Eating Animals Read online

  I ask Mario if the shocker always works properly.

  “We get them on the first shock I’d think about 80 percent of the time. We don’t want the animal to still have senses. We had one time where the equipment malfunctioned and kind of gave off a half charge. We really got to stay up on that stuff — test it before we slaughter. There’s going to be times when equipment fails. That’s why we have a bolt knocker as backup. Set it on their head, and it presses a piece of steel into their skull.”

  After getting stunned and hopefully rendered unconscious on the first, or at least the second, application of the stun gun, the pig is hung up by its feet and “stuck” — stabbed in the neck — and left to bleed out. The pig is then lowered into the scalder. It comes out looking a lot less piglike than when it went in — shinier, almost plastic — and is then lowered onto a table where two workers — one with a blowtorch, the other with a scraping device — get to removing any remaining hair.

  The pig is then hung up again, and someone — Mario’s son, today — cuts it lengthwise down the middle with a power saw. One expects — or I expected — to see the belly cut open and so on, but to see the face cut in half, the nose split down its middle, and the halves of the head peeled open like a book is shocking. I am also surprised that the person who removes the organs from the split-open pig does so not only by hand, but without gloves — he needs the traction and sensitivity of his bare fingers.

  It’s not just because I’m a city boy that I find this repulsive. Mario and his workers admitted to having difficulty with some of the more gory aspects of slaughter, and I heard that sentiment echoed wherever I could have frank conversations with slaughterhouse workers.

  The guts and organs are taken to Doc’s table, where he sorts through them, very occasionally cutting a piece to get a look at what’s beneath the surface. He then slides the glop off the table into a large garbage can. Doc wouldn’t have to change much to star in a horror movie — and not as the damsel, if you know what I mean. His smock is blood spattered, the stare beneath his goggles is resolutely crazed, and he is a viscera inspector named Doc. For years he has scrutinized the guts and organs of the Paradise line. I asked him how many times he’s found something suspicious and had to stop things. He removed his goggles, told me, “Never,” and put them back on.

  There Is No Pig

  PIGS EXIST IN THE WILD on every continent except Antarctica, and taxonomists count sixteen species in all. Domestic pigs — the species we eat — are themselves subdivided into a host of breeds. A breed, unlike a species, is not a natural phenomenon. Breeds are maintained by farmers who selectively mate animals with particular features, which is now usually done through artificial insemination (about 90 percent of large hog farms use artificial insemination). If you took a few hundred domestic pigs of a single breed and let them do their own thing for a few generations, they would begin to lose their breed characteristics.

  Like dog or cat breeds, each pig breed has certain traits associated with it: some traits matter more to the producer, like the ever-important rate of feed conversion; some matter more to the consumer, like how lean or fat marbled the animal’s muscle is; and some matter more to the pig, like susceptibility to anxiety or painful leg problems. Since the traits that matter to the farmer, consumer, and pig are not at all the same, it regularly happens that farmers breed animals that suffer more acutely because their bodies also display characteristics that the industry and consumers demand. If you have ever met a purebred German shepherd, you might have noticed that when the dog is standing, its rear is closer to the ground than its front, so that it always appears to be crouching or gazing up aggressively. This “look” was seen as desirable by breeders and was selected for over generations by breeding animals with shorter rear legs. As a result, German shepherds — even of the best pedigrees — now suffer disproportionately from hip dysplasia, a painful genetic condition that ultimately forces many owners either to condemn their companions to suffering, euthanize them, or spend thousands on surgery. For nearly all farmed animals, regardless of the conditions they are given to live in — “free-range,” “free-roaming,” “organic” — their design destines them for pain. The factory farm, which allows ranchers to make sickly animals highly profitable through the use of antibiotics, other pharmaceuticals, and highly controlled confinement, has created new, sometimes monstrous creatures.

  The demand for lean pig meat — “the Other White Meat,” as it’s been sold to us — has led the pork industry to breed pigs that suffer not only more leg and heart problems, but greater excitability, fear, anxiety, and stress. (This is the conclusion of researchers providing data for the industry.) These excessively stressed animals have the industry worried, not because of their welfare, but because, as mentioned earlier, “stress” seems to negatively affect taste: the stressed animals produce more acid, which actually works to break down the animals’ muscle in much the same way acid in our stomachs breaks down meat.

  The National Pork Producers Council, the policy arm of the American pork industry, reported in 1992 that acid-ridden, bleached, mushy flesh (so-called “pale soft exudative” or “PSE” pork) affected 10 percent of slaughtered pigs and cost the industry $69 million. When Iowa State University professor Lauren Christian announced in 1995 that he had discovered a “stress gene” that breeders could eliminate to reduce the incidence of PSE pork, the industry removed the gene from the genetic pool. Alas, problems with PSE pork continued to increase, and pigs remained so “stressed” that even driving a tractor too close to their confinement facility caused animals to drop dead. By 2002, the American Meat Science Association, a research organization set up by the industry itself, found that more than 15 percent of slaughtered pigs were yielding PSE flesh (or flesh that was at least pale or soft or exudative [watery], if not all three). Removing the stress gene was a good idea, at least insofar as it reduced the number of pigs that died in transport, but it didn’t eliminate “stress.”

  Of course it didn’t. In recent decades, scientist after scientist has come forward to announce the discovery of genes that “control” our physical states and our psychological predispositions. So something like a “fat gene” is announced with the promise that if only these DNA sequences could be snipped from the genome, we could skip exercise and eat whatever we want and never have to worry about getting dumpy. Others have proclaimed that our genes encourage infidelity, lack of curiosity, cowardliness, and short temper. They are clearly right that certain genomic sequences strongly influence how we look, act, and feel. But except for a handful of extremely simple traits like eye color, the correlations aren’t one to one. Certainly not for something as complex as the range of different phenomena we group together with a word like stress. When we talk about “stress” in farmed animals, we’re talking about many different things: anxiety, undue aggressiveness, frustration, fear, and, most of all, suffering — none of which are simple genetic traits, like blue eyes, that can be turned on and off.

  A pig from one of the many breeds traditionally used in America was, and is, able to enjoy the outdoors year-round if provided proper shelter and bedding. This is a good thing, not only for avoiding Exxon Valdez–scale ecological disasters (which I’ll get to in a bit), but because much of what pigs enjoy doing is best done with access to the outdoors — running, playing, sunning, grazing, and caking themselves in mud and water so a breeze will cool them (pigs only sweat on their snouts). Today’s factory farm pig breeds, by contrast, have been so genetically altered that more often than not they must be raised in climate-controlled buildings, cut off from sun and seasons. We are breeding creatures incapable of surviving in any place other than the most artificial of settings. We have focused the awesome power of modern genetic knowledge to bring into being animals that suffer more.

  Nice, Troubling, Nonsensical

  MARIO WALKS ME AROUND BACK. “This is the hog holding area here. They arrive the night before. We water them down. If they have to stay twenty-four hours
, we feed ’em. These pens were designed more for cattle. We have enough room for fifty hogs in here, but sometimes we get seventy or eighty at a time, and that makes it hard.”

  It’s a powerful thing to be so close to such large, intelligent animals so near to their deaths. It would be impossible to know if they have any sense of what is about to happen. Save for when the knocker comes out to round the next hog into the chute, they seem relatively relaxed. There’s no obvious terror, no wailing or even huddling together. I do notice one pig, however, that is lying on its side, trembling somewhat. And when the knocker comes out, while all of the others jump to their feet and become agitated, this one continues to lie there and tremble. If George were acting that way, we’d take her straight to the vet. And if someone saw that I wasn’t doing anything for her, they would at least think my humanity was somehow deficient. I ask Mario about the pig.

  “That’s just a pig thing,” he says, chuckling.

  In fact, it’s not uncommon for pigs awaiting slaughter to have heart attacks or become nonambulatory. Too much stress: the transport, the change of environment, the handling, the squeals from the other side of the door, the smell of blood, the knocker’s waving arms. But maybe it really is just a “pig thing,” and Mario’s chuckle is directed at my ignorance.

  I ask Mario if he thinks the pigs have any sense of why they are there or what’s going on.

  “I personally don’t think they know. A lot of people like to put that idea in people’s heads that animals know they’re going to die. I’ve seen too many cattle and hogs come through here, and I don’t get that impression at all. I mean, they’re going to be scared ’cause they’ve never been in here before. They’re used to being out on dirt and fields and stuff. That’s why they like to bring ’em in here at night. As far as they know what’s going on, they just know they got moved and are waiting here for something.”

  Maybe their fate is unknown and unfeared. Maybe Mario’s right; maybe he’s wrong. Both seem possible.

  “Do you like pigs?” I ask — perhaps the most obvious question, but also a very hard one to pose and answer in this situation.

  “You got to put them down. It’s kind of a mental thing. As far as liking one kind of animal over another, lambs are the toughest. Our shocker’s built for pigs, not for lambs. We’ve shot ’em before, but the bullet may ricochet.”

  I can’t quite follow his last comment about lambs, as my attention moves to the knocker, who comes out, blood halfway up his arms, and uses a paddle with a rattler to herd another pig into the kill area. Apropos of nothing or everything, Mario starts talking about his dog, “a bird dog, a small dog. A shih tzu,” he says, pronouncing the first syllable — “shit” — then pausing for a millisecond, as if to build up pressure in his mouth, and finally releasing “zu.” He tells me, with obvious pleasure, about the birthday party he recently held for his shih tzu, to which he and his family invited the other local dogs — “all small dogs.” He took a photo of all the dogs on the laps of their owners. He didn’t used to like small dogs. Thought they weren’t real dogs. Then he got a small dog. Now he loves small dogs. The knocker comes out, waving his bloody arms, and takes another pig.

  “Do you ever care about these animals?” I ask.

  “Care about them?”

  “Have you ever wanted to spare one?”

  He tells the story of a cow that had recently been brought to him. It had been a pet on a hobby farm, and “the time had come.” (No one, it seems, likes to elaborate on such sentences.) As Mario was preparing to kill the cow, it licked his face. Over and over. Maybe it was used to being a companion. Maybe it was pleading. Telling the story, Mario chuckles, conveying — on purpose, I think — his discomfort. “Oh, boy,” he says. “Then she pinned me against a wall and leaned against me for about twenty minutes or so before I finally got her down.”

  It’s a nice story, a troubling story, a story that makes no sense. How could a cow have pinned him against a wall? That’s not how the layout of the place works. And what about the other workers? What were they doing while this was going on? Again and again, from the largest to the smallest plants, I heard about the need to keep things moving. Why would Paradise have tolerated a twenty-minute delay?

  Was that his answer to my question about wanting to spare animals?

  It’s time to go. I want to spend more time with Mario and his workers. They are nice people, proud, hospitable people — the kind of people, one fears, that might not be able to stay in agriculture for all that much longer. In 1967, there were more than one million hog farms in the country. Today there are a tenth as many, and in the past ten years alone, the number of farms raising pigs fell by more than two-thirds. (Four companies now produce 60 percent of hogs in America.)

  This is part of a bigger change. In 1930, more than 20 percent of the American population was employed in agriculture. Today it’s less than 2 percent. That’s despite the fact that agricultural production doubled between 1820 and 1920, between 1950 and 1965, between 1965 and 1975, and in the next ten years will double again. In 1950, one farmworker supplied every 15.5 consumers. Today it’s one for every 140. This is depressing to both the communities that valued the contribution of their small farmers and to the farmers themselves. (American farmers are four times more likely to commit suicide than the general population.) Just about everything — feed, water, lighting, heating, ventilation, even slaughter — is now automated. The only jobs produced by the factory system are either bureaucratic desk jobs (few in number) or unskilled, dangerous, and poorly paying (many). There are no farmers on factory farms.

  Maybe that doesn’t matter. Times change. Maybe the image of a knowledgeable farmer caring for his animals and our food is nostalgic, like that of a telephone operator putting through calls. And maybe what we get in exchange for the replacement of farmers by machines justifies the sacrifice.

  “We can’t let you go yet,” one of the workers tells me. She disappears for a few seconds and comes back with a paper plate piled high with pink petals of ham. “What kind of hosts would we be if we didn’t even offer a sample?”

  Mario takes a piece and pops it into his mouth.

  I don’t want to eat it. I wouldn’t want to eat anything right now, my appetite having been lost to the sights and smells of a slaughterhouse. And I specifically don’t want to eat the contents of the plate, which were, not long ago, the contents of a pig in the waiting pen. Maybe there is nothing wrong with eating it. But something deep inside me — reasonable or unreasonable, aesthetic or ethical, selfish or compassionate — simply doesn’t want the meat inside my body. For me, that meat is not something to be eaten.

  And yet, something else deep inside me does want to eat it. I want very much to show Mario my appreciation for his generosity. And I want to be able to tell him that his hard work produces delicious food. I want to say, “Wow, that’s wonderful!” and have another piece. I want to “break bread” with him. Nothing — not a conversation, not a handshake or even a hug — establishes friendship so forcefully as eating together. Maybe it’s cultural. Maybe it’s an echo from the communal feasts of our ancestors.

  This is what a slaughterhouse is all about from a certain perspective. On the plate in front of me is the end that promises to justify all the bloody means next door. I heard this again and again from people who raise animals for consumption, and it’s really the only way the equation can be framed: the food — how it tastes, the functions it serves — either does or does not justify the process that brings it to the plate.

  For some, in this case, it would. For me, it does not.

  “I’m kosher,” I say.

  “Kosher?” Mario echoes as a question.

  “I am.” I chuckle. “Jewish. And kosher.”

  The room falls silent, as if the air itself were taking stock of this new fact.

  “Kind of funny to be writing about pork, then,” Mario says. And I have no idea if he believes me, if he understands and sympathizes, or if he is s
uspicious or somehow insulted. Maybe he knows I am lying, but understands and sympathizes. Everything seems possible.

  “Kind of funny,” I echo.

  But it isn’t.

  2.

  Nightmares

  THE PIGS SLAUGHTERED AT PARADISE Locker Meats tend to come from among the few pig farms left in the country that do not use factory methods. The pork sold in practically every supermarket and restaurant comes from the factory farms that now produce 95 percent of America’s pork. (Chipotle is, as of the writing of this book, the only national restaurant chain claiming to obtain a significant portion of its pork from animals that don’t come from factory farms.) Unless you deliberately seek out an alternative, you can be all but certain that your ham, bacon, or chop was factory farmed.