Before you read this article, I feel I need to provide a small disclaimer. I’m not a vegan. I’m not even a vegetarian. Seriously, I don’t even have a pet or a sea monkey. I am, however, a Jonathan Safran Foer fan (I once followed him down three blocks in Park Slope like a rabid stalker until I think he noticed me and took cover in a local cupcake store). So when he came to do a book reading in Paris, I made sure I was there and took nerdy photos with my phone. The book that he was promoting was Eating Animals. And then I read it.
Eating Animals is about Safran Foer’s quest to find out why we eat meat and where it really comes from. Safran Foer himself alternated between a vegetarian or omnivore diet for most of his life, but it wasn’t until he became a dad that he decided to research why we eat animals and take a stance. The book explores the cultural rituals behind eating, philosophical questions about how come we can eat chicken when we can’t bring ourselves to eat dog, and the very ugly side of the meat industry: factory farming. One reviewer said: “What makes Eating Animals so unusual is vegetarian Foer’s empathy for human meat eaters, his willingness to let both factory farmers and food reform activists speak for themselves, and his talent for using humor to sweeten a sour argument.”
You can read an excerpt of Eating Animals here.
While I found Eating Animals courageous and fascinating, albeit mildly grating because Safran Foer gets a little bit too sentimental and honestly irritating at times (some things only work in fiction), the issue of factory farming intrigued me.
So I started to read more books on the subject; Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser; The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defence of Food, by Michael Pollan; and Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin. I watched Food. Inc, the award winning documentary by Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser. I wanted to know all the facts. I was hungry to know what I was putting in my mouth and where it was coming from.
I’d played with my Fisher Price farm as a child, and I used to visit the happy cattle on my cousin’s farm, so I always thought the farm where my food came from looked like this:
When it turns out, they actually look mostly like this:
But what is factory farming, anyway?
- In the USA, a factory farm is, “new and existing operations which stable or confine and feed or maintain for a total of 45 days or more in any 12-month period and there’s no grass or other vegetation in the confinement area during the normal growing season.”
- In one space there can be up to 1000 cows, 2500 pigs or 125,000 chickens, caged, with little or no access to light or air.
- Factory farming began in the 1920s when vitamin A and D were added to the feed, so the animals didn’t need to be outside for light and exercise in order to grow.
- When you have a lot of animals indoors, disease will spread, so antibiotics were introduced to the feed in the 1940s. These antibiotics are now used pre-emptively.
- Farmers found they could increase productivity and reduce the operating costs by using mechanisation and assembly-line techniques, which includes cutting off the beaks of chickens and turkeys, and amputating the tails of cows and pigs without any anaesthetic.
- A whole lot of animals crammed together produce a whole lot of shit, and that ends up polluting the air and water. The sheer amount of waste floating around in our environment makes us sick.
- Chickens and turkeys, and many other farm animals, have been genetically modified to produce more meat in less time.
- The average cow in a factory farm eats around 14 kg of feed each day. That’s 14 kg of grain, not grass, a day to produce only so many kilos of meat. And there are still 15 million children that die of hunger each year.
- The meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, planes, and ships in the world combined.* On top of that, animal agriculture is the leading source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions, making factory farming a MASSIVE contributor to global warming.
All this information I was reading in these books and watching in documentaries was mostly USA-centric though. Surely the horrible things that happen in factory farms don’t happen in Australia? Surely not in food-loving France, where I live? I searched on the internet for information on factory farming back home and found the ‘Animals Australia’, and Jackie O talking about factory farming specifically in Australian piggeries:
Another website, Voiceless has some very interesting fact sheets about factory farming in Australia of both pigs and chickens.
But a niggling little voice in the back of my head kept saying, “I don’t want to become a vegetarian! I want to keep eating steak!” Did these websites and videos and books all have an agenda to make me a vegan? And if I didn’t give up meat, would I be a soulless and uncompassionate ignoramus? Would I be able to sleep at night if I had just a tiny rasher of bacon? Did I really love cute animals that much? And besides, aren’t we all part of a food chain?
The only solution a lot of the Australian websites suggested was becoming a vegan or vegetarian, and while I really do love vegetables, I’m also one of those freaky people who is allergic to everything, and limiting my diet even more would be a nightmare. But what about those poor baby pigs? I decided to take matters into my own hands, and tried calling a piggery in Australia myself. Here is what they told me:
“The soil and climate in some parts of Australia is not suited to pigs, so they need to be intensively farmed.” Seriously? The pigs NEED to be factory farmed? Surely that can’t be right?
I was also told I wasn’t able to visit the facility, and they would not confirm whether or not they use sow stalls to keep the pregnant pigs confined (these stalls are so small that the pigs can never turn around – they can only take one or or two steps forwards or backwards. In all states except NSW it is still legal to chain a sow to the stall by a collar around the neck or stomach.**). Another piggery told me I was welcome to visit, but could not take photos. What were they trying to hide?
Back in Paris, I started speaking to butchers. The majority of the meat in the supermarket seemed to come from animals that were intensively farmed, but where were the butchers getting their meat? A lot of them wouldn’t tell me the exact farm (trade secret, you know) but assured me that their meat came from sustainable farms and the animals had a good quality of life. Some of the butchers even made fun of me, one remarking that the lambs were so well treated that they were sung lullabies every night before they went to bed. But why would these butchers tell me anything otherwise and risk losing a customer? I started buying my meat from an organic butcher at the farmers markets. His stall had pictures of lovely happy cows and pigs galloping across green pastures. But was it the truth?
Despite all my research and knowing the dreadful things that go on in factory farms, I still wanted to eat meat. The thought of never having a lovely stew again, or a Sunday roast, or a nice rare steak, made me start to panic and I would hyperventilate every time I thought about meat. But I couldn’t get the innumerable problems with factory farming out of my head.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you might have a problem with animal cruelty and rights, or the effect on the environment, or the deterioration of our health, because it is the constellation of ALL of those individual things that makes factory farming something that each and every one of us MUST consider. It is the cluster of many problems that make this a very big relevant problem. I honestly believe we all need to do something about it.
So what can you do, if you don’t want to become a vegan or vegetarian?
- Reduce the amount of meat you eat. At the moment I only eat meat 2 days a week, which means I’m eating 70% less meat, which means I’m cutting 70% of any of my money that might go into the meat industry, reducing 70% of the carbon emissions, and 70% of the animal cruelty. It’s not the absolute best I can do, but why does it need to be all or nothing? I think that attitude scares a lot of people away. Totally changing your lifestyle can be difficult and I know that never eating a hamburger again can seem scary. If enough people start eating 70% less meat, it will get the message across to the meat industry to change their ways. Jonathan Safran Foer himself still didn’t cut out dairy and eggs after writing Eating Animals – what we eat is all about making an individual choice. Find what works for you.
- Don’t buy meat from the supermarket. Don’t forget that it’s an industry, and big companies will pay attention to consumer demand.
- Find a butcher who gets their meat from a sustainable farm. Not all meat comes from factory farms. Start speaking to butchers and ask them where their meat comes from, and why they choose that supplier. Find out contact details and call the farm yourself. Why shouldn’t we want to know what we’re putting in our bodies?
- Talk to people about this problem. Share this article. Find out more online. Read some books. We can’t afford to pretend that factory farming isn’t happening both around the world and on our doorsteps.
- Don’t think there’s nothing you can do about it. Every time you choose to eat less meat, no meat, or meat that comes from a sustainable farm, you’re making a difference.
The great thing is, there are lots of farmers out there who care. It’s possible to find happy meat out there. There are so many people looking for ways to create better farming practices, and less cruel ways to treat animals, and in a small farm in Spain, the farmers have found a humane way to produce foie gras! And you know, if they can make happy, sustainable, ethical foie gras, they can really do anything.
Here are some helpful websites:
http://www.eatinganimals.com
http://www.animalsaustralia.org
http://www.voiceless.org.au
http://www.factoryfarming.org.uk
http://www.foodincmovie.com
http://www.goveg.com
http://lovepigs.org.nz
Books on Amazon:
* H. Steinfeld et al., Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, Livestock, Environment and Development (2006).
** http://www.animalliberation.org.au/pigs.php
Also another site I just found today (via Yoko One on Twitter…) – Meat Free Monday!
http://www.supportmfm.org
Meat Free Monday is an environmental campaign to raise awareness of the climate-changing impact of meat production and consumption. Many people are unaware that livestock production is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions – that’s more than the entire transport sector.
How can such a great article go so wrong?
Saying it is OK to eat 70% less meat, is exactly like saying it’s OK if you just shoplift 70% less.
If something is wrong it’s wrong. It’s wrong to buy clothes made in sweatshops, it’s wrong to buy things on the black market, and it’s wrong to eat animals – because we know they suffer.
Vegans are healthier, have much less of an impact on the climate, and are compassionate to all species (including humans).
It is a sad day when we decide to choose to torture an animal, simply because we like the taste of their tortured flesh.
Personally I am glad to read an ethics-conscious article that doesn’t blather on and on about how one should not eat meat at all – as if being human makes one something more than an animal and we do not live on a planet where everything that lives relies on the death of other things to survive.
The issue is not what we eat but how we farm it for me also. Great article.
Brad, I think that view that eating meat is akin to shoplifting is a little naive. 60 years ago it wasn’t the same problem that it is now and as Kat said, the issue isn’t what we eat, but absolutely how we farm it.
The all or nothing view of eating meat isolates a lot of people. It’s attitudes like that that will make some people shy away from the issue altogether when they should be doing something, anything. How many people do you know who aren’t willing to give up meat? I bet it’s quite a few. What I was talking about there were viable solutions for those of us who don’t want to become vegan or vegetarian. 70% makes a huge difference, and if the other 30% is meat coming from a sustainable source, I don’t know how that is necessarily wrong. The cruelty is wrong, the effect on the planet is wrong, there are so many wrongs, but is it wrong to eat animals that have been raised with a good quality of life on a sustainable farm?
Also while I admire those who do eat a vegan diet and have seriously considered it as an option myself, don’t you think that it would be important for you (I’m assuming you are a vegan) to also be compassionate towards people who choose to eat meat (provided it comes from a sustainable non-industrial farm), as you claim to be? There are many options for omnivores that aren’t wrong. It’s not as black and white as eating meat = bad.
I just finished reading this book so held off reading your article until then. I think for me this isn’t as easy as eating meat = bad, but in the common marketplace to find meat that has no association and no connection with factory farming is rare, even more so to find meat of any kind that is grown outside of factory farms and engages with humane forms of slaughter.
If you can find/ have found a butcher that guarantees this to a point that you’re satisfied with then the problem is eliminated and ignore this, but I do think eating 70% less meat is, while better than most, a flawed logic if the reason you’re doing it is to avoid partaking in the overwhelming cruelty and systematic abuse that the meat industry subjects animals to.
I think that if you’re doing things for moral, ethical or humane reasons I don’t think a reduction makes sense. You can’t reduce something that’s immoral, unethical or inhumane.
I think the eating 70% less meat thing is wrong when you look at it as an isolated idea, but the point is that none of the things I suggested were meant to be practised in isolation. The other 30% should never be coming from the supermarket or non organic butcher. I’m not advocating gorging myself on factory farmed bacon when I do choose to eat meat.
Personally, I have found a butcher at my local farmer’s market who has convinced me that his produce is not industrially farmed and I am confident buying meat from him. I don’t eat meat in restaurant anymore. I never buy it from the supermarket. I think everyone who is an omnivore should reduce how much meat they eat in any case, simply because it’s not great for our health to eat as much meat as we do, and then find happy meat when they want to eat it.
Log time reader of Tresspass, first time blogger. I would just like say a few things on points that caught my attention.
“The soil and climate in some parts of Australia is not suited to pigs, so they need to be intensively farmed.”
Whilst I do not have the research to back me on this but I have a hunch that there were civilisations from the past that struggled to cultivate cattle due to droughts or other adverse weather patterns. If this is correct then what did the people back then do about with their diets? Refuse to alter it and still maintain their daily intake?
This is an important question to ask because it puts into perspective what exactly is wrong with the idea of reducing one’s meat intake. My question above is a hypothetical one, but it is a thought that I hope it puts into perspective that the issue of farming practices is the root of the ‘dilemma’. Killing animals is another, broader dilemma as well, but that is a separate issue.
In the last ten years we have had outbreaks of cow, bird and pig related diseases. I can only wonder what will happen once the Chinese and Indian middle class population start to demand higher protein diets.