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Shit became a problem only when Americans decided we wanted to eat more meat than any other culture in history and pay historically little for it.
For corporations like Smithfield, it is a cost-benefit analysis: paying fines for polluting is cheaper than giving up the entire factory farm system, which is what it would take to finally end the devastation.
One violation might be an accident. Even ten violations might. Seven thousand violations is a plan.
In the world of factory farming, expectations are turned upside down. Veterinarians don’t work toward optimal health, but optimal profitability. Drugs are not for curing diseases, but substitutes for destroyed immune systems. Farmers do not aim to produce healthy animals.
Although one can realistically expect that at least some percentage of cows and pigs are slaughtered with speed and care, no fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.
Remembering and forgetting are part of the same mental process. To write down one detail of an event is to not write down another (unless you keep writing forever).
A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat.
Every farm, like every everything, has flaws, is subject to accidents, sometimes doesn’t work as it should.
Farming is shaped not only by food choices, but by political ones. Choosing a personal diet is insufficient.
The idea that humans are a part of nature is also important here. I’ve always looked to natural systems for models. Nature is so economical. Even if an animal isn’t hunted, it is consumed soon after its death. Animals are invariably devoured by other animals in nature, whether by predators or scavengers.
I used to think that being a vegetarian exempted me from spending time trying to change how farm animals are treated. I felt that by abstaining from meat eating, I was doing my part. That seems silly to me now.
Factory farming wasn’t born or advanced out of a need to produce more food — to “feed the hungry” — but to produce it in a way that is profitable for agribusiness companies. Factory farming is all about money.
The UN special envoy on food called it a “crime against humanity” to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn’t even include the fact that 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop is also fed to farmed animals.
In earlier times, Americans were closely connected to the ways and places their food was produced. This connectedness and familiarity assured that food production was happening in a way that matched the values of our citizens. But farming’s industrialization broke this link and launched us into the modern era of disconnectedness.
The loss of not only local hatcheries, but also slaughterhouses, weigh stations, grain storage, and other services farmers require is an immense barrier to the growth of husbandry-based ranching. It’s not that consumers won’t buy the animals such farmers raise; it’s that farmers can’t produce them without reinventing a now destroyed rural infrastructure.
Billions of dollars in government funds marked for agriculture; state agricultural policies that shape the landscape, air, and water of our country; and foreign policies that affect global issues from starvation to climate change are, in our democracy, executed in the name of our farmers and the values that guide them. Except they’re not exactly farmers anymore; they’re corporations.
The meat industry has tried to paint people who take this twofold stance as absolutist vegetarians hiding a radicalized agenda. But ranchers can be vegetarians, vegans can build slaughterhouses, and I can be a vegetarian who supports the best of animal agriculture.
The farmer must somehow raise an animal as a commercial endeavor without regarding the animal as a mere commodity.
My uncle, my mother’s younger brother, was the first person on that side of the family to be born on this side of the Atlantic. My aunt can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower. That unlikely pairing of histories was no small part of what made those Thanksgivings so special, and memorable, and, in the very best sense of the word, American.
Two floors beneath us, Maverick salivated at the stove’s window, my father talked politics and cholesterol, the Detroit Lions played their hearts out on an unwatched TV, and my grandmother, surrounded by her family, thought in the language of her dead relatives.
Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful. But Thanksgiving is freed from any particular thing we are thankful for. We aren’t celebrating the Pilgrims, but what the Pilgrims celebrated. (The Pilgrims weren’t even a feature of the holiday until the late nineteenth century.) Thanksgiving is an American holiday, but there’s nothing specifically American about it — we aren’t celebrating America, but American ideals. Its openness makes it available to
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Thanksgiving is the meal we aspire for other meals to resemble. Of course most of us can’t (and wouldn’t want to) cook all day every day, and of course such food would be fatal if consumed with regularity, and how many of us really want to be surrounded by our extended families every single night? (It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.) But it’s nice to imagine all meals being so deliberate. Of the thousand-or-so meals we eat every year, Thanksgiving dinner is the one that we try most earnestly to get right.
I live in New York now and only rarely — at least according to my grandmother — get back to DC.
No one who was young is young anymore.
WE SHOULDN’T KID OURSELVES ABOUT the number of ethical eating options available to most of us. There isn’t enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the country. Ethical meat is a promissory note, not a reality. Any ethical-meat advocate who is serious is going to be eating a lot of vegetarian fare.
Any plan that involves funneling money to the factory farm won’t end factory farming. How effective would the Montgomery bus boycott have been if the protesters had used the bus when it became inconvenient not to? How effective would a strike be if workers announced they would go back to work as soon as it became difficult to strike?
NEXT TIME YOU SIT DOWN for a meal, imagine that there are nine other people sitting with you at the table, and that together you represent all the people on the planet. Organized by nations, two of your tablemates are Chinese, two Indian, and a fifth represents all the other countries in Northeast, South, and Central Asia. A sixth represents the nations of Southeast Asia and Oceana. A seventh represents sub-Saharan Africa, and an eighth represents the remainder of Africa and the Middle East. A ninth represents Europe. The remaining seat, representing the countries of South, Central, and North
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I’ve restricted myself to mostly discussing how our food choices affect the ecology of our planet and the lives of its animals, but I could have just as easily made the entire book about public health, workers’ rights, decaying rural communities, or global poverty — all of which are profoundly affected by factory farming.
The federal government first thought to promote Thanksgiving as a day of fasting, since that was how it had been frequently observed for decades. According to Benjamin Franklin, whom I think of as a kind of patron saint of the holiday, it was “a farmer of plain sense” who proposed that feasting “would be more becoming the gratitude.”
Producing and eating our own food is, historically, much of what made us Americans and not subjects of European powers. While other colonies required massive imports to survive, early American immigrants, thanks to help from Native Americans, were almost entirely self-sustaining.
It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive and what’s sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be illegal. We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.
Historians tell a story about Abraham Lincoln, that while returning to Washington from Springfield, he forced his entire party to stop to help some small birds he saw in distress. When chided by the others, he responded, quite plainly, “I could not have slept to-night if I had left those poor creatures on the ground and not restored them to their mother.” He did not make (though he might have) a case for the moral value of the birds, their worth to themselves or the ecosystem or God. Instead he observed, quite simply, that once those suffering birds came into his view, a moral burden had been
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