Eating Animals Read online

  I wanted to address these questions comprehensively. So although upwards of 99 percent of all animals eaten in this country come from “factory farms” — and I will spend much of the rest of the book explaining what this means and why it matters — the other 1 percent of animal agriculture is also an important part of this story. The disproportionate amount of this book that is occupied by discussion of the best family-run animal farms reflects how significant I think they are, but at the same time, how insignificant: they prove the rule.

  To be perfectly honest (and to risk losing my credibility on page 13), I assumed, before beginning my research, that I knew what I would find — not the details, but the general picture. Others made the same assumption. Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about “eating animals,” they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case. (What assumptions did you make upon seeing the title of this book?)

  I, too, assumed that my book about eating animals would become a straightforward case for vegetarianism. It didn’t. A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it’s not what I’ve written here.

  Animal agriculture is a hugely complicated topic. No two animals, breeds of animals, farms, farmers, or eaters are the same. Looking past the mountains of research — reading, interviewing, seeing firsthand — that was necessary even to begin to think about this stuff seriously, I had to ask myself if it was possible to say something coherent and significant about a practice that is so diverse. Perhaps there is no “meat.” Instead, there is this animal, raised on this farm, slaughtered at this plant, sold in this way, and eaten by this person — but each distinct in a way that prevents them from being pieced together as mosaic.

  And eating animals is one of those topics, like abortion, where it is impossible to definitively know some of the most important details (When is a fetus a person, as opposed to a potential person? What is animal experience really like?) and that cuts right to one’s deepest discomforts, often provoking defensiveness or aggression. It’s a slippery, frustrating, and resonant subject. Each question prompts another, and it’s easy to find yourself defending a position far more extreme than you actually believe or could live by. Or worse, finding no position worth defending or living by.

  Then there is the difficulty of discerning the difference between how something feels and what something is. Too often, arguments about eating animals aren’t arguments at all, but statements of taste. And where there are facts — this is how much pork we eat; these are how many mangrove swamps have been destroyed by aquaculture; this is how a cow is killed — there’s the question of what we can actually do with them. Should they be ethically compelling? Communally? Legally? Or just more information for each eater to digest as he sees fit?

  While this book is the product of an enormous amount of research, and is as objective as any work of journalism can be — I used the most conservative statistics available (almost always from government, and peer-reviewed academic and industry sources) and hired two outside fact-checkers to corroborate them — I think of it as a story. There’s plenty of data to be found, but it is often thin and malleable. Facts are important, but they don’t, on their own, provide meaning — especially when they are so bound to linguistic choices. What does a precisely measured pain response in chickens mean? Does it mean pain? What does pain mean? No matter how much we learn about the physiology of the pain — how long it persists, the symptoms it produces, and so forth — none of it will tell us anything definitive. But place facts in a story, a story of compassion or domination, or maybe both — place them in a story about the world we live in and who we are and who we want to be — and you can begin to speak meaningfully about eating animals.

  We are made of stories. I’m thinking of those Saturday afternoons at my grandmother’s kitchen table, just the two of us — black bread in the glowing toaster, a humming refrigerator that couldn’t be seen through its veil of family photographs. Over pumpernickel ends and Coke, she would tell me about her escape from Europe, the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn’t. It was the story of her life — “Listen to me,” she would plead — and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was.

  I know, now, what it was. And though the particulars couldn’t be more different, I am trying, and will try, to transmit her lesson to my son. This book is my most earnest attempt to do so. I feel great trepidation as I begin, because there is so much reverberation. Putting aside, for a moment, the more than ten billion land animals slaughtered for food every year in America, and putting aside the environment, and workers, and such directly related issues as world hunger, flu epidemics, and biodiversity, there is also the question of how we think of ourselves and one another. We are not only the tellers of our stories, we are the stories themselves. If my wife and I raise our son as a vegetarian, he will not eat his great-grandmother’s singular dish, will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the Greatest Chef Who Ever Lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.

  My grandmother’s first words upon seeing my son for the first time were “My revenge.” Of the infinite number of things she could have said, that was what she chose, or was chosen for her.

  Listen to Me:

  “WE WEREN’T RICH, BUT WE always had enough. Thursday we baked bread, and challah and rolls, and they lasted the whole week. Friday we had pancakes. Shabbat we always had a chicken, and soup with noodles. You would go to the butcher and ask for a little more fat. The fattiest piece was the best piece. It wasn’t like now. We didn’t have refrigerators, but we had milk and cheese. We didn’t have every kind of vegetable, but we had enough. The things that you have here and take for granted . . . But we were happy. We didn’t know any better. And we took what we had for granted, too.

  “Then it all changed. During the War it was hell on earth, and I had nothing. I left my family, you know. I was always running, day and night, because the Germans were always right behind me. If you stopped, you died. There was never enough food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating, and I’m not just talking about being skin and bones. I had sores all over my body. It became difficult to move. I wasn’t too good to eat from a garbage can. I ate the parts others wouldn’t eat. If you helped yourself, you could survive. I took whatever I could find. I ate things I wouldn’t tell you about.

  “Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Someone taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky again. Someone gave me a little rice once, and I traveled two days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had to have luck and intuition.

  “The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”

  “He saved your life.”

  “I didn’t eat it.”

  “You didn’t eat it?”

  “It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why?”

  “What, because it wasn’t kosher?”

  “Of course.”

  “But not even to save your life?”

  “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

  Modern industrial fishing lines can be as long as 75 miles — the same distance as from sea level to space.

  1.

  George

  I SPENT THE FIRST TWENTY-SIX years of my life disliking animals. I tho
ught of them as bothersome, dirty, unapproachably foreign, frighteningly unpredictable, and plain old unnecessary. I had a particular lack of enthusiasm for dogs — inspired, in large part, by a related fear that I inherited from my mother, which she inherited from my grandmother. As a child I would agree to go over to friends’ houses only if they confined their dogs in some other room. If a dog approached in the park, I’d become hysterical until my father hoisted me onto his shoulders. I didn’t like watching television shows that featured dogs. I didn’t understand — I disliked — people who got excited about dogs. It’s possible that I even developed a subtle prejudice against the blind.

  And then one day I became a person who loved dogs. I became a dog person.

  George came very much out of the blue. My wife and I hadn’t broached the subject of getting a dog, much less set about looking for one. (Why would we? I disliked dogs.) In this case, the first day of the rest of my life was a Saturday. Strolling down Seventh Avenue in our Brooklyn neighborhood, we came upon a tiny black puppy, asleep on the curb, curled into its ADOPT ME vest like a question mark. I don’t believe in love at first sight or fate, but I loved that damned dog and it was meant to be. Even if I wouldn’t touch it.

  Suggesting we adopt the puppy might have been the most unpredictable thing I’d ever done, but here was a beautiful little animal, the sort that even a hard-hearted dog skeptic would find irresistible. Of course, people find beauty in things without wet noses, too. But there is something unique about the ways in which we fall in love with animals. Unwieldy dogs and minuscule dogs and long-haired and sleek dogs, snoring Saint Bernards, asthmatic pugs, unfolding shar-peis, and depressed-looking basset hounds — each with devoted fans. Bird-watchers spend frigid mornings scanning skies and scrub for the feathered objects of their fascination. Cat lovers display an intensity lacking — thank goodness — in most human relationships. Children’s books are constellated with rabbits and mice and bears and caterpillars, not to mention spiders, crickets, and alligators. Nobody ever had a plush toy shaped like a rock, and when the most enthusiastic stamp collector refers to loving stamps, it is an altogether different kind of affection.

  We took the puppy home. I hugged it — her — from across the room. Then, because it — she — gave me reason to think I wouldn’t lose digits in the process, I graduated to feeding her from my palm. Then I let her lick my hand. And then I let her lick my face. And then I licked her face. And now I love all dogs and will live happily ever after.

  Sixty-three percent of American households have at least one pet. This prevalence is most impressive because of its newness. Keeping companion animals became common only with the rise of the middle class and urbanization, perhaps because of the deprivation of other contact with animals, or simply because pets cost money and are therefore a signifier of extravagance (Americans spend $34 billion on their companion animals every year). Oxford historian Sir Keith Thomas, whose encyclopedic work Man and the Natural World is now considered a classic, argues that

  the spread of pet-keeping among the urban middle classes in the early modern period is . . . a development of genuine social, psychological, and indeed commercial importance. . . . It also had intellectual implications. It encouraged the middle classes to form optimistic conclusions about animal intelligence; it gave rise to innumerable anecdotes about animal sagacity; it stimulated the notion that animals could have character and individual personality; and it created the psychological foundation for the view that some animals at least were entitled to moral consideration.

  It wouldn’t be right to say that my relationship with George has revealed to me the “sagacity” of animals. Beyond her most basic desires, I don’t have the faintest clue what’s going on in her head. (Although I have become convinced that much, beyond basic desires, is going on.) I’m surprised by her lack of intelligence as often as I’m surprised by her intelligence. The differences between us are always more present than the similarities.

  And George isn’t a kumbaya being who wants only to give and receive affection. As it turns out, she is a major pain in the ass an awful lot of the time. She compulsively pleasures herself in front of guests, eats my shoes and my son’s toys, is monomaniacally obsessed with squirrel genocide, has the savant-like ability to find her way between the camera lens and the subject of every photo taken in her vicinity, lunges at skateboarders and Hasids, humiliates menstruating women (and is the worst nightmare of menstruating Hasids), backs her flatulent ass into the least interested person in the room, digs up the freshly planted, scratches the newly bought, licks the about-to-be-served, and occasionally exacts revenge (for what?) by shitting in the house.

  Our various struggles — to communicate, to recognize and accommodate each other’s desires, simply to coexist — force me to encounter and interact with something, or rather someone, entirely other. George can respond to a handful of words (and choose to ignore a slightly larger handful), but our relationship takes place almost entirely outside of language. She seems to have thoughts and emotions. Sometimes I think I understand them, but often I don’t. Like a photograph, she cannot say what she lets me see. She is an embodied secret. And I must be a photograph to her.

  Just last night, I looked up from my reading to find George staring at me from across the room. “When did you come in here?” I asked. She lowered her eyes and lumbered away from me, down the hall — not a silhouette so much as a kind of negative space, a form cut out of the domesticity. Despite our patterns, which are more regular than anything I share with another person, she still feels unpredictable to me. And despite our closeness, I am occasionally thrilled, and even a bit scared, by the foreignness of her. Having a child greatly exacerbated this, as there was absolutely no guarantee — beyond the one I felt absolutely — that she wouldn’t maul the baby.

  The list of our differences could fill a book, but like me, George fears pain, seeks pleasure, and craves not just food and play, but companionship. I don’t need to know the details of her moods and preferences to know that she has them. Our psychologies are not the same or similar, but each of us has a perspective, a way of processing and experiencing the world that is intrinsic and unique.

  I wouldn’t eat George, because she’s mine. But why wouldn’t I eat a dog I’d never met? Or more to the point, what justification might I have for sparing dogs but eating other animals?

  A Case for Eating Dogs

  DESPITE THE FACT THAT IT’S perfectly legal in forty-four states, eating “man’s best friend” is as taboo as a man eating his best friend. Even the most enthusiastic carnivores won’t eat dogs. TV guy and sometimes cooker Gordon Ramsay can get pretty macho with baby animals when doing publicity for something he’s selling, but you’ll never see a puppy peeking out of one of his pots. And though he once said he’d electrocute his children if they became vegetarian, I wonder what his response would be if they poached the family pooch.

  Dogs are wonderful, and in many ways unique. But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can’t hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run and play, be mischievous, and reciprocate affection. So why don’t they get to curl up by the fire? Why can’t they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?

  Our taboo against dog eating says something about dogs and a great deal about us.

  The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses.

  The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows.

  The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

  While written in a much different context, George Orwell’s words (from Animal Farm) apply here: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The protective emphasis is not a law of nature; it comes from the stories we tell about nature.

  So who’s right? What might be the reasons to exclude canine from the menu? The selective carnivore suggests: />
  Don’t eat companion animals. But dogs aren’t kept as companions in all of the places they are eaten. And what about our petless neighbors? Would we have any right to object if they had dog for dinner?

  OK, then:

  Don’t eat animals with significant mental capacities. If by “significant mental capacities” we mean what a dog has, then good for the dog. But such a definition would also include the pig, cow, chicken, and many species of sea animals. And it would exclude severely impaired humans.

  Then:

  It’s for good reason that the eternal taboos — don’t fiddle with your shit, kiss your sister, or eat your companions — are taboo. Evolutionarily speaking, those things are bad for us. But dog eating hasn’t been and isn’t a taboo in many places, and it isn’t in any way bad for us. Properly cooked, dog meat poses no greater health risks than any other meat, nor does such a nutritious meal foster much objection from the physical component of our selfish genes.

  And dog eating has a proud pedigree. Fourth-century tombs contain depictions of dogs being slaughtered along with other food animals. It was a fundamental enough habit to have informed language itself: the Sino-Korean character for “fair and proper” (yeon) literally translates into “as cooked dog meat is delicious.” Hippocrates praised dog meat as a source of strength. The Romans ate “suckling puppy,” Dakota Indians enjoyed dog liver, and not so long ago Hawaiians ate dog brains and blood. The Mexican hairless dog was the principal food species of the Aztecs. Captain Cook ate dog. Roald Amundsen famously ate his sled dogs. (Granted, he was really hungry.) And dogs are still eaten to overcome bad luck in the Philippines; as medicine in China and Korea; to enhance libido in Nigeria; and in numerous places, on every continent, because they taste good. For centuries, the Chinese have raised special breeds of dogs, like the black-tongued chow, for chow, and many European countries still have laws on the books regarding postmortem examination of dogs intended for human consumption.