Hi, all. This month, my friend Max contributes his perspective on carnivorous consumption. Enjoy!
I eat my friends. I didn’t always. Until I was in my 60s, like most people, I ate only strangers. I typically encountered them in a baking dish, or on a rotisserie. At times I met them at the grill, or in a carry-out bag. Or I unwrapped dismembered bits of them from cellophane. At a good restaurant, I would be presented with some portion of their inert bodies, appetizingly arranged. I’d leave uneaten pieces of them for the kitchen staff to dispose of. I rarely thought of these pieces of animal muscle I was devouring as parts of formerly whole living bodies, so complete was the dissection that the final product bore no resemblance to its origins.
We eat animals no less than ancient people. In fact, given the relative cheapness of industrially raised meat and its ubiquity, we probably consume way more than most earlier cultures did. But unlike nearly every human until just a handful of generations ago, we have no relationship to the sentient creatures killed for our gustatory pleasure. Most of us don’t hunt or raise animals. We don’t venture into their territory to track them down, we don’t help them be born, we don’t feed them, or ensure their safety on their way to our dinner plates.
The domestication of animals led to all kinds of new human-animal relationships, such as companion, protector, fellow hunter, and workmate. But above all else, what drove domestication was the desire to have ready access to and control of the animals we eat. Learning how to tame and raise animals freed humans from needing to stalk them, fish them, or trap them for dinner. Time studies amongst hunting and gathering tribes indicate that domestication didn’t shorten the work day, quite the contrary, but it did put humans in a hierarchical relationship to animals, no longer just one amongst them. Domestication facilitated the turn from animism and respect for whom we ate, to control and dominance, and now the forces of industrialization, under capitalism’s drive for ever increasing efficiency and productivity, have landed us in bankrupt relationships with those we eat. The typical meat eater consumes flesh devoid of any connection to the life that was taken for theirs. While our dependence on animals for sustenance hasn’t diminished (vegetarianism aside), our awareness of what that means has all but disappeared.
The hierarchical relationship brought on by domestication facilitates the use of euphemistic language that helps hide the reality that other sentient beings are cruelly raised and killed for food. A slaughterhouse is just a facility where “livestock” get “processed.” Pork bellies are a “commodity” on the stock exchange. The circumlocution extends well beyond our treatment of domesticated animals. Hunting involves “harvesting.” Lame animals are “dispatched.” Herds are “culled.” A suffering pet is “put down” or “euthanized.” And because out of sight is out of mind, we end up feeling worse about the animal we accidentally run over with our car than the one raised in a concrete bunker for our pulled pork sandwich, even though it suffered far more than the instantly-dead roadkill.
We still read picture books to children filled with friendly cows, pigs, chickens, etc. The diverse family barnyard of America’s past is alive and well in the world of childhood fiction, despite having all but disappeared from the contemporary rural landscape. The human caregivers in these quaint stories name their animals, love them, care for them. But the real-life component that goes missing in these stories is that, in the end, the farmers would kill and eat these animals. Domesticated livestock are not raised to reach old age, but to reach our stomachs – the sooner the better. The brutal realities of the industrial agricultural practices that replaced the pastoral farm of America’s past, remain veiled from children. As adults, we may get up in arms over stories of abused pets, despite enjoying a diet defined by mass slaughter and animal brutality. We are not to blame, as us ordinary folks did not create the systems that define our meat choices and hide its cruelty. But it can put our moral values and our actions out of kilter. We are awash in contradictions we rarely contemplate. Children read about cows, but we eat beef. Old MacDonald had pigs, but we chew on pork chops. If we said we were having cow for dinner, it might remind us just a bit that this slab of meat was once part of a sentient creature.
Which brings me back to eating strangers. By eating strangers, we are signing on to having others do the dirty work. It is ironic that people overall are squeamish about images showing animal death while simultaneously participating in systems that make those animals’ lives more miserable than ever and their deaths beastly, not only to them, but those who must perform the deed. Who are the people who build and run the hog confinement operations? Who are the workers in the meatpacking plants that are tasked with killing and dismembering one animal after another? What does it do to a person’s psyche to kill and piece out sentient beings all day, not for one’s own meal, not with ceremony and respect, but for a paycheck?
Working on a sped up (dis)assembly line demands desensitization to anonymous death at a job that already requires grueling and dangerous physically repetitive tasks. Like the battlefield soldier trained to “dispatch” the “enemy,” the slaughterhouse worker is required to participate in the large-scale killing and dismemberment of animals under stressful and sometimes horrific working conditions.
If we participate in the standard sourcing of meat in America’s diet, we are involved in these realities of industrial agriculture. Death is no less present on our dinner plates or in our bag of chicken nuggets than it was in the hunt or on the farm, but gone is the awareness of its import. If we don’t seek alternatives, we are complicit in systems not of our making, but supported by our dollars anyway. Meaning and connection have been swapped out for convenience and low cost, which is the plight of us modern consumers with regards to so many of the products and goods we use. Coming to understand these trade-offs and the systems that produce them can motivate one to change their consumptive behaviors, but even that isn’t always feasible.
In college, once I learned about the environmental costs and callousness behind modern meat production I chose to eat from the dining hall’s vegetarian line. As a graduate student preparing my own meals I worked my way through Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet. But I missed meat. And I discovered the local co-op. I couldn’t always afford to buy humanely raised and dispatched meat, but the option was there. Later, I taught environmental philosophy at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest and confronted my own dietary contradictions head on. I tried to purchase meat from local producers practicing humane animal raising.
I was once allowed to take my students to a hog confinement operation. The students were horrified. The pigs couldn’t satisfy any of their natural instincts to root around or build nests. They were crammed in so tightly that these normally social animals bit each other. Workers cut off the pigs’ tails to pre-empt the bleeding that would otherwise result. Some of the hogs had open sores from laying on concrete and were routinely fed antibiotics to protect against infection from the pathogens running rampant in such close confinement. The smell of the nearby manure lagoon was overwhelming. I doubled down on choosing to eat free-ranging, humanely dispatched, happy animals, but they were all still strangers to me. I had yet to have an intimate relationship with any animal I put in my mouth.
When life’s twist and turns gave me a place to rent and a chance to help out at the Patch, I finally had
the opportunity to make friends with the sentient beings I eat. The pigs and chickens get names, I care for them, get to know them, play around with them, and finally, participate in their demise. I dreaded my first chicken slaughter. I was down for the gutting, but I couldn’t get myself to participate in the “off with their heads” opener. And it took me a few months before I was ready to eat any of the birds I had processed. But the hesitation disappeared surprisingly quickly in subsequent butchering sessions. While the pigs I help raise are killed by a local outfit that comes on site, I hear the gunshot, I see my strung-up friend on their way to becoming skinned and headless with a pile of organs in a bucket. In a few weeks, some of this former buddy of mine will be bacon in the freezer. These experiences have taught me at a visceral level what it means for an animal to give its life for mine. The hour of death loses its horror while gaining solemnity. As the mysterious force that animates a sentient creature evaporates before my eyes, I am left with a bloody pile of flesh, guts, and bone to be processed. But what remains is respect and gratitude for this creature whose life was taken to sustain my own.
Finally being able to eat my friends and not just strangers is a relief. For this philosophy professor, dietary praxis has started to line up with theory. And I recognize it’s a privilege. For many of us, eating humanely plays off against inadequate wages and trying to keep our heads above water, exhausted from a 60-hour work week, with our kids clamoring for chicken nuggets. The systems that led to industrial agriculture also bring low pay, food deserts, and incessant and inhumane working demands for many of us. One can only do so much and must pick which battles to fight.
So, I am not crusading. A mass return to the age-old human practice of being in some kind of meaningful relationship to those we eat could only happen in consort with other massive systemic changes. But we shouldn’t hide the fact that something crucial to what it meant to be human has been lost. Gone is a powerful source of meaning and respect, grounded in a lived experience of connection and felt dependency on the other-than-human world that sustains us. I count myself lucky to be in the company of friends at dinner, even when dining alone.
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