Eating Animals

“You have just dined, and however scrupulously the  slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I’ve never been much of a meat-eater. I didn’t have anything against it, I just didn’t crave it the way some people do. In the past, when my husband has been out of town, I would eat little or no meat without even consciously thinking about it. But I recently watched the movie Food, Inc. and it pushed me over the edge. I’ve been mostly vegetarian for three months now (I say mostly because I have eaten some fish), and I wish I had converted years ago. I made the decision by and large for moral reasons, and the health benefits are a welcome side effect.

 In an effort to not be seen as one of those people who is dramatically swayed by a single documentary, I’ve been trying to do my research, so I was thrilled to discover that one of my favorite authors had recently written a book on this very subject. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals is a fascinating and convincing examination of factory farming in America. As someone with a background in journalism, I prize objectivity, and while Foer clearly has a point he’s trying to prove, he does a good job of presenting both sides while maintaining his stance.

The crux of Eating Animals is not a puritanical argument for vegetarianism. It is, the author makes clear, an argument for vegetarianism, but more than anything else it is an argument for knowing where you food comes from and working to effect change in the way it is produced. The devastating consequences of factory farming are manifold, but Foer tackles three in particular: the cruel and inhumane treatment of animals, the environmental toll, and the compromised health of those who both eat factory farmed meat and who merely live in a world where it exists.

Learning how animals are handled and slaughtered had the greatest impact on me personally. One reason I gave up meat was that it occurred to me that I couldn’t, in good conscience, love one animal so much that I let it sleep in my bed (I have two Great Danes whom my world revolves around) and then cook another one for dinner.

Chickens are kept in cramped quarters, often having their beaks seared off, and they’ve been genetically altered to grow bigger and faster, to the extent that many of them buckle under their own weight and are unable to walk. Two kinds of chickens are bred: broiler chickens for their meat, and layer hens for their eggs. What bothered me most (and is pushing me further toward a vegan diet) was learning that male layer chicks aren’t good for meat and are thus useless, so they are ALL killed, sometimes through a sort of wood chipper for chickens. And that goes for all eggs – the cheapest Wal-Mart eggs, cage-free eggs, and free-range eggs – which for me means that there is no such thing as an ethical egg. (Also, the terms “cage-free” and “free-range” are very misleading and don’t necessarily imply that the chickens are faring any better than those in cages.)

The story is similar for pigs. Pregnant sows are kept in cramped gestation crates without enough room for them to even turn around. Piglets that are sick or too small are killed by “thumping,” a horrific practice in which workers literally hurl them at the ground to knock their skulls. Piglets that escape thumping are castrated and have their tails cut off without anesthesia (could you conceive of having your dog or cat neutered without anesthesia?). Cows have it somewhat better, but they too experience their own brand of horror, often making it to the slaughter line partially or completely conscious as they’re skinned.

As someone who has already decided against meat, Eating Animals was preaching to the converted to some extent, but it solidified my decision. My one critique would be that it didn’t really touch on the dairy industry, and I wish the author had explained why he chooses the label “vegetarian” and not “vegan,” as eggs and dairy are also products of factory farming. But those details aside, the book was riveting and thought-provoking. Will it convert a die-hard omnivore like my husband? Probably not. A compassionate and open-minded person on the fence? Certainly.

Food, Inc. makes an excellent point: through preparation, packaging, and presentation, we are as separated from the origins of our food as is humanly possible. Chicken nuggets and tidy little rectangles of ground round seem perfectly innocuous. But if your butcher played a reel of slaughterhouse footage on a continuous loop, you might not want pork chops for dinner. Have you ever seen on the news when someone gets a fried chicken head in their bucket of KFC? They flip out, because we don’t like any reminders that what we’re eating used to be alive, used to have a pulse and a brain. Perhaps we would make different decisions if we really knew what we were putting in our bodies. And the movie makes another good point: every time you buy your food, you are voting. Voting for what you want to see in the store or the restaurant. Voting for the factory farm or the family farm. What are you going to vote for?

I encourage everyone to visit www.meat.org and watch the video “Glass Walls,” featuring Paul McCartney. Also check out “Meet Your Meat” on YouTube.  Yes, I’m on my soapbox, but more than anything I am an advocate of independent thinking. Read what’s out there. Watch a few documentaries. Maybe even get your cholesterol checked. And then decide for yourself.

“Truely man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds theirs.  We live by the death of others:  we are burial places!  I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look on the murder of animals as they now look on the murder of men.”  ~Leonardo da Vinci