When I was about two years-old, I stopped eating all meat. My parents thought I’d grow out of it, but I never did. I never really gave much thought to the reasons why, then or later, that I didn’t eat it. I just had no desire and figured it was my weird thing.
But being an outsider in terms of both the meat-eating thing (though I cook it almost nightly for my wife and kids) and the vegetarian for a reason thing probably gives me some perspective, if not on my own habits, on those of others.
I have always been an animal lover. I worried about them feeling hurt or sad. At times, this stress extended beyond the animal kingdom. When my diet was extremely limited as a kid, I even spent more than one afternoon wondering if lettuce felt pain when I chewed it. Did my “head” of lettuce leave some screaming lettuce zombie body wondering around a farm trying to find the fat, freckled Jewish kid who just poured Wishbone on his noggin
I suppose we’ve all had that thought now and again, eh?
On animals, I never got (and still don’t) the way people so easily made distinctions between animals they loved and those they ate. Ultimately, one has to just block out certain elements about meat “manufacturing” in order to enjoy a steak or a piece of chicken. You can’t really think it through, step by step, and make sense of it otherwise. Look, your dinner was probably treated a hell of lot worse than Michael Vick’s dogs.
I’m not judging here. I buy it. I cook it. I stopped eating it at an age when I was too young to make a thoughtful choice on the matter. But this is the take of an outsider who worried about lettuce feeling pain. How can we let animals be treated they way they are? We can’t. We all know we can’t. And yet, we do. It’s just the way it is, so we don’t think about it. It’s so much that way that we assume that’s the way it’s supposed to be (only a vegetarian can work a sentence like that, my friends).
In a new work of non-fiction, Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer examines some of the denial, hypocrisy and psychological gymnastics that go into eating meat. This is from a New Yorker review.
Americans love animals. Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually…
Americans also love to eat animals. This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric. Broiler chickens, also known, depending on size, as fryers or roasters, typically spend their lives in windowless sheds, packed in with upward of thirty thousand other birds and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, fryers often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.”
For pigs, conditions are little better. Shortly after birth, piglets have their tails chopped off; this discourages the bored and frustrated animals from gnawing one another’s rumps. Male piglets also have their testicles removed, a procedure performed without anesthetic. Before being butchered, hogs are typically incapacitated with a tonglike instrument designed to induce cardiac arrest. Sometimes their muscles contract so violently that they end up not just dead but with a broken back.
We know these are just a few examples. But we eat, eat and eat. We don’t slow down. We don’t demand changes. It’s interesting, no? I’ve always wondered how much meat would sell if it had to be displayed as it looked when it was alive instead of as clean, well-lit slices of something that never really appeared to have life. The guys at my market’s butcher shop tell me that’s an unlikely scenario. But maybe, at least, folks should read books by Safran Foer and others. It probably doesn’t make sense to try to change things overnight. But being aware and giving some thought to the matter seems to be a reasonable goal. If nothing else, it’ll give my head of lettuce a little piece of mind.
