At the beginning of 2009, as I embarked upon my solo car journey from San Francisco to Guatemala a friend handed me a book to read along the way, telling me it was a very interesting read. In all fairness, I believe that the book should have come with a warning: “you will not be able to buy food or eat from any American supermarket or fast food restaurant ever again”, because about half-way through (and half-way down the coast of California), I found myself in exactly that situation (and hungry). The book was Michael Pollen’s An Omnivore’s Dilemma, and it was indeed a fascinating, eye-opening and very inciteful look into the industrial food-chain and the world of organic, sustainable and green certification in the US. Interestingly, on my recent visit to Canada an essay by Michael Pollen on the same subject (written before the book was published) came across my lap, and I was once again reminded of the crazy world in which we live.
There is no doubt that my thinking around the industrial food chain (including organic and green certification) has been greatly influenced by Pollan’s works, and has inspired me to make some conscious changes in my life – in particular my eating and purchasing habits.
As I am making the yearly pilgrimmage home to see my family, I smile at the anticipated conversation with my mum…the years have seen an evolution in my eating habits that have followed the development of my social consciousess (vegetarian, organic, raw, GMO-free), and my mum knows me as only mothers do. On our first conversation when I landed back in the country, she asked me: “what are you eating this time Corrina?”. And I must admit, as I responded “Food with a face, mum. Beyond organic, beyond certification, locally produced food that rages against the industrial machine…”, I sympathised with her for what it must mean to be a mother. I am sure that I will get my own some day.
However the coincidence of coming across Pollan’s work again on my return from Guatemala (and re-entry into the industrial food chain) has inspired me to share his ideas with other people. And so, I leave you here with some food for thought: an essay by Michael Pollan from “An Animal’s Place”, which was written before An Omnivore’s Dilemma. If you have a chance, I highly recommend getting hold of a copy of this book and having a read. In the interim, here is a taster…
Happy Eating!
The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan
There’s a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig – an animal easily as intelligent as a dog – that becomes the Christmas ham.
We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view. When’s the last time you saw a pig? Except for our pets, real animals – animals living and dying – no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check, on either the sentiment or the brutality.
Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, “Why Look at Animals?” in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between humans and animals – and specifically the loss of eye contact – has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship with other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us: in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship that allowed them to both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down: nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians.
Which brings us – reluctantly, necessarily – to the American factory farm, the place where all such distinctions turn to dust. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we’ve learned about animals at least since Darwin has simply been…set aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Descartes’ belief that animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possible believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate the system and a willingness to avert their eyes on the part of everyone else.
Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers ten days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. “Learned helplessness” is the psychological term and it’s not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slates suspended over a manure pit. So it’s not surprising that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow its tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. The U.S.D.A’s recommended solution to the problem is called “tail docking”. Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most, but not all, of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.
More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what Capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here, in these places, life itself is redefined – as protein production – and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes “stress”, an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail docking.
But before you swear off meat entirely, let me describe a very different sort of animal farm. Polyface Farm occupies 550 acres of rolling grassland and forest in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, Joel Salatin and his family raise six different food animals – cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits, turkeys, and sheep – in an intricate dance of symbiosis designed to allow each species, in Salatin’s words, “to fully express its physiological distinctiveness.”
What this means in practice is that Salatin’s chickens lives like chickens: his cows, like cows: pigs, pigs. To many animal rightists, even Polyface Farms is a death camp. But to look at these animals is to see this for the sentimental conceit it is. In the same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and during my visit to Polyface Farm I saw it in abundance.
Salatin slaughters his chickens and rabbits right on the farm, and would do the cattle, pigs, and sheep there too if only the U.S.D.A. would let him. He showed me the open-air abattoir he built behind the farmhouse – a sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab, with stainless-steel sinks, scalding tanks, a feather-plucking machine, and metal cones to hold the birds upside down while they’re being bled. Processing chickens in not a please job, but Salatin insists on doing it himself because he’s convinced he can do it more humanely and cleanly than any processing plant. He slaughters every other Saturday throughout the summer. Anyone’s welcome to watch.
On Salatin’s farm, the eye contact between people and animals whose loss John Berger mourned is still in fact of life – an of death, for neither the lives nor the deaths of these animals have been secreted behind steel walls. “Food with a face”, Salatin likes to call what he’s selling, a slogan that probably scares off some customers. People see very different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a chicken or a steer: a being without a soul, a “subject of a life” entitled to rights, a link in a food chain, a vessel for pain and pleasure, a tasty lunch.
Salatin’s open-air abattoir is a morally powerful idea. Someone slaughtering a chicken in a place where he can be watched is apt to do it scrupulously, with consideration for the animal as well as for the eater. This is going to sound quixotic, but maybe all we need to do to redeem industrial animal agriculture in this country is to pass a las requiring that the steel and concrete walls of the CAFOs and slaughterhouses be replace with…glass. If there’s any new “right” we need to establish, maybe it’s this one: the right to look.
The industrialization – and dehumanization – of America animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way. Practices like tail docking would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end. For who could stand the sight? Yes, mean would get more expensive. We’d probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we’d eat the m with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.
(New York Times Magazine, November 2002 © Michael Pollan 2005).
