expect to have it three meals a day.

I am a former vegetarian, and have raised my own animals for meat. I think a lot of the angst comes from going too far away from the "animals are soulless automatons" toward the view that animals are "just like us." Surely they are thinking feeling beings. But they don't have the same level of intelligence that humans do, nor do they suffer in advance knowing that they will end up on someone's plate. The animals on my farm lead happy lives outdoors on pasture, and when the time comes for them to become food, it is very quick. We should all be so fortunate to live as happy a life and die as quickly.

Posted by Annie on Mon 20 Feb 2012