Farm to Fable: The Fictions of Our Animal-Consuming Culture

by Robert Grillo, Carol J. Adams (Forword)

Why do the vast majority of us continue to consume animals when we could choose otherwise? What are the cultural forces that drive our food choices? These are the fundamental questions Farm to Fable seeks to answer in two ways: by asserting that our beliefs about eating animals remain largely unexamined and therefore unchallenged, and by demonstrating how the fictions of popular culture continually reinforce these beliefs and behaviors. Farm to Fable deconstructs these fictions for those who truly want to know not only where our food comes from, but also why we make the choices that we do. For seasoned animal advocates as well, this book will provide important insights.

Genres: Nonfiction, Vegan

200 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2016

Reviews

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the best books on animal advocacy are not those written by the well-known heads of big-name organizations, but the smaller ones that fly under the radar without so much fanfare. FARM TO FABLE is an intelligently written, thought-provoking book that will inspire good discussions for many years to come.

FARM TO FABLE doesn’t spend its time describing factory farming or telling activists how to get a foot in the door with the omni world. Instead, it examines the fictions both industry and consumer erect in tandem to keep the machine running. Understanding why people believe as they do is the first step toward reaching them with a message of change.

I liked and appreciated that Grillo used examples from popular culture, including books, TV, movies, and advertising, in explaining how certain imagery weaves its way into popular thought. “[M]ost of us have assimilated [arguments for eating meat] into our consciousness and spout them back out to others, as if they were fact, and with little or no critical evaluation,” the author observes.

Some of this imagery that will be instantly (and frustratingly) familiar to animal advocates will be that of “Old McDonald’s Farm.” In the rare instances when animals are actually shown in ads for animal products, there will be lush green pastures and little red barns and the animals will probably be “talking,” thanks to CGI, about how thrilled they are. “Happy cows come from California,” even though California has some of the most massive dairy factory feedlots in the nation. Grillo references a ridiculous CGI-enhanced ad in which a chicken primps in front of a mirror, happy to be raised for Perdue:

[N]o one ever seems to have a problem when a major food brand like Perdue uses in its advertising to mislead us into believing that its chickens are actually pampered. It just so happens to be right in line with what we want to hear, see, and believe…But then as soon as some dissenting view surfaces that challenges our massive system of animal exploitation, we are quick to level accusations of anthropomorphism for attributing human traits to other animals.

Invisibility also works tremendously in the meat industry’s favor. It’s easy to denigrate an animal who you may have only seen, at best, through the ventilation slats of a slaughterhouse truck speeding down the highway. Grillo presents us with this sobering thought: “Consider the fact that at any given time, there are approximately thirty-two farmed animals being raised for every American. … But how many of these animals have you seen?”

At the same time, he doesn’t let the public off the hook so easily, thankfully. Most people in the industrialized nations now have the world literally at their fingertips; anyone who wants to learn about how animal foods get to the table can do so instantaneously. In fact, it takes a conscious effort not to.

At the same time, the truth about farmed animals is more visible and accessible than ever before. Anyone can quickly and easily access undercover footage inside animal farms and slaughterhouses on the internet. The fact that so many still insulate themselves in an “I don’t want to know” state of self-deception seems to suggest that the fictional power of invisibility is to some extent bidirectional…we tell the food industry what we believe and what to see and hear, and the industry projects that back to us through clever branding executions. … researchers conclude that “the cooperation between producers and consumers to maintain the idea of Old McDonald’s farm, despite clear evidence to the contrary, is…one of the most important challenges of animal welfare.”

Grillo injects some dark humor into his book when he writes of a visit to Indiana’s Pig Adventure, a breeding and confinement operation that breaks with the storybook-farm imagery and instead seeks to paint a happy face on modern, industrial farming. The attraction exists, according to its website, to “demonstrate that pork production is morally right, a noble profession and a service to humanity.” “monetarily rife, a nauseating profession and a service to the nation’s cardiac surgeons and statin drug manufacturers.” Fixed it for you! :D

Another argument that animal advocates hear constantly is that consuming animals is “natural.” After all, cavemen ate animals, and lions eat other animals, and we all base our everyday lives and morality on what was/is done by Cro-Magnons and enormous felines, right?

“Ironically, the process of breeding, raising, and killing animals today is about as unreal and artificial as it gets. What is authentic about the experience of picking food products off of the store shelf?,” the author writes, and then blindsides us with this devastating critique:

-[T]he fact remains that if animals matter to us, even only marginally, then we don’t violate their most basic right to life and liberty when we can easily avoid it. If we believe that part of what makes us uniquely human is our moral compass, then perhaps what is natural for us to eat is what causes us the least remorse.

The recent exposes and controversy over factory farming, the industrialized method by which well over 90% of all animal products are produced, has driven the market for so-called “happy meat” amongst more affluent consumers. “Happy meat” is a catch-all term for the various “free-range,” “grass-fed,” “local,” and all of the other labels with wildly varying (and sometimes meaningless) standards found on more costly animal foods, and Grillo doesn’t back away from critiquing this facet of the industry and its champions, either.

Happy meat, the author states, relies on a “depraved standard of treatment we call ‘humane,’ which, if applied to our cats and dogs, would be considered torture and even sadism.” Which is inarguably true. If you took your dog to the vet to be neutered, and the vet explained that he was going to hold your struggling dog down with a knee to the neck and cut him open with a pocketknife, using absolutely no painkillers—let alone anesthesia—would you leave your dog with that vet? Why not? That’s standard industry care for calves and piglets, even on your local back-to-the land boutique farm.

With “happy meat” purveyors, the phrase you’ll see a lot is “one bad day.” As in, their animals have only “one bad day”—the day they are killed in adolescence so people can eat them. Well, as we see above, all production animals have far more than one bad day, what with things like surgical procedures without pain relief, artificial insemination, and the separation of mothers from babies. That said, even if these things did not exist—is this the “bad day” we would wish for our pets, our loved ones, ourselves? If you heard that someone had taken a cat, hung her upside-down and slashed her throat, would you shrug it off as “oh well, she had one bad day.”

The happy meat movement has its celebrity faces, among them writers Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver. There are plenty of people who read Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” and Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” yet refuse to read “Eating Animals” or “Bleating Hearts” or any of the other zillions of books which question what we do to the animals unlucky enough to be called “food.” It’s not that the readers of the former books are poor shrinking violets who can’t handle learning where meat comes from; animal slaughter is discussed and described in these books just as it is in the vegan-oriented materials. The difference is that the former tell omnis what they want to hear—and the latter decidedly do not.

Even the “happy meat” adherents, in their various books and articles, put down and insult the animals they kill. Pollan and Kingsolver have both described the animals they raise for killing as stupid and nasty.

With sustainable, “food revolution” types like Pollan talking trash about animals and devaluing them in exactly the same way as agribusiness, is it any wonder that chickens are treated as trash? … Don’t we ourselves become “stupid and nasty” when we decide, arbitrarily, that someone else deserves to be abused and exploited because we don’t like them?

Grillo notes that “beginning in the 1960s, research has shown that if we feel powerless to alleviate an injustice, we have a tendency to convince ourselves that the victims deserve their fate.” When even “humane meat” champions put down farm animals, is it any wonder that even most readers of these bestselling authors continue to consume factory farmed products with no such “humane” pretentions?

Happy meat purveyors are also big on what is called “snout to tail” eating, meaning that they advocate eating parts of animals not normally consumed in Western culture, to eliminate “waste.” Grillo writes,

If it were truly an issue of wasting, we’d do well to consider the enormous waste of precious resources, like water and land, that raising animals requires. Or how about the fact that about half of the world’s edible grain crop is fed to farmed animals instead of the nearly one billion hungry?

I’d like to add that “snout to tail” usage isn’t anything new or different. It’s the standard across the industry, from the biggest slaughter conglomerates to the most affluent niche butcher shop. Unwanted or less-appealing body parts get used in the factory-farming industry too—whether they’re exported to other countries, rendered for tallow and gelatin, or ground up for low-grade processed meat products or dog food.

And before someone inevitably says that animal kindness is a “first world problem” and we need to stop worrying about pigs and chickens in our ugly world of hatred and violence against human beings…

The first-world critique is often coupled with the false dilemma that human interests compete with other animals, when in fact the 99 percent of animals we harm are those we eat for reasons of pleasure, not out of necessity or competition to protect important human interests. In short, they don’t need us to tear ourselves away from solving our own human problems to help them. No, they just need us to leave them alone and stop buying [their products], which will result in them no longer being bred in the first place. Problem solved for the 99 percent.

And now we go from the animals themselves to the people who have taken up the mantle of speaking for those animals. To the animal products industry, we’re a looming threat. Grillo hilariously quotes a factory farming lobbying group’s website, which features a subsection titled “Agriculture is outnumbered, outfunded by animal activists.” If the meat industry’s “poor me” stance already doesn’t have you ROFL, I suggest taking a look at this chart: http://www.countinganimals.com/meat-i... , which compares the advertising budgets (just advertising, not political lobbying, infrastructure or anything else) of major players in the meat industry with the entire budgets of various animal welfare groups. It’s like Cheerios in an Olympic swimming pool.

Many veg*ns don’t want to be activists. Some refuse to criticize the meat industry, even abstractly, out of fear that they will be accused of judging omnis:

If we claim that others should not be judged for eating animal products, then we also make the judgement that an animal’s entire lifetime of experiences is worth even less than satisfying some trivial, momentary taste sensation.

And there’s certainly precedent for being afraid of such a reaction, as one of the most common insults lobbed at vegans is that they’re judgmental. But do other activists do so many gymnastics around their own convictions just to avoid offending somebody?

It is telling that human rights activists who campaign against violent and exploitative practices, such as sweatshop labor or sex trafficking, are rarely, if ever, criticized for pushing their beliefs on others.

Grillo muses,

[I]t would be hard to find advocates of other causes more concerned about what others think of them than animal advocates. Why do we care so much?

Yet the author answers that question for himself when he cites the almost overwhelmingly negative depiction of vegans and animal activists in popular culture, and the fact that putting down veganism, animal advocacy, and farmed animals themselves remains a perfectly acceptable thing for even the most progressive and well-respected people to do. It’s no wonder we worry; the movement itself is an unprecedented undertaking and so few people are at the moment participating in it; it makes sense that those who do want to be as effective as possible.

Finally, I’ll add the author’s thoughts on the popular imagery of plant-based eating as sooooo hard, a falsehood believed by both omnis and echoed in meat-reduction campaigns:

Misrepresenting veganism as something more remote and utopian than it actually is … rather than a simple act of reaching for one product over another on the store shelf…which has no more to do with purity or perfection than does the same rejection of human exploitation.

For those of us with the autonomy and resources to be able to choose what we eat and wear, difficulty is no excuse. Vegans shop in the same grocery stores that omnis do, and we eat in most of the same restaurants. Vegans have Ben & Jerry’s and Girl Scout cookies and Doritos and Taco Bell and every other damn thing. Instead of going to a veg-hostile fast food restaurant like Arby’s or McDonald’s, you may have to go ten feet down the strip mall to a veg-friendly one like Subway or Chipotle. Whoop-de-doo. You can get a faux leather coat just as easily as you can get a cow-skin one, and usually in the same store. What makes that such a hardship?

[T]he abundance of alternatives are already staring most of us in the face, wherever our eyes land on the supermarket shelf or on the menu in the restaurant or at the office cafeteria. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the growing market for animal-free products. Yet denial persists…Reaching for a different place on the store shelf does not require an act of moral purity, hardship, or even inconvenience…nor are plant-based alternative difficult to find for the vast majority of us. It’s not as if they can’t provide us with satisfaction in both taste and texture, as well as provide equal or better nutrition and easily substitute in our favorite recipes.

[Wendy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty much love this, except Grillo can't answer any better than any of us how do you open people's eyes up to the plight of nonhuman animals, particularly those used as food. Telling the truth? Well, yes, I can see how this is necessary in light of all the claims about the number of vegans rising, the number of animals being slaughtered for food decreasing - then youj check stats and see the second isn't true, and wonder how anyone knows the number of vegans is on the rise when the only way to count vegans is by self-definition, and too many people equate veganism as a diet. The enormous rise in human population altogether is rarely mentioned in the context of growing veganism. So yes, let us tell the truth, this is a hard battle for sure. But what form does truth-telling take, and what about the countless people who don't care about the truth?

Grillo's book is short but tightly packed with information, and sends the reader speeding along to a conclusion that he doezn't deliver on. It is a frustrating ending, and I am left with the feeling I've had for the past 22 years: how do we do this? How do we wake people up? Perhaps it's my error for wanting an easy answer to a situation that probably has as many answers as issues. I don't know. I would recommend this book. The section on new age religion and spirituality is especially, well, not eye-opening because I live in kne of those towns,but Grillo has a great ability to take the fictions of these things and distill them down to their human-centric, hypocritical, points of view. He tackles euphemisms like the word "meat," who is really the victim in the animal-farming industry, and evolutionof the human brain.

I really enjoyed this book and was happy to see someone take on HSUS and the concept of reducetarianism, and though there are a few places I think Grillo could have expanded his theories (i.e., "The hard part is changing not one's diet but the belifes that inform that diet," to which I would ask, which comes first? Did one person, milennia ago, eat an animal out of necessity, feel guilty, amd stary the belief process, or did the belief that animals are inferior allow humans to eat them?; and also the idea that it is not hard for most people to have access to tast, affordable vegan food- yeas, there are many places that is very do-able, but some places where it is cheaper to eat animals than vegetables, and I would have liked to see that fiction tackled.) But overall, I can happily recommend this book.

[Lauren Rev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book is good in that it describes the many fictions held by our society that cause us to rationalize the horrors we cause animals to go through on behalf of our palates. It explains how these fictions, often initiated by those who profit financially from the animal exploitation, have been institutionalized into every facet of our society including home, education, media and even the organizations working for justice for farm animals. The book was a bit disappointing in that after thoroughly dissecting the fictions and noting their complexities, the book only offered one technique to combat the injustice-to tell the truth.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent and succinct read exposing the plethora of fictional devices that industry, media and those who benefit from, and or participate in, animal exploitation employ to justify the erroneous status of farmed animals as consumable commodities.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

FINALLY! A book that delves into the fiction that so many of us are brought up with from the earliest age, about how animals are "supposed" to be used and exploited for human purposes, and even further, that the animals are willing participants. Robert Grillo is the founder of Free From Harm, an organization that focuses on educating people about the very things he discusses in this book. I get a lot of emails, but the messages from Grillo are ones I always make sure to open. His common sense reasoning and scientific backing always make for a good read - and now he's expanded all that knowledge into a must-read book. Grillo excels at taking commonly-held human beliefs and showing where they're false. He highlights the dichotomy of how we teach our children to respect animals, and then go home and feed them some of those same animals for dinner. I can't say enough good things about this book - it's sad to see how so many people are fooled into believing the myths, but this is not a depressing read. In fact, it's empowering. With the knowledge in this book, those who feel strongly about the exploitation of animals can rationally fight against the propaganda.
I almost didn't read this book; I expected it to be depressing. But I'm so glad I overcame that first impression to give it a chance. This should be required reading for all humans, but at the very least all humans who believe non-human animals deserve a chance to live.