Eating Animals, or: I'm Lazy and Morally Weak, or: Seriously, What's Wrong with Me (Us)?

I didn't blog yesterday.  In fact, I did exactly two things yesterday: watered the plants, and made dinner.  Well, there were other actions taken, of course: the making of tea, texting, microwaving lunch.  But basically nothing.  I did start Dostoevsky's The Idiot, which frankly gave me a little existential crisis, because about half of the first 60 pages is all about the inevitability of death.  I'm hoping a nascent wedding plot picks up soon, there.

What I avoided writing about yesterday was Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, which I finished on Sunday night.  It's a book that's chiefly about the abuses of factory farming.  Foer is in large part concerned with the ethics of how the vast, vast majority of animals are confined and slaughtered, though he also discusses the truly disgusting practices of modern agribusiness in terms of its consequences on human health (the nullification of antibiotics, the release into the environment of literally billions of metric tons of animal feces, etc.).  Did you know that the USDA is perfectly cool with the poultry industry standard that 11% of the factory farmed "chicken" you buy is actually a slurry of fecal- and disease-infested waste water that the chicken absorbs in the vat cooling process?  ELEVEN PERCENT.  That is motherfucking disgusting. Buy air chilled chicken people -- if you take nothing else from today's blog, buy air chilled chicken.

As horrifying as eating that is, of course, it's nothing like what the animals suffer, which was already known to me.  Most of what Foer reports is familiar to me, because I've spent many years worrying over the ethics of food, particularly in regards to animal welfare.  Foer, though, is not primarily a journalist -- though he spent three years researching this book -- and as a novelist, his descriptions of the processes by which we obtain meat are perhaps particularly ... affective.  I literally got sick to my stomach reading about how cows are often not killed at the start of the assembly line that dismantles them, and so will be conscious and screaming as they are skinned, as their legs are cut off, and as their stomachs are split and their ribs pulled apart.  This is not some rare abuse or exception -- it is normal and usual.  Chickens living out their entire lives in a space the size of a piece of paper -- never turning, never flapping, never standing -- sandwiched into cages into the wire mesh floors of which their feet literally grow, crushed on either side by other chickens with equally little space, while the waste of chickens stacked above rains down upon them.  They are often -- often -- also not killed at the front of the assembly line, and so are frequently scalded alive.  Perhaps worst is the pigs, because pigs are notoriously intelligent. Their suffering is intense and horrifying.

It's possible that you just don't care at all about how animals are treated, but I doubt that.  Most people, I think, would agree that even if you intend to eat an animal -- and after a lot of consideration on the subject, I've decided, for myself, that there's nothing immoral about killing and eating an animal per se -- it is morally objectionable to torture it first.  Think of the way people dote on their pets.  Think of the outcry when a notorious animal abuser is caught and put on the local news.  Granted those abusers exist, and I've known some people who would honestly remain unmoved to see an animal abused to death in front of them -- I grew up in one of America's fucked up small towns, after all.  Crystal meth is a hell of a drug.  But I think in general, we can all agree that even food animals deserve to be treated humanely.  I mean, I swear before God and everyone reading this that if I came into my house to find an intruder threatening one of my kitty cats with real harm, if I had the power to do so, I would kill that son of a bitch and never, never regret it.  So, you know, I know that I, at least, can get pretty intense about animals.

Look, my purpose here is not to exhort you to go vegetarian.  It's more that I keep wondering why I'm NOT a vegetarian.  I was a pescetarian -- I ate fish but not meat -- for four years, and often times that amounted to eating vegetarian, because fish is expensive and a pain in the ass to cook, and frankly, I only really like fish when it's in its sushi form, or if it's shellfish (crabs, shrimp, clams, mussels, etc.).  A fish fillet has never excited me.  My point is that I have known about the abuses of the factory farming industry for many years, and yet I, who would kill a human to protect my pet cats, who harbor the deepest hope that the lowest circles of hell are reserved for the people who abused my rescue cat Floyd, or Friend Katie's rescued dog, just keep eating shit like chicken wings.

Don't get me wrong, I make a half-hearted effort.  I only buy organic eggs, which according to the research I've done, means a marginally better existence for the layer hens.  ("Cage Free" or "All Natural" mean absolutely nothing -- you have to get the actual certified organic eggs, or eggs from a trusted local source.)  I always buy my chicken thighs from Whole Foods, because they are marked with this little sticker that says the thighs have an animal welfare rating of "2".  I gather this means that the chickens had an "enriched" environment, though it's hard to discover what this actually means.  I do know that factory farmed chicken -- which makes up 99.9% of poultry in the US (no, you didn't read that wrong) -- does not qualify even for a rating of 1, so I am comforted by that.  (Here's a piece on the system from the Chicago Tribune, and here is the system as described by the group who created it, a nonprofit called Global Animal Partnership.)

But here's the thing, yinz guys.  I don't just eat Whole Foods chicken thighs.  First, of course, there was the exchange from Monday's blog with the guy behind the counter at Parma.  It sounds like their prosciutto pigs might count for an OK animal welfare rating, but clearly, the sausage pigs wouldn't.  And clearly, if I'm out at Sidelines for chicken wings, they can't sell a dozen of them for $6.75 if the chickens have been treated well.  There's no honest way for me to say that it's morally acceptable to pay for and eat an animal that's been horrendously abused, and yet, boy, do I ever.  In general, I don't consider myself a bad person, but here we are.

You don't need meat to live, I assure you, and in fact, many studies have shown vegetarian diets to be healthier than omnivorous ones.  What Foer doesn't account for sufficiently in his book is the cultural weight of eating.  He takes stabs at describing how starting the new tradition of refraining from meat for ethical reasons could be just as rewarding as the old family traditions surrounding food, but frankly, that's horseshit, and I kind of think he knows it.  A lot of how we interact with friend and family, how we identify ourselves as part of a culture, is wrapped up in food.  I'm not saying that justifies anything, I'm just saying it's harder to give up some foods than he makes it sound, for a variety of reasons that aren't all about taste and satisfying one's oral fixations.  (Though it dismays me how easily my morality is put aside because bacon tastes good.)

Ted -- who is a kind-hearted man, and who is sympathetic to this ethical plight -- and I have thought of how we might array ourselves as ethical eaters.  Invest in a used chest freezer for the basement; purchase meat from regional farms that have good standards of care for their animals (there are a surprising number of such, if you're willing to make a day trip out of buying half a hog or a quarter of beef); refrain from eating meat when out, unless we're at the kind of classy joint where they can tell you where the meat came from (of which there are a good enough number in Pittsburgh, for sure).  It's easy to buy nicer eggs and kindly procured milk -- the cheese, though, the cheese is a problem.  Who the hell knows where fine cheeses come from, honestly?

But we never seem to put this plan into action.  I think one part of the problem is the effort involved: it's not just laziness, it's that living gently in the world is real work, and when you also have, you know, work to go to, plus the work of keeping a home, maintaining relationships, and etc., adding more work on top of that can be daunting.  And while just giving up animal products might be the "easiest" solution, I'm here to tell you that being a vegan sucks.  It sucks.  There is usually a vegetarian option on any given menu -- there is NEVER a vegan option, and making vegan shit at home is boring and laborious, unless all you do is eat processed patties, which are sort of gross since you just know those things are a chemical shit storm, and frankly, eating vegan all the time is deeply unsatisfying, I don't care what anyone has told you, and the two times in my life I've gone vegan (for Lent) I emerged unusually pale and tired and somewhat angry.

Another thing that makes me angry is the prevailing economic, cultural, and government conditions that make it this much work to eat reasonably ethically.  How in the hell much governmental corruption is required for the USDA to allow feces to be classified as a "commercial blemish" so poultry slaughterers are allowed to sell chickens whose intestines have been split open in the butchering process, coating them in disease-ridden shit?  How disconnected from the world and basic compassion are we as a society that almost every animal that is slaughtered in America is tortured first -- which was absolutely not the case as late as the middle of the 20th century, when factory farming began to supplant traditional animal husbandry?  How heinous is the late capitalist economy that no concern for animal, human, or environmental welfare (let me tell you what miles and miles of lagoons of pig shit do to a watershed sometime) is permitted to stand between the owners of production and their rich-ass shareholders and the last possible cent of profit?

I don't know.  I've lost the thread of where this blog is going, I think.  I'm a lazy, morally weak person who keeps eating meat even though I am well aware of the horrifying conditions that most of our meat-providing animals live and die in, as well as how absolutely disgusting it is to put these carcasses into my body -- ELEVEN PERCENT WASTE WATER, people.  Absolutely nothing excuses it; my mind just paves it over, the way it naturally does all death.  I'm not sure how other people handle this question.  Well, I know how Jonathan Safran Foer does -- he's a vegetarian.

My extremely delicious homemade green curry.  Maybe next time I'll leave out the chicken thighs?