The Animal’s Almanac: Justifying Eating Animals

Trace the oppositional arguments against animal rights to thier deepest roots and you’ll find an embarassment of ignorance. I was reminded of this fact while reading a bit on the history of animal advocacy.  A common tact employed by active opponenets of animal rights–and a rather innocuous one–was to obscure the weakness of their position in a cloud of sarcasm. One editorialist, undone by all the “proselytizing animal lovers” coming out of Victorian England, snarkily retorted that, if we were now going to care so much about mere animals, we should offer them “a little education, a little night school training, [and] a few newspapers printed in their language.” Funny (not). (See Diane Beers, The Prevention of Cruelty.)

In a more disturbing vein, those threatened by the rhetoric of animal compassion frequently sought refuge under the cope of sexism. Noting that a large proportion of the animal rights movement was women, medical experts concocted a hysteria-related disease known as “zoophilpsychosis.” Only unhinged females, the diagnosis suggested, could resort to the whacked out idea that animals mattered more than objects. Readers of Carol Adams (The Sexual Politics of Meat) will quickly recognize that matters today have changed little since the nineteenth century. In fact, on the sexism front, they may have become worse. “Meat,” she concludes (with ample and horrifying evidence), “is a symbol of male dominance.”

It’s true, and worse. I’m not going to elaborate here, but I urge you to plumb the depths of the pro-meat agenda. One needs little analytical expertise to quickly realize that common justifications for eating animals require an uncommon resort to sexism, speciesism, and solipsicim. Nowhere in this effort to justify unnecessary suffering will you find compassion, tolerance, or open-mindedness. Nowhere, and I mean nowhere, will you find an affirmation of love.

“Animal Lover”: Emotionalism vs. Objectivity in Animal Rights

 

A day after writing about the importance of seeking animal rights through the emotional love we have for animals (pervious post), I came across this passage by the Oxford theologian Andrew Linzey, a pre-eminent supporter of moral rights for animals:

Rights talk moves the discussion away from feelings and sympathy to what is objectively owed to animals as a matter of justice. This represents an improvement on previous appeals to care based purely on emotion, which is typified in the expression “animal lover.”  (Why Animal Suffering Matters, 161)

I love Linzey’s work. But I think the theologian errs in this commentary: first, he unjustifiably separates thought and emotion; second, he forgets that there are multiple paths to social change.  Humans do not connect with ideas in a vacuum. We’re drawn to “objective” criteria through the vagaries of our emotional lives. Linzey’s fear here is legitimate, to be sure. He’s worried about the cat lover who just adores her cat–and thus all cats–but cannot seem to extend this emotional fetish to all animals in general. As Linzey sees the matter, emotionalism obscures the transcendent principle of animal rights. This is a fair concern, but–given that, on some level, we all negotiate the world of ideas through our emotions–I think it would be more productive to spin our innate love for animals in a more optimistic direction.

Specifically, I see nothing standing in the way of abstracting from an emotional attachment. In other words, loving a particular animal or species strikes me as a useful, and readily accessible, starting point towards an appreciation of objective animal rights. I love the dogs I live with (well, most of the time) and, although I’ve never spent significant time with pigs, I can certainly imagine loving pigs much as I do dogs. That’s a leap–but a pretty realistic one. Once that leap is made, the groundwork is laid for an objective, rights based approach to conceptualizing animals. To think this journey can be emotionless is to defuse the passion that drives our connection to the non-human animal world. I have no problem admitting that my “objective” right-based stance on animals has its roots in a sentiment for dogs dripping with the sap of emotion.

 

 

Conscious Eating Conference: Putting Animals First

Berkeley was great. I spoke at the first annual Conscious Eating Conference, sponsored by several animal advocacy groups, and held in the Student Union. I tweaked my talk the night before to sharpen one point that I think was obscured in the original version.

Approaching vegan education through appeals to personal health and environmental improvement, I now argued, are limited. Important, but limited. By contrast, the path to permanent and ethically grounded veganism will only happen when animals themselves are placed at the center of vegan education. I love animals–and I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. We have to capitalize on this pervasive love. We have to put animals first, highlighting their sentience, sociability, intelligence, emotional lives, and sense of identity. Only when we come to appreciate why animals matter will the call of veganism have the same powerful appeal that the call for the abolitionism of slavery had for many Americans living in the antebullum United States.  That’s what has to happen.

My decision to put animals first was confirmed by Karen Davis’s profoundly moving discussion of chickens. Listen to Davis discuss the complexity of chicken lives (or read her books) and you’ll never look at a chicken the same way again. ”A chicken,” I say, because Davis has a remarkable way of reminding humans to look at animals as individuals (which is how they ultimately see themselves). Hopefully, if you’re thinking about keeping some chickens of your own, you won’t, as Davis–who’s president of United Poultry Concerns– makes it brutally clear that backyard birds come from breeders that epitomize all that’s wrong with industrial agriculture.  And if you eat them or their eggs without reflecting on what that animal is like, then you’re simply not eating responsibly.

Re-reading this post, I’m struck by how easily it would be to mock. “Chickens! I’m sure they’re brilliant!!! I prefer them fried!!” I get this kind of thing a lot. So what. In the face of mockery we have to pursuade skeptics to do one thing and one thing only: look. Just look. Given the decency that marks the human heart, I am confident that, as more and more of us look, the appeal of veganism will spread–not because of our health or the environment (important as these factors are), but because we know it’s wrong to exploit a living being with feelings.

The Prius Fallacy: Thoughts on “Sustainability”

This piece of mine ran yesterday at Freakonomics.com. While not directly tied into the ethics of veganism, the article highlights what many vegans find deeply frustrating about contemporary discussions of “sustainability”: the solutions that we’re pursuing with respect to food production, in their failure to question the ethics of consuming animals, backfire all over our good intentions.

For a singularly grim, if fiercely literary, assessment of the earth’s environmental fate, the grizzled wisdom of Cormac McCarthy is always there to deliver the dark pronouncement that we’re flat-out doomed. “The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die,” explains the judge in McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. “[B]ut in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night.” Darkness, in essence, will fall at the very moment when we think we’re out-of-our-mind brilliant. 

(Photo: Photodisc)

Brilliance in conventional environmentalism has thus far been embodied by the caricature of hybrid-driving solar evangelists with soft spots for local farms, grass-fed beef, and re-useable shopping bags adorned with inscriptions of ecological virtue. Such popular solutions to our environmental quandary come not only with the eager endorsement of a progressive political establishment, but with the added appeal of basic pragmatism. Drive a more fuel-efficient car, eat locally, seek energy-efficient light fixtures, and vote “yes!” for public transit initiatives — such ideas simply make sense. And thus they’ve become the nuts-and-bolts of modern environmentalism.

David Owen sees the matter differently. In his incisive and doggedly counter-intuitive new book, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse, Owen gently dismantles the foundation of standard environmental behavior with a series of succinctly turned arguments that, in addition to being presented with considerable wit and self-deprecation, lead us to the conclusion that ecological salvation will ultimately be found in tightly packed cities where mobility is minimized, living space is constrained, and the myriad gadgetry designed to reduce the individual carbon footprint is rendered obsolete by sheer virtue of human density. In essence, the opposite of the way Americans typically live.

The original ecological sin of ceaseless suburban sprawl is hard to shake. It means that, as Owen writes, “when we do attempt to do the right thing we often choose plans that make the underlying problems worse.” Take initiatives to build mass-transit systems as a helpful response to a city’s chronic traffic jams. Not necessarily a bad idea, Owen notes. But here’s the catch: such systems backfire “if the new trains and buses merely clear space on highway lanes for those who would prefer to drive — a group that, historically, has included almost everyone with access to a car.” If mass transit is going to work in places such as Austin or Portland, it “has to be backed up by something that impels complementary reductions in-car use–say, the physical elimination of traffic lanes, or the conversion of existing roadways into bike or bus lanes, ideally with higher fuel taxes, parking fees, and tolls.” Can you imagine any public official advocating such measures in a meaningful way? Hence the conundrum. 

Owen’s critique resonates far beyond the United States. Driven by the premise that “new power demand in any form begets new power demand in every form,” his concerns are equally relevant for the developing world — places that, swept up in the vortex of globalization, will gradually witness millions move toward western-styled consumption and, in turn, western-styled rates of energy usage.

A roof solar panel, in a tribal village in Bangladesh. (Photo: Magalie L’Abbé)

It’s in this context that Owen’s take on solar energy in Bangladesh is especially interesting. He freely acknowledges the “desirable results” produced by an increased living standard for underprivileged Bangladesh citizens with access to solar power. At the same time, he forthrightly observes how “increased income inevitably means increased consumption and increased consumption means increased energy use in all forms.” Owen quotes Ethan Goffman, who asks, “As these clean energy sources come online, won’t a world of voraciously expanding consumption be tempted to use even more energy, continuing to tap fossil fuels to their maximum along with the new sources?” The escape hatch to this bind, according to Owen, is “larger reductions in consumption by the world’s more fortunate citizens.”  If the prospect of the global elite reducing consumption so that traditionally impoverished peoples can expand their previously pre-industrial endeavors sounds unrealistic, well, you’ve further appreciated the depth of Owen’s conundrum.

Whether at home or abroad, the fact remains that more and more of us are developing an environmental ethic around the idea that “consumption itself has environmental value if the energy using devices it depends upon are ‘green.’” It’s been deemed “the Prius Fallacy.”  According to Owen, the fallacy leads to “rebound creep,” thereby resulting in the very opposite of what the technology was billed to accomplish in the first place: reduce energy usage. Rebound creep could happen with a Prius in any number of ways: you might use the money you’ve saved on gas to buy a ticket to the opera, located in another city; you might draw upon the virtue you’ve banked by purchasing a Prius to justify not riding your bike to Whole Foods when it rains; you might decide to drive to the gym during rush hour because Terry Gross is on, and your Prius is a quiet place to sit and be left alone. No matter the scenario, the end result is that the supposedly ameliorative form of consumption — the hybrid — leads not to greater efficiency, but to easier, more comfortable, and greater rates of energy usage.

In one way or another, Owen’s arguments (he also touches on water usage, lighting, wind energy, building codes, among other issues) are rooted in the work of a nineteenth-century economist named William Stanley Jevons. Jevons set the world on fire with the claim that (italics his) “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is true.” Jevons’s critics were legion then, and the arguments they advanced apply equally well to The Conundrum now. As Amory Lovins wrote in response to Owen’s 2010 New Yorker piece on Jevons’s paradox: “Rebound effects are small for three reasons: no matter how efficient your house or washing machine becomes, you won’t heat your house to sauna temperatures, or rewash clean clothes; [and] you can’t find an efficient appliance’s savings in your un-itemized electric bill.”

All good points. But the real value of Owen’s book lies not in a nit-picking debate about the legitimacy of Jevons’ thesis — interesting as that might be — but rather in reminding environmentally conscientious consumers how easily virtuous intentions can be trumped by negative and unexpected outcomes.

The Animal’s Almanac: On Dogs (1807)

I’ve been reading a fascinating historical document. It’s a book, published in 1807 in Philadelphia, called The General Character of the Dog: Anecdotes of that Beautiful and Useful Animal. The author, Joseph Taylor, aimed to highlight “various instances of sagacity and faithful attachment” that he observed among members of the canine species. He did so, he explained, to “prevent future mistreatment.”

A sample quote: “When I see the several actions and designs of my Dog, I profess it is impossible to avoid being amazed. His passions are more quiet than those of many men. There are some [men] whose joy or grief at accidents, give them so little emotion , and are so dull, as to render it difficult to say which it is that affects them: but, in this honest animal, both are lively and strong. When any of the family return home, he discovers great gladness in caressing and skipping about them, and seems dull and concerned at their going out.”  (12)

The logic behind Taylor’s intention is worth appreciating: he was writing about the emotional and intellectual lives of dogs in order to prevent humans from abusing them.  In so doing, Taylor was affirming an important truth—the more we know about the inner lives of non-human animals, the more inclined we are to behave in a way that’s consistent with their intrinsic worth.  Much of our instrumentalist approach to animals is due to the simple fact that we know so little about them. What was true in 1807 is, alas, still true today.

A Rebuttal to a Rebuttal: An Eating Plants Reader Responds to An Angry Butcher

Some context: what follows is a rather brilliant point-by-point rebuttal of Berlin Reed’s rebuttal of my recent piece in the Atlantic.com. All the drama can be followed by reading the past several postings here on eatingplants.org. It is an understatement for me to express my sincere appreciattion for the INTELLIGENT feedback that comes in on this blog. That is a rare quality these days.

Off we go:

From: Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten

I read the article original article this is responding to. The point was that small farm meat advocacy will just be co-opted by big meat. The language was sharp in some points, and perhaps could have been softened as to not slight the ethical butcher since that wasn’t the intent, but overall, I didn’t read it as an attack as such. Anyway, onwards to the reply:

EB- “the moral superiority complex that plagues so many herbivores”

HE HAS A BLOG CALLED THE ETHICAL BUTCHER! McWilliams has a blog called Eating Plants. No matter how Reed goes about defining what he means by ethical butcher, whether it’s a label, a blog, or a project, there is inherently some moralizing going on. He can’t really spin around and say, “Oh, those vegans, so many with moral superiority complexes!”

EB – “I will never assume to know what others should do; I find that to be a dangerous mindset.”

His book is titled The Ethical Butcher: Real Food Rules. Whether “rules” means “a prescribed guide for conduct or action” or “the exercise of authority or control” (Merriam –Webster), it sure seems he is suggesting what others should do. Also, his livelihood seems to depend on being a butcher. McWilliam’s doesn’t really depend on being vegan, he can write about whatever he wants to and may even be less marginalized if he wrote about something else.

EB – “worldwide vegan fascism”

I’m not sure that it’s worth even engaging with this individual with this sort of rhetoric. Which vegan organization is campaigning in impoverished countries pulling meat off of people’s dinner plates? I know that there’s plenty of leafleting on college campuses with affluent young people capable of making lifestyle changes. There is Heifer International though, whose mission is to give impoverished people livestock. Good? Bad? Well, there’s some criticism to content with (http://goo.gl/JMV61), but regardless, it’s certainly not a vegan organization.

EB – “Going vegan doesn’t answer..etc”

But neither does “ethical butchering” or “avoiding soy.” With the soy avoidance, it’s clear that we’re dealing with the usual WAPF kool-aid. Livestock, even the local “pastured” kind, still consume plenty of cereal crops akin to soy. Even Joel Salatin doesn’t escape this.

EB – “The outdated obsession with meat as the crux of the problem is unnecessarily narrow-minded”

If by outdated he means, “advocates who pointed out the problem decades ago,” (you can go back even a hundred years even) that’s not being outdated, that’s being right. Animal agriculture is the number one cause of climate change, deforestation, and depleting fisheries. It’s unnecessary, certainly in the amount that is condoned, and it’s easier to reduce animal product consumption than to “free ourselves” from “the complex web” whatever that even means.

EB – “I have never, ever argued against being vegetarian or vegan.”

No, it’s just that vegans have a moral superiority complexed, destroy the world with soy and “precious veggies”, cause animals to suffer (deliberately I wonder?), are “dogmatic,” “elitist,” “outdated,” “obsessive,” “narrow-minded,” “unrealistic,” “short-sighted,” “fascist,” and wronger than wrong, but no, no arguments against being vegetarian or vegan. It all reads like a bullet points from the retarded Vegetarian Myth except he loses a few points for not mentioning that vegans need B12 so it’s unnatural and no society has ever been truly vegan, oh, and something about hunter-gatherers. For extra credit he could have at least mentioned the welfare of plants and microbes.

EB – “I abstain from soy at all costs and I don’t eat any seafood other than shellfish and a very, very short list of truly sustainable fish.”

He believes soy is the problem, so he abstains at all costs, which is unfortunate because the comparable costs of meat eating that soybean eating can displace is very high. Legumes also fix nitrogen. Soybeans that feed people really aren’t that big of a problem and of course soybeans can be organically sourced. Most of the tofu and soymilks on the market are organic, all are non-GMO, some brands are even regional/local depending where you live. If you live in New York (Brooklyn), Fresh Tofu Inc. produces tofu for the tri-state region from Pennsylvania and the organic soy beans are sourced nearby. Commercial animal products are a big problem, they make up 99% of the animal food supply, but when vegans abstain from them for very good reasons, it’s “fascism?”

EB – “Going vegan doesn’t preserve generations of time-honored traditions “

Who cares when we are reading articles on illuminated screens transmitted through a computer network. I thought we were supposed to be solving big problems, not having cultural day. Can’t cultures honor their languages, their stories, their dance, and dress, even their holidays, maybe that means modifying meals to a vegan menu, maybe they consume animal products on those special occasions. I can only refer to Jonathan Safran Foer who presents the idea that culture is more than what we put into our mouths. Also, since vegetarianism is ancient, it most certainly is a cultural item that can be integrated into most any other cultural milieu. Certainly any cultural people near a decent supermarket.

Here’s what I find most obnoxious with the notion of time honored traditions used in defending hunting or butchering animals. Long before humans could write they could kill animals and figure out how to consume them. It’s not rocket science. If civilization collapses tomorrow in typical Hollywood fashion, enough survivors will be able to figure out on their own how to hunt, fish, and butcher any animals they may find in order to survive. We don’t really need to practice. If buttery is a skill, it’s one that far less intelligent proto-humans mastered long ago. Chimpanzees hunt and manage meat eating just fine.

Somehow when vegans eat vegetables it’s, “your precious veggies,” that could only come from the worse circumstances, but then he eat vegetables it’s fine, because his menus “teem with fresh, seasonal vegetables.” Hey, that’s great, but any vegan can do the same if they want to. Also, I’m not going to suggest to everyone never to eat non-seasonal frozen or canned vegetables, because that isn’t really helping anyone to make eating less meat easier. It’s not possible nor desirable for everyone to exclusively eat fresh seasonal vegetables. People should each oranges and other nonseasonal fruits in the Northern winter. It’s healthier (plenty of studies show this) for people to consumer fruit year round and the environmental impact is relatively negligible (compared to any meat eating). Sure, conditions of many agricultural workers are poor, but that’s not inherent to growing vegetables and solutions have more to do with labor and immigration policies.

EB – “I can actually still count the number of animals I’ve served over the past two years,”

I can actually still count the number of animals I’ve eaten over the past two years. Zero. Whoop dee doo. A feat only possible because it’s not really a feat at all. It’s fairly straightforward and simple, I wish I had this feeling of moral superiority that people like Reed claim vegans exhibit, but I don’t self-congratulate myself as if I’m preforming some sort of notable or courageous deed. If I had a blog or a new book coming out I wouldn’t title it ethical anything, that’s for sure.

EB – “I don’t eat very much meat and one look at my latest menu will dispel your claims that I encourage wanton meat consumption.”

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me they don’t eat very much meat… The point is that ethical butchers become symbols of meat consumption for everyone else whether you like it or not. The proof is Center for Consumer Freedom linking to your blog, but it’s also apparent in attitudes of a majority of indifferent meat eaters. Meat eating can be done right, they have an example in ethical butchers, so all meat eating is justified. These people will wait until the industry reforms itself while maintaining high supply and low prices.

EB – “In my opinion, the single most critical element in the perpetuation of factory farming is corporate greed.”

As McWilliams (and many others) have pointed out, that’s where the slow food movement (or locavores, or whatever we want to call it) gets is a bit off. Factory farming of animals is older than people think and it exists because lots of people want to eat lots of animal products and that is the only way to cheaply supply them. The accusation is that corporate greed leads to factory farming. A glib rebuttal could be that greed leads to eating animals when there are viable alternatives and that leads to factory farming.

EB – “The issue is the system through which most of the animals we eat are supplied.”

A system that is there to meet demand. It’s not there in a vacuum. So long as meat is promoted, either by small or large scale entities, the demand won’t decrease nearly enough as it should. Does consuming less animal products solve all our problems? No. But it is a very large problem and the solution is “easier” — it’s a social problem, “easier” in a relative sense — to implement than retrofitting our civilization into some sort of primitivism hybrid. That’s a massive social and infrastructure problem; one that is unfeasible.

On the Butcher Blog’s Butcher Block?: Yep, James McWilliams

 

More angry butchers. This one said I have “vegan tourettes,” called me a “mendacious manipulator” (nothing more dangerous than a butcher with a thesaurus), and refused (as is usual) to engage the central argument I made in the Atlantic piece.  

(Oh, by the way, I have a student in one of my classes this semester with actual tourettes. For this reason and others, I find the author’s insulting use of the term to be offensive at best.)

Anyway, here we go again:

 

The Context of No Context: What The Ethical Butcher and a Historian With Vegan Tourettes Have In Common

We promise not to call James McWilliams a mendacious manipulator. He is, of course, but as is his fashion, we will drop that “fact” casually and then tell you that, no, dear reader, we won’t bring it up, because that is a subject for another discussion.

If you haven’t read his convoluted and wholly misguided essay in The Atlantic, “Meat: What Big Agriculture and the Ethical Butcher Have in Common,” take a moment to try to make sense of it.

McWilliams tips his hand by telling you what he won’t talk about, when he introduces The Ethical Butcher: “The Ethical Butcher (a concept I find absurd, but that’s for another post), is a blog run by a guy named Berlin Reed,” he writes.

The best explanation we can come up with is that Mr. McWilliams seems to have vegan Tourettes.

Now, Mr. McWilliams starts his muddled Atlantic essay with the premise that “supporting alternatives to the industrial production of animal products serves the ultimate interest of industrial producers.” And how does he support this thesis? Well, because eating meat is ethically wrong in his worldview. Also, consuming milk, eggs and dairy is wrong.

And, according to McWilliams, those who consume animal products are “providing, however implicitly, an endorsement of the products that big agriculture will always be able to produce more efficiently and cheaply.” Ok, fair enough. But, if they are doing so — providing an “endorsement” of animal products, whatever that means — while loudly proclaiming the problems with Big Ag and factory farming, how is it they are supporting it? By eating meat. And that’s basically where his argument begins and ends.

Then he brings poor Berlin Reed into his argument, muddying The Ethical Butcher by claiming Reed’s message has been appropriated by The CCF (The Center for Consumer Freedom) — widely regarded as an advocacy group backed by, or at least founded by, restaurant, alcohol and tobacco industry lobbyists. McWilliams writes:

But now it’s the CCF — inspired by the ethical butcher’s staunch advocacy of meat consumption — that’s doing the calling, highlighting his website as consistent with CCF’s industrial values.

Go ahead click on the link he embedded there (we have no idea what he means by “That’s doing the calling,” by the way). It’s a blogroll.

On The CCF website there is nothing but a bunch of libertarian jargon about individual responsibility, and seemingly no appropriated language supporting sustainable farming (though if by appropriation you mean emulation, we could handle that). How does McWilliams equate the CCF’s listing of The Ethical Butcher on its blogroll with an appropriation of Berlin Reed’s message?

Just for kicks and because McWilliams didn’t, we called the CCF to ask them why they put The Ethical Butcher on the blogroll for Humanewatch. Justin Wilson, the research director and spokesman laughed, and said for the same reasons anyone anywhere does it: because it was something they saw and thought was interesting. There’s no implicit endorsement in either direction (but then, we’ve seen that McWilliams has an odd definition of endorsement), and the only time the CCF has mentioned The Ethical Butcher other than the blogroll listing is a brief mention when the blog launched in 2009. Wilson says he’s never had any contact with Reed. He did point out, though, that “We’ve cited McWilliams more than we’ve ever cited The Ethical Butcher.”

And herein likely lies the root of McWilliams anger. In fact, the CCF frequently cites McWilliams’ misguided arguments against locavorism and organics in support of its own equally misguided arguments. McWilliams is an associate professor of history at Texas State University, San Marcos and the author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, a tome from which The CCF seems to love to quote. The fact that his own words could be used so often to support an organization that is the antithesis of his vegan wonderland surely raised his ire. So apparently, he tried (badly) to do it to someone else, smearing Berlin Reed because the loathsome CCF had included his blog in its blogroll.

The only thing The Ethical Butcher and the CCF have in common, as the title of McWilliam’s essay proclaims, is “meat.” So is that enough to say one supports the other without citing anything more than a blogroll listing?

But where is the danger? Well, McWilliams has a theory.

He writes, “Right now industry is merely stealing words, concepts, and websites,” though he provides no evidence of any of this aside from the aforementioned blogroll listing, which of course is none of these things. But if the work of organizations such as The Butcher’s Guild, Cochon 555 and The Slow Foods USA has its desired affect and consumers do move toward locally grown and sustainable sources of meats, well, that is what terrifies McWilliams. Why? Because, in his words “what’s to stop industrial agriculture from building a few token sustainable farms where the animals are pastured, pampered, and publicized?”

So that is his big fear. That agribusiness adopt the methods of sustainable farms in a superficial way. His proof is that Big Agg will hollowly appropriate a well-intentioned message is the fact that The CCF, a fringe organization perhaps backed by restaurant industry money, put The Ethical Butcher on its blogroll.

Putting aside his cynicism about whether meaningful systemic change to our food supply is possible, the disaster, in his eyes, would be if people had more choices of sustainably raised meat.

Why? Because people would still be eating meat.

His logic is hard to argue with, but that’s for another post.

Next Up on the Ethical Butcher’s Block: James McWilliams

Hellfire if I don’t have a knack for angering butchers. Fortunately, they come at me with words (thus far). What follows is an open letter from Berlin Reed. As I reported in a recent Atlantic.com post (and reposted yesterday on Eating Plants) Reed’s blog, the Ethical Butcher, was recently co-opted by a propaganda wing of industrial agriculture. My reason for mentioning Reed was to show how big agriculture shamelessly co-opts those who purport to threaten it, doing so on the common ground of the basic belief that it’s okay to kill animals unnecessarily. Reed, who certainly deserves to have his viewpoint heard, has this to say: 

Mr. McWilliams, we’ve never met. We’ve never spoken to one another. I only wish you had sought to remedy that situation before writing a treatise on meat consumption using me as an example. I was flabbergasted by the inaccuracies in your article in the Atlantic,but your biggest mistake in writing “What Big Ag and the Ethical Butcher Share” was deciding to build your stance against me based on little more than two lines from my blog bio. I’ve been hanging under the radar, head down on a few new projects and preparing to write my first book, which you have gracefully gifted me an opportunity to mention. Why not attempt to stand on the fortitude of your ideas alone? Or, at the very least interview me so that you could write about me from a more informed perspective. With minimal effort, you could have found a more recent portrayal of my ethos at work,in this interview, which was released the same day as yours, by a writer who did the legwork you blithely bypassed in your fervor to assert your self-righteousness while disproving my methodology.

I pity the limited scope with which you seem to view the world. To begin, your article was a disrespectful disgrace to this nation’s farmers and to the many people working tirelessly to change the meat industry. I would have explained the meaning of “The Ethical Butcher”, had you called me for even a short interview. Since you didn’t, I’ll have to take a step back to explain. First, “The Ethical Butcher” is the title of my project, not a self-assigned moniker. Second, butchery is a craft, a skill. Ethics are philosophy in action. Butchery is what occurs at the block, knives in hand. It is still butchery whether I get the animal from a sunny green pasture or a dismal feedlot. Nothing I can do will make the physical act of butchering itself more or less ethical. The ethics come in on either side of the block. The ethics guide how to choose the animal, how to make use of it and how to relate to consumers in representing the meat, farms and farmers. Not so absurd, after all.

In my opinion, the single most critical element in the perpetuation of factory farming is corporate greed. We must focus on the whole picture: our entire food system. This includes the USDA, the FDA, and in this conversation, the entire agricultural system- livestock, corn, soy, wheat, monocrops, GMO’s, the whole nine. The outdated obsession with meat as the crux of the problem is unnecessarily narrow-minded and closes us off to the advantage of seeing the complex web we are struggling to free ourselves from.

I have never, ever argued against being vegetarian or vegan. I argue against shaming and demonizing something so monumentally personal as food choice. I argue against dogma, against the moral superiority complex that plagues so many herbivores, and against the unrealistic and elitist goal of worldwide vegan fascism. The world is waiting for a better solution. Going vegan doesn’t answer the bigger issues of a fossil-fuel propelled world economy based on the abuse of humans, the destruction of the environment and the unchecked rapacity of a few hundred people. Going vegan doesn’t stop Monsanto from poisoning the earth and our bodies or threatening the very choice to grow food for ourselves. Going vegan doesn’t improve the labor camp living conditions of migrant workers who supply your precious veggies. Going vegan doesn’t preserve generations of time-honored traditions and it doesn’t help us return to a more sustainable and enriching way of interacting with the earth. Most of all, going vegan does not absolve you from participation in the suffering of living beings or environmental destruction.

It is not the eating of animals at issue; that is a reactionary and short-sighted distraction. The issue is the system through which most of the animals we eat are supplied. As this system is tied to a larger system of irresponsible and abusive agriculture, it is absolutely necessary that we seek a solution to the entire problem. I have always said, in every interview and in my own work, that curbing meat consumption goes hand-in-hand with humane treatment of animals and responsible farming methods. I don’t eat very much meat and one look at my latest menu(http://ethicalbutcher.blogspot.com/ ) will dispel your claims that I encourage wanton meat consumption. It will show menus that teem with fresh, seasonal vegetables in all preparations. The photos will display plates with reasonable, some may even say small, portions of meat.

I can actually still count the number of animals I’ve served over the past two years, a feat only possible because of the infrequency and purposeful nature with which I approach the use of meat. I abstain from soy at all costs and I don’t eat any seafood other than shellfish and a very, very short list of truly sustainable fish. As for the CCF connection, the fact that a website lists my blog as recommended reading does not align my philosophy with theirs. Welcome to the 21st century, we call it a blogroll. That list includes many publications dedicated to the subject of meat, animals and farming. Just as you wrote about me without contacting me, those sites are free to do the same. I am in no way connected to CCF, Humanewatch, Meatpaper or any other organization outside of The Butcher’s Guild.

For a long time now, my focus has been on consumer education and demystifying the green-washed marketing that both the government and food industry use to their advantage. The most effective tool for fighting this tactic is information. I will never assume to know what others should do; I find that to be a dangerous mindset. I can only share knowledge and remind people that they can make their own decisions. I rarely get into the ethics behind the actual choice of whether or not to eat meat, and I won’t be baited do it here either. I am in full support of everyone having the ability to make the very personal decision of what to feed themselves and their families. I am not interested in persuading people eat meat or abstain from it. I am interested in where ALL of their food, but especially their meat, comes from. I am invested in helping people to understand how these companies misrepresent their practices and in challenging consumers to make their own choices.

Our responsibility to be vigilantly engaged with the dismantling of the status quo doesn’t end with what is on our plates. We must all continue to vote with our forks, with our legs, with our wardrobes and with the power of our words. Every single day, we make choices about the world we want to live in. I will continue to fight for a world where I can trust where my food comes from and encourage others to do the same. As I funnel the momentum of the EB projects into my book, I am likewise finding a new outlet for an expanded vision of my practice. I have just co-founded 718 Collective, a band of fellow activist chefs, musicians and artists hell-bent on food justice for all. I am thrilled at the potential we have for reaching even more people in the community through the meshing of food, art, politics, music and fashion.

I am fairly certain many of your readers had never heard of me before you named me in your article. Thanks for the mention and this fortuitous occasion to shift from underground grassroots activism to representing a movement on the national stage. It was no coincidence that your article should come out the very day the contract for my upcoming book from Soft Skull Press,The Ethical Butcher: Real Food Rules, arrived on my doorstep. Such a tasty little platter of publicity…I could not have dreamed of a better way to announce the Spring 2013 hardcover release of my book.

Now that we’ve cleared up a few of your misrepresentations, I invite you to prepare your notes, and come at me again.

The Animal’s Almanac: On Hunting

The Animal’s Almanac is a new feature of my blog, one in which I will draw on the past to shed light on the current relationship among people, animals, and food. 

In 1782, Hector St. John Crevecoeur published Letters from an American Farmer. In it, he surveyed life in British North America, commenting on everything from the behavior of Native Americans to the danger of the rattlesnake (“the only observation I wish to make is that the rattling is loud and distinct when they are angry.”) His thoughts on hunting are especially revealing.

We tend to mythologize the American frontier as a land of rough hewn Davy Crocketts, a land where a man lived by his gun and the game it provided. This nineteenth-century image is, however, belied by an eighteenth-century reality: British Americans, according to Crevecoeur, believed hunting to be a sign of degeneracy.

“Our bad people,” he wrote, referring to his fellow settlers, “are those who are half cultivators and half hunters.” He added, “and the worst of them are those who have degenerated altogether into the hunting state.” The idea that “hunting is but a licentious idle life” was widely shared in colonial America, a sign that settlers were failing to domesticate land and animals and, in so doing, becoming “savage” like the Indians.

Animal domestication–as I will show in the next almanac–led to a fundamentally different kind of relationship with animals than did hunting. Basically, farmers got to know animals as beings with distinct wants and needs. Hunting, by contrast, reduced an animal to a moving target (at least for the English settlers). Americans have done a much better job of inflating and glorifying the importance of hunting in American history than exploring the nature of the human-animal relationship in the context of domestication.

The “Ethical Butcher”: Co-opted by the Unethical Food Industry

 

This piece ran on the Atlanic’s website two days ago. Here’s the link:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/meat-what-big-agriculture-and-the-ethical-butcher-have-in-common/252679/] 

Check out the comments. Crazy.

-jm

 

I’ve repeatedly argued that supporting alternatives to the industrial production of animal products serves the ultimate interest of industrial producers. The decision to eat animal products sourced from small, local, and sustainable farms might seem like a fundamental rejection of big business as usual. It is, however, an implicit but powerful confirmation of the single most critical behavior necessary to the perpetuation of factory farming: eating animals. So long as consumers continue to eat meat, eggs, and dairy — even if they are sourced from small farms practicing the highest welfare and safety standards — they’re providing, however implicitly, an endorsement of the products that big agriculture will always be able to produce more efficiently and cheaply. And thus dominate.

Until the act of eating animals itself is made problematic, “voting with our forks” will be little more than a vacuous slogan. Critics claim that it’s unrealistic to expect a substantial transition to veganism, and advocate the support of small-scale animal farms as a more achievable alternative. What’s truly unrealistic, however, is the expectation that small, more eco-friendly and “humane” farms will permanently defy economic logic and convince a meaningful percentage of meat and dairy eaters to spend substantially more money to buy a nobler egg or pork chop. I’d bet on a massive transition to veganism before a massive transition to economic irrationality.

A point that’s germane to this issue, but frequently muted, is how the preexisting power and amorality of industrial animal agriculture enables it to manipulate the rhetoric of alternative animal-based systems to its profitable advantage. Agribusiness has been conspicuously nonplussed by the rise of the food movement, shrugging its shoulders as it markets itself as “sustainable,” “supporting family farms,” and steadfastly oriented toward the “welfare” of animals. Industry grasps, then thrills in manipulating, the axiom that language is both cheap and powerful. Industrial machinations are helped along by the fact that the food movement’s buzzwords are slackened catchphrases that allow the largest pig farm on the planet to advertise itself as “humane” and “sustainable.” This fungible verbal lexicon, with every well-meaning new term appropriated by the marketers at Big Ag, is the food movement’s Achilles’ heel.

A recent confirmation of this point is the emergence of an organization called humanewatch.org. Contrary to how it sounds, HumaneWatch is the self-appointed watchdog — think Cujo – of a group that actually does watch out for dogs, and many other animals, with admirable dedication: the Humane Society of the United States. Calling HSUS a “stealth animal rights organization” that’s stealing money from the public to promote secret agendas, humanewatch.com is a propaganda tool of the Center for Consumer Freedom. According to Source Watch, CCF is “a front group for the restaurant, alcohol, tobacco, and other industries” that “run media campaigns which oppose the efforts of scientists, health advocates, doctors, animal advocates, [and] environmentalists.” Its website offers a sordid example of how the pursuit of sustainable animal agriculture, so long as the consumption of animal products is encouraged, easily plays into the hands of influential industrial interests.

CCF — through humanewatch.org — claims as one its “allies” the “Ethical Butcher.” The Ethical Butcher (a concept I find absurd, but that’s for another post), is a blog run by a guy named Berlin Reed. Reed describes himself as “driven by personal relationships with small local farmers, a deep love of food, respect for the animals we eat, and the environment on which we depend.” He lives in Brooklyn, by way of Portland. If you called central casting to find a character to oppose the evils of industrial agriculture, all the while appealing to the gluttonous impulses of the foodie elite, Reed would be your man.

But now it’s the CCF — inspired by the ethical butcher’s staunch advocacy of meat consumption — that’s doing the calling, highlighting his website as consistent with CCF’s industrial values. Reed, who I would imagine isn’t thrilled with the CFF association, can complain all he wants that he’s been appropriated by a charade organization working to promote the idea that, in the face of the HSUS’s apparent threat to carnivorousness, it’s your God-given right to eat animals. The meat industry doesn’t care. As it sees it, any perceived threat to eating animals (HSUS) far outweighs any threat that consumers will source their animal products from the farms so close to Reed’s heart (and butcher block). Hence the co-opting of the Ethical Butcher.

I realize that this example might seem minor. Think ahead on this one, though, and you’ll see how things portend poorly for the future of alternative animal agriculture. Right now industry is merely stealing words, concepts, and websites. In the unlikely event that mass economic irrationality prevails, and there is in fact a statistically meaningful transition to supporting the non-industrial production of animal products, what’s to stop industrial agriculture from building a few token sustainable farms where the animals are pastured, pampered, and publicized? Most of the small-scale animal farmers I know are literally living hand to mouth. Tyson’s or Smithfield wouldn’t suffer such hardships.

We’ll never beat Big Ag at its own game. Those of us concerned with the myriad problems of industrial agriculture will make genuine progress toward creating agricultural systems that are ethical, ecologically sound, and supportive of human health only when we pursue alternatives that are truly alternative. The most immediate and direct way to take a step in this direction is to stop eating animals.