It’s What’s For Dinner

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

We then read food expert Michael Pollan, America’s most well-known omnivore, who in a 2002 essay, “An Animal’s Place,” argues convincingly that “What’s wrong with animal agriculture—with eating animals—is the practice, not the principle.” An animal’s place, in other words, is first on the farm and then, so long as that farm was nice, on the dinner plate. During one class, we watch a video about deer hunting and processing; it shows carcasses that are first skinned, and then run through bandsaws, butchered under the edges of boning knives, and extruded from meat grinders on their way to becoming venison steaks and sausages. One lesson here is that, as with most other mammals we eat, deer undergo a name change while under the knife. We follow the hunting-and-butchering footage with more moving pictures, the 2005 DreamWorks film Madagascar, a fun-for-all-ages cartoon about talking zoo animals. Madagascar, believe it or not, aspires to present a vegetarian utopia to rival those imagined in the books of Genesis and Isaiah, parts of which we also read. The students always seem wonderfully startled to learn that Adam and Eve were, at first, vegetarians.

We continue with novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who in the 2009 book Eating Animals is writing against meat in the context of becoming a new father. “Feeding my child,” he writes, “is not like feeding myself: it matters more.” I ask the class what he might mean by “matters.” They don’t usually have a good answer—nor, I think, does the author. From Foer we finish with South African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, another vegetarian fiction writer whose novel Elizabeth Costello takes shape, in large part, as a series of academic lectures delivered by the main character, Coetzee’s alter ego, on the campus of an imaginary American college. In addressing her audience “on the subject of animals,” Elizabeth Costello compares the effect on us of ignoring our nation’s factory farms and abattoirs with the profound sin of everyday Germans and Poles of the Third Reich “who did and did not know of the atrocities around them.” What students don’t always get—Who does he think he is?!, they sometimes snarl—is that Coetzee is making a different comparison here (though only slightly) than the one famously made by his fellow Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer in a 1965 story, “The Letter Writer,” about the character Herman Gombiner, a Holocaust survivor who views animal slaughter as the “eternal Treblinka.” (As you might expect, Singer was, like Coetzee and both of their protagonists, an ethical vegetarian.) And for his part, Coetzee does refer to modern animal farms—factory farms—as “an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end.” Coetzee seems to take for granted the respective brutality of those in charge of concentration camps and factory farms; what shocks him, and what should shock us, I hope, is the complete lack of sympathy it requires to ignore what goes on all around us.

At some early point in the class, often at first blush, someone raises the most basic complaint about our relationship to animals. It’s usually an already committed vegetarian who says, “Who do we think we are?” This I have come to expect. And this I like. After all, few of us have been taught to think of college—or the workplace, the supermarket, or the kitchen—as a place to ask ourselves with any real curiosity the ageless question of who we think we are or, indeed, what sustains us. This question feels like a good start.

What I find disheartening is that after nearly a month of reading and writing and talking about who we think we are, and perhaps who we’ve always been, relative to animals—
and let’s not forget we are relatives—it’s not uncommon for someone to ask this very same question with the very same exasperation again on the last day: “Who do we think we are?” When it comes to examining honest living, I often worry in this class that we’re people who get nowhere. We’re stuck wishing we were still in Eden.

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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