PART SIX
IF, AS the old feminist saw would have it, the personal is the political, the culinary—so subject to individual taste, to class, to social precepts—is also intensely political. Though the home kitchen may seem to be a private space, it’s also an extension of a public domain in which gastronomic choices are shaped by moral as well as economic pressures. And the restaurant kitchen, perhaps more obviously public, has also, especially in recent years, become a political battleground. Eating, declares the farmer-poet-novelist Wendell Berry, is “an agricultural act, a political act,” for what we eat presupposes choices about how (or whether) animals are killed for food, where (and how) fruits and vegetables are grown, and in what ways the foods we eat may (or may not) have been industrially processed.
Of course, culinary controversies are hardly new. As we’ve seen in our brief introduction to early food writing, eating taboos have long functioned to separate Jews from Christians, Muslims from Hindus, sometimes intensifying religious turmoil. Similarly, gastronomic practices have long been the subject of intense debate, especially the slaughter of domestic animals. “I rather wonder,” mused the Platonist philosopher Plutarch in his Moralia, “both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man who did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature. . . . How could his eyes endure the slaughter . . . ? How could his nose endure the stench?” Horror of the gore and stench made Pythagoras, Plato, Plutarch himself, and Horace—among classical thinkers—into confirmed vegetarians, along with such later figures as Shelley, Tolstoi, Shaw, Kafka, Gandhi, Einstein, and (even) Hitler. More recently, the passions of vegetarians and the more austere vegans (who refuse to eat “anything that’s had a mother”) have led to polemical writings by the ethicist Peter Singer as well as the novelists J. M. Coetzee and Jonathan Safran Foer, among others. Cookbooks and restaurants too have been shaped by their views. Deborah Madison’s famous Greens, in San Francisco, along with her well-received Greens Cook Book, exemplify—along with many other eateries and collections of recipes—the real-world results of the political ideals advanced by Plutarch’s modern descendants.
But vegetarianism is only one branch of the political philosophy that Wendell Berry represents. Berry himself, for instance—like Barbara Kingsolver and the late David Foster Wallace—is neither vegan nor vegetarian. His views are fueled by distaste for the kind of industrialized “cattle metropolis” that Michael Pollan so powerful describes in our selection here, and also by the horrifying visions of slaughterhouses recorded by writers from Upton Sinclair (in our first section) to Eric Schlosser (in this section). Nor would Berry disagree with Henry Miller’s impassioned declaration that “if the bread is bad, the life is bad.” Underlying all these arguments is surely Brillat-Savarin’s famous assertion that “you are what you eat.” If you eat—and have chosen to eat—degraded, synthetic commercial food, you yourself are in some sense morally or physically degraded. Though Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook was based on problematic politics (the Futurists were essentially fascists), his precepts too implied that not just your physical but also your mental health could be contaminated by bad food: he thought that pasta was making Italians soft! Today, his Italian counterpart Carlo Petrini has become famous as the founder and exponent of the Slow Food Movement. His manifesto is very different from Marinetti’s—Marinetti, for instance, celebrated technology, whereas Petrini sees industrial food as the enemy of slow, delicious cooking—yet as careful readers will see, both these writers consider culinary matters central to both individual and social well-being.
Rather than eat Fast Food or heavy pasta, these thinkers would aver, we should eat fresh fruits and vegetables, grass-fed beef, and free-range chickens, while renouncing the processed foods hawked by corporate culture. But, observes Rachel Laudan, there is an element of nostalgia in a wholesale rejection of advances in the cultivation and preservation of food. Our ancestors, she argues, didn’t inhabit quite the gastronomic utopias that Berry and Pollan would have us imagine. More troublesome still, declare others in attacking the group one recent writer has called “Pollanites,” there’s a decided element of elitism in the farm-to-table movement. If you don’t, like Kingsolver, inherit a farm in Appalachia, or have the means, like Pollan, to hunt and forage in Northern California—if you’re a migrant worker or an inner-city ghetto dweller—you might just be stuck with the junk foods available in your local bodega or on sale at McDonald’s and Burger King.
Increasingly, to be sure, activists influenced by thinkers from Berry to Petrini and Pollan have worked to add salads to fast food menus, to plant community gardens (like Alice Waters’s “Edible Schoolyard”) in urban areas, and to convince shoppers that fruits and vegetables are cheap to buy and easy to cook. Michele Obama has even used the bully pulpit of the White House to enlist Walmart in the fight against childhood obesity. In a society whose tastes and tastings are literally and figuratively flavored by the marketing maneuvers of giant corporations, culinary change may be slow—but perhaps healthier foods are even now simmering on a range of back burners.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944)
MARINETTI WAS THE founder of the proto-fascist Italian avant-garde movement known as Futurism. During some forty tempestuous years, he passionately propagandized for progress, speed, militarism, and innovative technology. Like Futurist poetry, Futurist cooking was defined as a culinary art that renounced old-fashioned, “soft” foods—especially the pasta so beloved of Italians—in favor of experimental cuisine that in some ways looked forward to Ferran Adrià’s “molecular gastronomy.” Marinetti preached strange combinations (chicken roasted with a steel bullet in its breast) but he and fellow Futurists also suggested varieties of food that are still defined as healthy—for instance, instead of traditional spaghetti Bolognese (considered too heavy for the tough, fit Italians of the future), a salad of shredded carrots seasoned with lemon juice.
from The Futurist Cookbook:
The Manifesto of Futurist Cooking
ITALIAN FUTURISM, FATHER of numerous Futurisms and avant-gardeisms abroad, will not remain a prisoner of those worldwide victories secured ‘in twenty years of great artistic and political battles frequently consecrated in blood,’ as Benito Mussolini put it. Italian Futurism will face unpopularity again with a programme for the total renewal of food and cooking.
Of all artistic and literary movements Futurism is the only one whose essence is reckless audacity. Twentieth-century painting and twentieth-century literature are in reality two very moderate and practical Futurisms of the right. Attached to tradition, dependent on each other, they prudently only essay the new.
AGAINST PASTA
FUTURISM has been defined by the philosophers as ‘mysticism in action’, by Benedetto Croce as ‘anti-historicism’, by Graca Aranha as ‘liberation from aesthetic terror’. We call it ‘the renewal of Italian pride’, a formula for ‘original art-life’, ‘the religion of speed’, ‘mankind straining with all his might towards synthesis’, ‘spiritual hygiene’, ‘a method of infallible creation’, ‘the geometric splendour of speed’, ‘the aesthetics of the machine’.
Against practicality we Futurists therefore disdain the example and admonition of tradition in order to invent at any cost something new which everyone considers crazy.
While recognizing that badly or crudely nourished men have achieved great things in the past, we affirm this truth: men think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink.
Let us consult on this matter our lips, tongue, palate, taste buds, glandular secretions and probe with genius into gastric chemistry.
We Futurists feel that for the male the voluptuousness of love is an abysmal excavator hollowing him out from top to bottom, whereas for the female it works horizontally and fan-wise. The voluptuousness of the palate, however, is for both men and women always an upward movement through the human body. We also feel that we must stop the Italian male from becoming a solid leaden block of blind and opaque density. Instead he should harmonize more and more with the Italian female, a swift spiralling transparency of passion, tenderness, light, will, vitality, heroic constancy. Let us make our Italian bodies agile, ready for the featherweight aluminum trains which will replace the present heavy ones of wood iron steel.
Convinced that in the probable future conflagration those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win, we Futurists have injected agility into world literature with words-in-liberty and simultaneity. We have generated surprises with illogical syntheses and dramas of inanimate objects that have purged the theatre of boredom. Having enlarged sculptural possibility with anti-realism, having created geometric architectonic splendour without decorativism and made cinematography and photography abstract, we will now establish the way of eating best suited to an ever more high speed, airborne life.
Above all we believe necessary:
a) The abolition of pastasciutta, an absurd Italian gastronomic religion.
It may be that a diet of cod, roast beef and steamed pudding is beneficial to the English, cold cuts and cheese to the Dutch and sauerkraut, smoked [salt] pork and sausage to the Germans, but pasta is not beneficial to the Italians. For example it is completely hostile to the vivacious spirit and passionate, generous, intuitive soul of the Neapolitans. If these people have been heroic fighters, inspired artists, awe-inspiring orators, shrewd lawyers, tenacious farmers it was in spite of their voluminous daily plate of pasta. When they eat it they develop that typical ironic and sentimental scepticism which can often cut short their enthusiasm.
A highly intelligent Neapolitan Professor, Signorelli, writes: ‘In contrast to bread and rice, pasta is a food which is swallowed, not masticated. Such starchy food should mainly be digested in the mouth by the saliva but in this case the task of transformation is carried out by the pancreas and the liver. This leads to an interrupted equilibrium in these organs. From such disturbances derive lassitude, pessimism, nostalgic inactivity and neutralism.’
AN INVITATION TO CHEMISTRY
PASTASCIUTTA, 40% less nutritious than meat, fish or pulses, ties today’s Italians with its tangled threads to Penelope’s slow looms and to somnolent old sailing-ships in search of wind. Why let its massive heaviness interfere with the immense network of short long waves which Italian genius has thrown across oceans and continents? Why let it block the path of those landscapes of colour form sound which circumnavigate the world thanks to radio and television? The defenders of pasta are shackled by its ball and chain like convicted lifers or carry its ruins in their stomachs like archaeologists. And remember too that the abolition of pasta will free Italy from expensive foreign grain and promote the Italian rice industry.
b) The abolition of volume and weight in the conception and evaluation of food.
c) The abolition of traditional mixtures in favour of experimentation with new, apparently absurd mixtures, following the advice of Jarro Maincave and other Futurist cooks.
d) The abolition of everyday mediocrity from the pleasures of the palate.
We invite chemistry immediately to take on the task of providing the body with its necessary calories through equivalent nutrients provided free by the State, in powder or pills, albumoid compounds, synthetic fats and vitamins. This way we will achieve a real lowering of the cost of living and of salaries, with a relative reduction in working hours. Today only one workman is needed for two thousand kilowatts. Soon machines will constitute an obedient proletariat of iron steel aluminum at the service of men who are almost totally relieved of manual work. With work reduced to two or three hours, the other hours can be perfected and ennobled though study, the arts, and the anticipation of perfect meals.
In all social classes meals will be less frequent but perfect in their daily provision of equivalent nutrients.
THE perfect meal requires:
1.Originality and harmony in the table setting (crystal, china, décor) extending to the flavours and colours of the foods.
2.Absolute originality in the food.
PERHAPS BEST KNOWN for his controversial, erotically explicit novels and quasi-memoirs, Miller was also an essayist and polemicist of considerable stature. For years his most famous books (The Tropic of Cancer, The Tropic of Capricorn) were banned as pornographic in the United States, but after the 1960s they were legitimized and became best-sellers. Born in New York City, Miller spent much of his early career as an expatriate in Paris, then lived for many years in Big Sur, on the California coast. He had five wives and numerous lovers, including the lyrical novelist and memoirist Anaïs Nin. As his essay on bread, excerpted here, indicates, he was an energetic social critic whose views on sexual liberation were paralleled by his other analyses of what he considered American puritanism and conformism.
from Remember to Remember: The Staff of Life
BREAD: PRIME SYMBOL. Try and find a good loaf. You can travel fifty thousand miles in America without once tasting a piece of good bread. Americans don’t care about good bread. They are dying of inanition but they go on eating bread without substance, bread without flavor, bread without vitamins, bread without life. Why? Because the very core of life is contaminated. If they knew what good bread was they would not have such wonderful machines on which they lavish all their time, energy and affection. A plate of false teeth means much more to an American than a loaf of good bread. Here is the sequence: poor bread, bad teeth, indigestion, constipation, halitosis, sexual starvation, disease and accidents, the operating table, artificial limbs, spectacles, baldness, kidney and bladder trouble, neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, war and famine. Start with the American loaf of bread so beautifully wrapped in cellophane and you end on the scrap heap at forty-five. The only place to find a good loaf of bread is in the ghettos. Wherever there is a foreign quarter there is apt to be good bread. Wherever there is a Jewish grocer or delicatessen you are almost certain to find an excellent loaf of bread. The dark Russian bread, light in weight, found only rarely on this huge continent, is the best bread of all. No vitamins have been injected into it by laboratory specialists in conformance with the latest food regulations. The Russian just naturally likes good bread, because he also likes caviar and vodka and other good things. Americans are whiskey, gin and beer drinkers who long ago lost their taste for food. And losing that they have also lost their taste for life. For enjoyment. For good conversation. For everything worth while, to put it briefly:
What do I find wrong with America? Everything. I begin at the beginning, with the staff of life: bread. If the bread is bad the whole life is bad. Bad? Rotten, I should say. Like that piece of bread only twenty-four hours old which is good for nothing except perhaps to fill up a hole. Good for target practice maybe. Or shuttlecock and shuffle board. Even soaked in urine it is unpalatable; even perverts shun it. Yet millions are wasted advertising it. Who are the men engaged in this wasteful pursuit? Drunkards and failures for the most part. Men who have prostituted their talents in order to help further the decay and dissolution of our once glorious Republic.
Here is one of the latest widely advertised products: Hollywood Bread. On the red, white and blue cellophane jacket in which it is wrapped, this last word in bread from the American bakeries, it reads as follows:
whole wheat flour, clear wheat flour, water, non-diastatic malt, yeast, salt, honey, caramel, whole rye flour, yeast food, stone ground oatmeal, soya flour, gluten flour, barley flour, sesame seed, and a small quantity of dehydrated (water free) vegetables including celery, lettuce, pumpkin, cabbage, carrots, spinach, parsley, sea kelp, added for flavor only.
The only thing missing from this concoction is powdered diamonds. How does it taste? Much like any other American product. Of course, this is a reducing bread of which one should eat two slices a day three times a day and not ask how it tastes. Grow thin, as in Hollywood, and be thankful it doesn’t taste worse. That’s the idea. For several days now I have been trying to get a whiff of some of those ingredients—sea kelp especially—which were included “for flavor only.” Why they were not added for health too I don’t know. Naturally all these delicious-sounding items amount to about one ten-thousandth part of the loaf. And on the second day, stale, flat and unprofitable, this marvelous new bread is no more attractive to the palate or the stomach than any other loaf of American bread. On the second day it is good for replacing a missing tile on the roof. Or to make a scratchboard for the cat. . . .
Outside of the foreign quarters, then, take it for granted that there is no good bread to be had. Every foreign group has introduced into our life some good substantial bread, even the Scandinavians. (Excepting the English, I should add, but then we hardly think of them as foreign, though why we shouldn’t I don’t know, for when you think of it the English are even less like us than the Poles or Latvians.) In a Jewish restaurant you usually have a basket filled with all kinds of bread from which to choose. In a typical American restaurant, should you ask for rye, whole wheat or any other kind of bread but the insidious, unwholesome, and unpalatable white, you get white bread. If you insist on rye bread you get whole wheat. If you insist on whole wheat you get graham bread. Once in a great while you come upon nut bread; this is always a sheer accident. Raisin bread is a sort of decoy to lure you into eating unpalatable, perfidious and debilitating white bread. When in doubt go to a Jewish restaurant or delicatessen; if necessary, stand up and eat a sandwich made of sour rye, sweet butter, pastrami and pickle. A Jewish sandwich contains more food value than an eighty-five cent meal in the ordinary American restaurant. With a glass of water to wash it down you can walk away feeling fit. . . .
The moment you sit down at a table in the ordinary American restaurant, the moment you begin scanning the menu, the waitress asks you what you wish to drink. (If by chance you should say “cocoa,” the whole kitchen would be thrown out of gear.) To this question I usually counter with another: “Do you have anything but white bread?” If the answer is not a flat No, it is: “We have whole wheat,” or “We have graham bread.” Whereupon I usually mumble under my breath: “You can stick that up your ass!” When she says; “What did you say?” I reply, “Do you have rye bread by any chance?” Then, before she can say no, I launch into an elaborate explanation of the fact that I don’t mean by rye bread the ordinary rye bread, which is no better than white, graham, or whole wheat, but a succulent, tasty, dark, sour rye such as the Russians and the Jews serve. At the mention of these two suspect nationalities a scowl spreads over her face. . . .
Today the mailman brought three kinds of bread: Italian bread, a milk loaf, and pumpernickel. (No sour rye, of course, no corn bread.) The bread comes from Monterey, the nearest town, which is fifty miles away. In Monterey there is no Jewish grocer or delicatessen, worse luck. In Monterey there are Mexicans, Portuguese and Filipinos, but who gives a damn what these poor devils eat? The Mexicans have their tortillas, the Portuguese their garlic, and the Filipinos . . . well, among other things they have all our bad habits. Nobody in Monterey has a good slice of bread to eat. Nor in Carmel either, unless it’s Robinson Jeffers, and that would be a sacramental bread. Just outside of Carmel lives Edward Weston, the photographer. And that leads me to speak of another kind of bread: photographic bread. Have you ever noticed that even the photographic bread tastes poorly? Have you ever seen a piece of bread photographed by our advertising maniacs which you would like to bite into? I haven’t. Edward Weston could undoubtedly make you the most wonderful photographic bread conceivable—but could you eat it? The bread you hang on your wall is not the bread you want to eat at table. Even a piece of bread by Man Ray would prove unpalatable, particularly if he just happened to be reading his favorite author, the Marquis de Sade. Sacher Masoch might have made a good bread, if he had lived long enough. It has a Kosher sound, Sacher Masoch. But in the long run I have a feeling it would make one morbid and introspective, this Sacher Masoch bread.
I have now found that the only way to eat our most unwholesome, unpalatable and unappetizing American bread, the staff of our unsavory and monotonous life, is to adopt the following procedure. This is a recipe, so please follow instructions to the letter.
To begin with, accept any loaf that is offered you without question, even if it is not wrapped in cellophane, even if it contains no kelp. Throw it in the back of the car with the oil can and the grease rags; if possible, bury it under a sack of coal, bituminous coal. As you climb up the road to your home, drop it in the mud a few times and dig your heels into it. If you have a dog with you, let him pee on it now and then. When you get to the house, and after you have prepared the other dishes, take a huge carving knife and rip the loaf from stem to stern. Then take one whole onion, peeled or unpeeled, one carrot, one stalk of celery, one huge piece of garlic, one sliced apple, a herring, a handful of anchovies, a sprig of parsley, and an old toothbrush and shove them into the disemboweled guts of the bread. Over these pour first a thimbleful of kerosene, a dash of Lavoris and just a wee bit of Clorox; then sprinkle guts liberally with the following—molasses, honey, orange marmalade, vanilla, soy bean sauce, tabasco sauce, ketchup and arnica. Over this add a layer of chopped nuts, assorted nuts, of course, a few bay leaves (whole), some marjoram, and a stick of licorice cut into fine pieces. Put the loaf in the oven for ten minutes and serve. If it is still lacking in taste whip up a chili con carne piping hot and mix bread with it until it becomes a thick gruel. If this fails, piss on it and throw it to the dog. But under no circumstances feed it to the birds. The birds of North America are already on the decline, as I pointed out earlier. Their beaks have become dull, their wing-span shortened; they are pining and drooping, moulting in season and out. Above all, they no longer sing as they used to; they make sour notes, they bleat instead of tweeting, and sometimes, when the fogs set in, they have even been heard to cackle and wheeze.
ONCE DESCRIBED AS “the Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology,” Snyder began his career during the so-called San Francisco Renaissance of the late fifties and sixties, as a member of a literary circle that included Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure. After graduating from Reed College, where he double majored in English and anthropology, he embarked on a long and rich writing career, while supporting himself in a range of jobs—logger, fire-lookout, member of a steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and (for many years) professor of English and creative writing at the University of California, Davis. A passionate student of Zen Buddhism, Snyder traveled between Japan and California for decades, living as a de facto Zen monk. His fascination with ecology prompted his work on the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Turtle Island, and can be traced in some of his culinary poems, including the one we present here.
Up on the bluff, the steak houses
called “The Embers”—called
“Fireside”
with a smiling Disney cow on the sign
or a stockman’s pride—huge
full-color photo of standing Hereford stud
above the very booth
his bloody sliced muscle is
served in;
“rare”
The Chamber of Commerce eats there,
the visiting lecturer,
stockmen in Denver suits,
Japanese-American animal nutrition experts
From Kansas,
With Buddhist beads;
And down by the tracks
in frozen mud, in the feed lots,
fed surplus grain
(the ripped-off land)
the beeves are standing round—
bred heavy.
Steaming, stamping,
long-lashed, slowly thinking
with the rhythm of their
breathing,
frosty—breezy—
early morning prairie sky.
KENTUCKY NATIVE WENDELL Berry has gained acclaim as a working farmer who is also a poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist on key agricultural issues. His principled resistance to industrial farming has been broadly influential; his admirers include such advocates of localism as Michael Pollan and Alice Waters. In a number of works, including most recently the prestigious Jefferson Lecture of 2012, he has called attention to the axiom that is at the center of the piece we include here: “Eating is an agricultural act,” noting that every culinary choice supports either globalized technological farming or local organic farming that respects the land. New York Times writer Mark Bittman has remarked that although Berry is “sometimes described as a modern-day Thoreau . . . I’d call [him] the soul of the real food movement.”
from What Are People For?:
The Pleasures of Eating
MANY TIMES, AFTER I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, “What can city people do?”
“Eat responsibly,” I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I meant, but afterwards I have invariably felt that there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.
I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as “consumers.” If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. They buy what they want—or what they have been persuaded to want—within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been “manufactured” or “processed” or “precooked,” how has that affected its quality or nutritional value?
Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know on what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge or skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea—something they do not know or imagine—until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.
The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly also true of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers—passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach. (Think of the savings, the efficiency, and the effortlessness of such an arrangement!)
Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The current version of the “dream home” of the future involves “effortless” shopping from a list of available goods on a television monitor and heating precooked food by remote control. Of course, this implies, and indeed depends on, a perfect ignorance of the history of the food that is consumed. It requires that the citizenry should give up their hereditary and sensible aversion to buying a pig in a poke. It wishes to make the selling of pigs in pokes an honorable and glamorous activity. The dreamer in this dream home will perforce know nothing about the kind or quality of this food, or where it came from, or how it was produced and prepared, or what ingredients, additives, and residues it contains. Unless, that is, the dreamer undertakes a close and constant study of the food industry, in which case he or she might as well wake up and play an active and responsible part in the economy of food.
There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that neither can we be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.
But, if there is a food politics, there are also a food aesthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. “Life is not very interesting,” we seem to have decided. “Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.” We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to “recreate” ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation—for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hell-bent on increasing the “quality” of our life. And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness of the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes of the life of the body in this world.
One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertisements of the food industry, in which the food wears as much makeup as the actors. If one gained one’s whole knowledge of food—as some presumably do—from these advertisements, one would not know that the various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all come from the soil, or that they were produced by work. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier, and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.
And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reason to obscure the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer that spent much of its life standing deep in its own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the coleslaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals just as animals in close confinement are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs. . . .
The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy will remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture, and of the calf contentedly grazing, flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think it bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think, it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.
I mentioned earlier the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure—pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance—is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:
There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but of the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination
intact.
ALAN RICHMAN IS a distinguished food writer for the magazine GQ, dean of food journalism at the French Culinary Institute, and the most decorated James Beard Award winner of all time—some fourteen food journalism medals. The author of Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater, Richman has also aroused the opprobrium of Anthony Bourdain, who once wrote an essay entitled “Alan Richman Is a Douchebag.” The man who provokes such contrary opinions is a smart, knowledgeable, witty, and often authoritative food writer never afraid to assert his prejudices: he called one demolition job on a New York restaurant “Dinner for Schmucks.” For Richman, dining with a vegan is like an anthropologist examining the arcane and exotic habits of an alien people. But, as he reports here, he seems to have been quite amused when a vegan date defined honey as “bee-puke.” Bourdain once spoke of “vegetarians and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans”; though he might find it painful to concur with his nemesis, Richman probably wouldn’t disagree.
from Fork It Over: My Beef with Vegans
MY FIRST CONTACT with hard-core veganism occurred in the offices of GQ, heretofore never thought of as a breeding ground for countercultural doctrine. An editor who is a fierce vegan sent me a note urging that I repent and “see that meat eating has grim consequences that extend beyond the health of the individual omnivore.” I can see why I might not be a vegan icon, considering my predisposition to lurk hungrily in the foyers of butcher shops.
Included with his overture was a guide to veganism (“Think of all the exciting new foods you’ll be trying”) and a pamphlet entitled “101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian.” It was indeed informative. I learned that the combined weight of all the cattle on earth is greater than the combined weight of the entire human population. The solution, as I see it, is to eat more cows.
Vegans do not eat meat, of course. Nor do they admire anyone who does. They are the radical arm of the vegetarian movement, ill-tempered all the time. One of their fundamental tenets, that it is immoral to eat eggs, milk, butter, or any of the fruits of animal labor, makes them seem a few beans short of a burrito. Another of their goals, to put an end to cruelty in commercial slaughterhouses, is compelling enough to make me uncomfortable.
As they lurch between acts of insanity and acts of humanity, vegans seem no better or worse than any of our domestic extremists, the ones I do my best to ignore. What appalls me about them is that they are not content to exorcise pleasure from their own dinner tables. They insist that everybody who enjoys eating join them in their odd brand of masochism.
Not all people who decline to eat meat are like them. Macrobiotics, who share the vegan affinity for food colored unattractive shades of brown, are kindly souls who believe in the Zen principle of not irritating everybody with whom they come in contact. The way I see it, macrobiotics is the art of prolonging life, whereas veganism is the art of making life not worth prolonging. The ovo-lacto-vegetarians we see around all the time are much more tolerable. They are actually happier than most people, since all they eat are giant chocolate-chip cookies.
I’ve always felt vegans are best avoided, and they have certain attributes that make them easy to identify and evade. First is their grimness. At the vegan restaurant Angelica Kitchen, in New York’s East Village, I asked my waitress, an attractive young woman with green fingernails, for some of the best vegan pickup lines tried on her. She replied bluntly, “Vegans aren’t funny.” Another is their pallor, a minor side effect of existing on a diet that cannot sustain human life. A third is the miso stains on their hemp wear, while the fourth is the terrifying attitude they assume.
I have heard stories, all reputedly true, of the outrages perpetuated by the worst of them. A vegan invited into a home throws open the refrigerator door and announces that children are being poisoned. A vegan served honey by a kindly host denounces it as “bee puke.” A Memphis rib joint is spray-painted, the owner warned that his family could be the next to suffer. An Austin, Texas, newspaper columnist receives a death threat after poking fun at them. It would be nice to believe these are the deeds of isolated rogue vegans, but I’m skeptical. I suspect I have just made a list of what vegans consider a good time.
I myself have sat beside vegans, eaten with them, listened to the horror-movie mantra they utter lifelessly to one another upon meeting: “Where did you get your protein?” I have tales to tell, stories that would curdle the very milk vegans forbid their children to drink. The most terrible one is of a beautiful young woman I know who turned vegan and immediately fell for her yoga instructor.
Since vegan women eat nothing and are therefore as skinny as super-models, they are unusually attractive to men, but there is no sense in ordinary men pursuing them. Vegan women all fall hopelessly in love with their yoga instructors. These are spindly yet extraordinary flexible guys who project an irresistible air of serenity and piety. Yoga instructors don’t have students; they have harems. . . .
While sitting in Angelica Kitchen, an immensely popular restaurant that must gross more money than Lutèce, I said the three little words I never expected to say in a vegan restaurant. I turned to my friends and announced, “This is delicious.” I was eating marinated tofu on mixed-grain bread. The bread was an unhealthy-looking speckled brown, and while I dislike indiscriminate speckles in my food, the bread was fresh, which is not all that common in vegan restaurants. The tofu was doing no harm, which is all I ever ask of that product, the roasted carrots added a sweet crunch, and the parsley-almond pesto was vibrant. Vibrant is another word I never expected to utter in a vegan restaurant. I was almost as pleased with the soup of the day, split-pea that could not have tasted better had a beef bone been used for the stock. In my newly devised four-tier classification of vegan food, I rated both the sandwich and the soup Worth Ordering Again.
I was never quite as satisfied with anything else at Angelica Kitchen. Let me put it more precisely: I hated everything else.
I want to be fair about this. Nobody is more close-minded than me when it comes to vegetarian cuisine, regardless of whether it’s vegan, macrobiotic, or vegetarian. I think vegetarian restaurants generally prepare vegetables worse than nonvegetarian restaurants. Vegetarian restaurants have little respect for the individual properties of their ingredients, only a realization that one takes longer to get soft than another. I’ve always suspected that vegetarian chefs toss their turnips, potatoes, and cabbage into the same pot and follow a one-line recipe that reads: “Turn up the heat.”
I find vegetarian restaurants both smug and culinarily unsuccessful. Still, I have always been inclined to allow vegetarians to go about their business without interference from me. But I don’t feel quite the same about vegans. What infuriates me about them is their self-righteousness, their insistence that we miscreants give up our enjoyment of food and eat what they eat. I set out to determine if their dogma made any sense at all, if I was mistaken about the inferiority of their cuisine. To do that, I decided to eat at three of the most esteemed vegan restaurants in New York—the aforementioned Angelica Kitchen; the branch of Zen Palate located on Ninth Avenue; and Hangawi, in Midtown.
Angelica Kitchen is something of a vegetarian cliché, with insufficient room between the plain, varnished-wood tables, place settings that include chopsticks for no good reason, a friendly but ineffectual staff that might well have trained on some alien plant world, and all the staples one would expect—carrot juice, sesame sauce, miso soup, mulled apple cider, and the like. Near the entrance is a community help board offering assistance with the essentials of life, such as channeling, massage, and meditation, and a lot of notices promising rewards for the return of lost animals. Vegans seem to lose more than their share of cats.
After Worth Ordering Again, my next vegan gastronomic rating is Just Plain Bad. In that classification I place Angelica Kitchen’s three-bean chili, one of those profoundly unsuccessful attempts to make a dish that ordinarily relies on meat taste as though the meat isn’t missed. Also Just Plain Bad was the overly spiced, overly smooth hummus served with a lump of cauliflower plopped in it, a carrot-apple juice melding two incompatible flavors, and a translucent fruit-and-gelatin parfait that looked like baby food but would frighten any child who tasted it.
Making my third vegan category, Bad Beyond Belief, was a “daily seasonal special” called Scary, Posh, Baby & Sporty. It had lots of everything, including tofu sour cream, yellowed cauliflower, gnarled radishes, and what seemed to be weeds. On a second visit, my special of “baked ginger tofu triangles with udon noodles in a silky peanut sauce” arrived with sweet potatoes, broccoli, kimchi, mizuna, peanuts, and sesame seeds but without the tofu. In real cooking, unlike vegan cooking, main ingredients seldom if ever are forgotten by the kitchen.
If Angelica Kitchen satisfies the repressed hippie yearnings of the vegan community, then Zen Palate addresses a different psychological need, a longing to connect with the mystical East. The décor of the Ninth Avenue branch is surprisingly trendy, with oversize sconces, sponged walls, and dimmed lights, but any decorative effort is overwhelmed by a drab, indifferent staff. The kitchen is determined to cook food quickly rather than well, and the outerwear of customers is strewn about, making the place look like a suburban rec room on NFL game day.
I ate one dish Worth Ordering Again, a plate of delicate ravioli stuffed with a not unpleasant mixture of soy protein, bamboo shoots, and snow peas and topped with a subdued sesame-wasabi sauce. Very nearly Worth Ordering Again, but I wouldn’t, were the “sizzling medallions,” which I liked until the monotonous texture of the chewy little orange-flavored wheat-gluten blobs tired me out. Bad Beyond Belief were cardboard-like scallion pancakes with no scallion taste, pan-fried vegetable dumplings filled with a repugnant brown mash, and a dish called Dreamland. I thought Dreamland had promise. It contained deep-fried linguine, black mushrooms, and marinated ginger. This dish severely tested my karma, because after a single bite, I wanted to throw it across the room.
Hangawi, a Korean vegan restaurant, turned out to be so much more admirable than the other two places that I would put it on a totally different spiritual and culinary plane. I didn’t love what I ate there, simply because the food suffered mightily from the limitations of the vegan diet, but I did find the cooking impressive.
I approached Hangawi warily, because like most Americans, I find Korean cuisine a little too unconventional, with its emphasis on steaming, marinating, and casseroles that aren’t anything like the ones our mothers made. I yanked open the imposing outer door to the restaurant and entered a tiny anteroom. Then I had a choice to make: go forward or flee. To commit to a meal at Hangawi takes courage, for the staff confiscates your shoes, and then there is no escape. On the other hand, the polished wood floor feels really good under stocking feet.
Joining me for this meal was the vegan who fell prey to her yoga instructor. She seemed in a pleasant enough mood, particularly for a vegan, although she complained of not having had sufficient time to enjoy her usual predinner massage. She told me she’d had some really good falafel for lunch. This is how vegans normally begin a meal, by reciting the details of their previous one, a side effect of a near starvation diet. The room, appropriately serene, had polished wood tables, screens, and lots of pots and ceramics. The music was mostly that Eastern-style wailing that sounds like a soprano holding a high note.
As an aperitif, we tasted two drinks she recommended, cold pine-tree juice and hot citron-paste tea. Both were indeed delicious, and both were insanely sweet, which brings me to my fourth category of vegan cuisine: Shockingly Sweet. With no animal fat permitted in the diet and surprisingly few fried foods on menus, vegans seem to obtain almost all their pleasure from sweetness. Much of the food I sampled at Hangawi went directly to the gratification of that craving. The best dish, as it should have been, was a $29.95 plate of wild matsutaki mushrooms grilled over pine needles; the mushrooms had a clean, woodsy, earthy flavor, although I doubt they detoxified me, as promised. Vegans seem to believe that every bite they take has an immediate physiological effect on the body, while we everyday omnivores understand that it takes decades of burgers and fries to really mess us up.
MY DATE WITH A VEGAN
SHE wore a dress with spaghetti straps, quite elegant by vegan standards, in the photo that appeared in the personals section of the Veggie Singles News. I wrote to her, suggesting lunch. She responded, recommending Zenith Vegetarian Cuisine, a vegan restaurant in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. Actually, any restaurant dishing up vegan food is Hell’s Kitchen to me.
She looked lovely, head to toe. Well, maybe not her toes, since they were encased in vegan-sanctioned Payless nonleather shoes. She told me she had been on three previous dates with men who had answered her singles ad, and all of them had turned out to be vegetarians, not vegans. I was relieved to learn that there are not as many vegans out there as I had feared.
She told me she was twenty-nine, worked as a corporate travel agent, and lived in Queens with her eight-year-old daughter, who adores Chicken McNuggets. That’s as lax a brand of family veganism as I’ve ever come across. She told me she didn’t get along with the first vegetarian because he was too macho and insisted on paying for the meal. “We went out to shoot pool after dinner and I won,” she said. “That didn’t go over too well.” She said she didn’t get along with the second man because of his attitude. When they got to the restaurant and she asked him where he wanted to sit, he replied, “On your lap.”
I agreed that was an inappropriate comment for vegans and vegetarians alike.
She said he was an Israeli.
I told her that was a pretty typical comment for an Israeli.
Her third date was the most promising, but the budding relationship stalled when he started lecturing her on the breakdown of the American family, how every household needs a man. This is not an approach recommended to anyone attempting to charm a woman who is a single parent.
I wished her the best of luck in future dating endeavors and warned her about the seductive powers of the vegan yoga instructors she was certain to meet. She promised she would ask my advice before she ever went out with a “crazy nut-job yoga instructor.”
I had done my duty. If I can save even one woman from one of them, I will have left the vegan world a better place.
AS long as there have been vegans, I have looked upon them as persons with whom I would not want to break bread—actually, one bite of the revoltingly dry corn bread at Angelica Kitchen should be enough to make even vegans not want to break bread with vegans.
I have now changed my mind. I had a lovely lunch with the woman who placed her advertisement in the Veggie Single News and would eat with her again, as long as she didn’t order the “eggplant chips” at Zenith. I had a nice dinner with my friend at Hangawi, but she was my friend before turning to veganism and so we could talk about the old days, before her life centered around tofu.
I’m not even certain any longer that vegans are the worst people who have ever lived. After all, Adolf Hitler was merely a vegetarian.
HISTORIAN RACHEL LAUDAN was born and raised on a farm in Wiltshire, a locale she has described as a sort of Arcadia. She has taught at various universities and lived in Mexico and Hawaii, writing about her investigations of the cuisine in those cultures. Her recent work has focused on the falsely sentimental “nostalgia” she sees as shaping the Slow Food Movement; in various influential essays she has argued against the positions taken by Michael Pollan and others whose works she regards as fantasizing about the culinary past. Her latest book is an ambitious volume titled Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History.
from A Plea for Culinary Modernism
MODERN, FAST, PROCESSED food is a disaster. That, at least, is the message conveyed by newspapers and magazines, on televison cooking programs, and in prizewinning cookbooks. It is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and supermarket bread while yearning for stone-ground flour and brick ovens; to seek out heirloom apples and pumpkins while despising modern tomatoes and hybrid corn; to be hostile to agronomists who develop high-yielding modern crops and to home economists who invent new recipes for General Mills. We hover between ridicule and shame when we remember how our mothers and grandmothers enthusiastically embraced canned and frozen foods. We nod in agreement when the waiter proclaims that the restaurant showcases the freshest local produce. We shun Wonder Bread and Coca-Cola. Above all, we loathe the great culminating symbol of Culinary Modernism, McDonald’s—modern, fast, homogenous, and international.
Like so many of my generation, my culinary style was created by those who scorned industrialized food; Culinary Luddites, we may call them, after the English hand workers of the nineteenth century who abhorred the machines that were destroying their traditional way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our store cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic flavorings.” I progressed to the Time-Life Good Cook series and to Simple French Food, in which Richard Olney hoped against hope that “the reins of stubborn habit are strong enough to frustrate the famous industrial revolution for some time to come.” I turned to Paula Wolfert to learn more about Mediterranean cooking and was assured that I wouldn’t “find a dishonest dish in this book. . . . The food here is real food . . . the real food of real people.” Today I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “Savor a world of authentic cuisine.”
Culinary Luddism involves more than just taste. Since the days of the counterculture, it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade. Now in Boston, the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust works to provide “a scientific basis for the preservation and revitalization of traditional diets.” Meanwhile, Slow Food, founded in 1989 to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, is a self-described Greenpeace for Food; its manifesto begins, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods. . . . Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.” As one of its spokesmen was reported as saying in the New York Times, “Our real enemy is the obtuse consumer.”
At this point I begin to back off. I want to cry, “Enough!” But why? Why would I, who learned to cook from Culinary Luddites, who grew up in a family that, in Elizabeth David’s words, produced their “own home-cured bacon, ham and sausages . . . churned their own butter, fed their chickens and geese, cherished their fruit trees, skinned and cleaned their own hares” (well, to be honest, not the geese and sausages), not rejoice at the growth of Culinary Luddism? Why would I (or anyone else) want to be thought “an obtuse consumer”? Or admit to preferring unreal food for unreal people? Or to savoring inauthentic cuisine?
The answer is not far to seek: because I am a historian. As a historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by Culinary Luddism, a past sharply divided between good and bad, between the sunny rural days of yore and the grey industrial present. My enthusiasm for the Luddites’ kitchen wisdom does not carry over to their history, any more than my response to a stirring political speech inclines me to accept the orator as scholar. The Luddites’ fable of disaster, of a fall from grace, smacks more of wishful thinking than of digging through archives. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast; artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated and fatty. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.
That food should be fresh and natural has become an article of faith. It comes as something of a shock to realize that this is a latter-day creed. For our ancestors, natural was something quite nasty. Natural often tasted bad. Fresh meat was rank and tough, fresh milk warm and unmistakably a bodily excretion; fresh fruits (dates and grapes being rare exceptions outside the tropics) were inedibly sour, fresh vegetables bitter. Even today, natural can be a shock when we actually encounter it. When Jacques Pépin offered free-range chickens to friends, they found “the flesh tough and the flavor too strong,” prompting him to wonder whether they would really like things the way they naturally used to be.
Natural was unreliable. Fresh fish began to stink, fresh milk soured, eggs went rotten. Everywhere seasons of plenty were followed by seasons of hunger when the days were short, the weather turned cold, or the rain did not fall. Hens stopped laying eggs, cows went dry, fruits and vegetables were not to be found, fish could not be caught in the stormy seas. Natural was usually indigestible. Grains, which supplied from fifty to ninety percent of the calories in most societies, have to be threshed, ground, and cooked to make them edible. Other plants, including the roots and tubers that were the life support of the societies that did not eat grains, are often downright poisonous. Without careful processing, green potatoes, stinging taro, and cassava bitter with prussic acid are not just indigestible, but toxic.
Nor did our ancestors’ physiological theories dispose them to the natural. Until about two hundred years ago, from China to Europe, and in Mesoamerica, too, everyone believed that the fires in the belly cooked foodstuffs and turned them into nutrients. That was what digesting was. Cooking foods in effect pre-digested them and made them easier to assimilate. Given a choice, no one would burden the stomach with raw, unprocessed foods.
So to make food tasty, safe, digestible and healthy, our forebears bred, ground, soaked, leached, curdled, fermented, and cooked naturally occurring plants and animals until they were literally beaten into submission. To lower toxin levels, they cooked plants, treated them with clay (the Kaopectate effect), and leached them with water, acid fruits and vinegars, and alkaline lye. They intensively bred maize to the point that it could not reproduce without human help. They created sweet oranges and juicy apples and non-bitter legumes, happily abandoning their more natural but less tasty ancestors. They built granaries for their grain, dried their meat and their fruit, salted and smoked their fish, curdled and fermented their dairy products, and cheerfully used whatever additives and preservatives they could—sugar, salt, oil, vinegar, lye—to make edible foodstuffs. In the twelfth century, the Chinese sage Wu Tzu-mu listed the six foodstuffs essential to life: rice, salt, vinegar, soy sauce, oil, and tea. Four had been unrecognizably transformed from their naturally occurring state. Who could have imagined vinegar as rice that had been fermented to ale and then soured? Or soy sauce as cooked and fermented beans? Or oil as the extract of crushed cabbage seeds? Or bricks of tea as leaves that had been killed by heat, powdered, and compressed? Only salt and rice had any claim to fresh or natural, and even then the latter had been stored for months or years, threshed, and husked.
Processed and preserved foods kept well, were easier to digest, and were delicious: raised white bread instead of chewy wheat porridge; thick, nutritious, heady beer instead of prickly grains of barley; unctuous olive oil instead of a tiny, bitter fruit; soy milk, sauce, and tofu instead of dreary, flatulent soy beans; flexible, fragrant tortillas instead of dry, tough maize; not to mention red wine, blue cheese, sauerkraut, hundred-year-old eggs, Smithfield hams, smoked salmon, yogurt, sugar, chocolate, and fish sauce.
Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror, something to which only the uncivilized, the poor, and the starving resorted. When the compiler of the Confucian classic Book of Rites (ca. 200 B.C.) distinguished the first humans—people who had no alternative to wild, uncooked foods—from civilized peoples who took “advantage of the benefits of fire . . . [who] toasted, grilled, boiled, and roasted,” he was only repeating a commonplace. When the ancient Greeks took it as a sign of bad times if people were driven to eat greens and root vegetables, they too were rehearsing common wisdom. Happiness was not a verdant Garden of Eden abounding in fresh fruits, but a securely locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods.
Local food was greeted with about as much enthuasiasm as fresh and natural. Local foods were the lot of the poor who could neither escape the tyranny of local climate and biology nor the monotonous, often precarious, diet it afforded. Meanwhile, the rich, in search of a more varied diet, bought, stole, wheedled, robbed, taxed, and ran off with appealing plants and animals, foodstuffs, and culinary techniques from wherever they could find them. . . .
By the standard measures of health and nutrition—life expectancy and height—our ancestors were far worse off than we are. Much of the blame was due to the diet, exacerbated by living conditions and infections which affect the body’s ability to use the food that is ingested. No amount of nostalgia for the pastoral foods of the distant past can wish away the fact that our ancestors lived mean, short lives, constantly afflicted with diseases, many of which can be directly attributed to what they did and did not eat.
Historical myths, though, can mislead as much by what they don’t say as by what they do. Culinary Luddites typically gloss over the moral problems intrinsic to the labor of producing and preparing food. In 1800, ninety-five percent of the Russian population and eighty percent of the French lived in the country; in other words, they spent their days getting food on the table for themselves and other people. A century later, eighty-eight percent of Russians, eighty-five percent of Greeks, and over fifty percent of the French were still on the land. Traditional societies were aristocratic, made up of the many who toiled to produce, process, preserve, and prepare food, and the few who, supported by the limited surplus, could do other things.
In the great kitchens of the few—royalty, aristocracy, and rich merchants—cooks created elaborate cuisines. The cuisines drove home the power of the mighty few with a symbol that everyone understood: ostentatious shows of more food than the powerful could possibly consume. Feasts were public occasions for the display of power, not private occasions for celebration, for enjoying food for food’s sake. The poor were invited to watch, groveling as the rich gorged themselves. Louis xiv was exploiting a tradition going back to the Roman Empire when he encouraged spectators at his feasts. Sometimes, to hammer home the point while amusing the court, the spectators were let loose on the leftovers. “The destruction of so handsome an arrangement served to give another agreeable entertainment to the court,” observed a commentator, “by the alacrity and disorder of those who demolished these castles of marzipan, and these mountains of preserved fruit.”
Meanwhile, most men were born to a life of labor in the fields, most women to a life of grinding, chopping, and cooking. “Servitude,” said my mother as she prepared home-cooked breakfast, dinner, and tea for eight to ten people three hundred and sixty-five days a year. She was right. Churning butter and skinning and cleaning hares, without the option of picking up the phone for a pizza if something goes wrong, is unremitting, unforgiving toil. Perhaps, though, my mother did not realize how much worse her lot might have been. She could at least buy our bread from the bakery. In Mexico, at the same time, women without servants could expect to spend five hours a day—one third of their waking hours—kneeling at the grindstone preparing the dough for the family’s tortillas. Not until the 1950s did the invention of the tortilla machine release them from the drudgery.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it looked as if the distinction between gorgers and grovelers would worsen. Between 1575 and 1825 world population had doubled from 500 million to a billion, and it was to double again by 1925. Malthus sounded his dire predictions. The poor, driven by necessity or government mandate, resorted to basic foods that produced bountifully even if they were disliked: maize and sweet potatoes in China and Japan, maize in Italy, Spain, and Romania, potatoes in northern Europe. They eked out an existence on porridges or polentas of oats or maize, on coarse breads of rye or barley bulked out with chaff or even clay and ground bark, and on boiled potatoes; they saw meat only on rare occasions. The privation continued. In Europe, 1840 was a year of hunger, best remembered now as the time of the devastating potato famine of Ireland. Meanwhile, the rich continued to indulge, feasting on white bread, meats, rich fatty sauces, sweet desserts, exotic hothouse-grown pineapples, wine, and tea, coffee, and chocolate drunk from fine china. In 1845, shortly after revolutions had rocked Europe, the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli described “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy . . . who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners and are not governed by the same laws . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR.”
In the nick of time, in the 1880s, the industrialization of food got under way long after the production of other common items of consumption, such as textiles and clothing, had been mechanized. Farmers brought new land into production, utilized reapers and later tractors and combines, spread more fertilizer, and by the 1930s began growing hybrid maize. Steamships and trains brought fresh and canned meats, fruits, vegetables, and milk to the growing towns. Instead of starving, the poor of the industrialized world survived and thrived. In Britain the retail price of food in a typical workman’s budget fell by a third between 1877 and 1887 (though he would still spend seventy-one percent of his income on food and drink). In 1898 in the United States a dollar bought forty-two percent more milk, fifty-one percent more coffee, a third more beef, twice as much sugar, and twice as much flour as in 1872. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the British working class were drinking sugary tea from china teacups and eating white bread spread with jam and margarine, canned meats, canned pineapple, and an orange from the Christmas stocking.
To us, the cheap jam, the margarine, and the starchy diet look pathetic. Yet white bread did not cause the “weakness, indigestion, or nausea” that coarse whole wheat bread did when it supplied most of the calories (not a problem for us since we never consume it in such quantities). Besides, it was easier to detect stretchers such as sawdust in white bread. Margarine and jam made the bread more attractive and easier to swallow. Sugar tasted good, and hot tea in an unheated house in mid-winter provided good cheer. For those for whom fruit had been available, if at all, only from June to October, canned pineapple and a Christmas orange were treats to be relished. For the diners, therefore, the meals were a dream come true, a first step away from a coarse, monotonous diet and the constant threat of hunger, even starvation.
Nor should we think it was only the British, not famed for their cuisine, who were delighted with industrialized foods. Everyone was, whether American, Asian, African, or European. In the first half of the twentieth century, Italians embraced factory-made pasta and canned tomatoes. In the second half of the century, Japanese women welcomed factory-made bread because they could sleep in a little longer instead of having to get up to make rice. Similarly, Mexicans seized on bread as a good food to have on hand when there was no time to prepare tortillas. Working women in India are happy to serve commercially made bread during the week, saving the time-consuming business of making chapatis for the weekend. As supermarkets appeared in Eastern Europe and Russia, housewives rejoiced at the choice and convenience of ready-made goods. For all, Culinary Modernism had provided what was wanted: food that was processed, preservable, industrial, novel, and fast, the food of the elite at a price everyone could afford. Where modern food became available, populations grew taller and stronger, had fewer diseases, and lived longer. Men had choices other than hard agricultural labor, women other than kneeling at the metate five hours a day.
So the sunlit past of the Culinary Luddites never existed. So their ethos is based not on history but on a fairy tale. So what? Perhaps we now need this culinary philosophy. Certainly no one would deny that an industrialized food supply has its own problems, problems we hear about every day. Perhaps we should eat more fresh, natural, local, artisanal, slow food. Why not create a historical myth to further that end? The past is over and gone. Does it matter if the history is not quite right?
It matters quite a bit, I believe. If we do not understand that most people had no choice but to devote their lives to growing and cooking food, we are incapable of comprehending that the foods of Culinary Modernism—egalitarian, available more or less equally to all, without demanding the disproportionate amount of the resources of time or money that traditional foodstuffs did—allow us unparalleled choices not just of diet but of what to do with our lives. If we urge the Mexican to stay at her metate, the farmer to stay at his olive press, the housewife to stay at her stove instead of going to McDonald’s, all so that we may eat handmade tortillas, traditionally pressed olive oil, and home-cooked meals, we are assuming the mantle of the aristocrats of old. We are reducing the options of others as we attempt to impose our elite culinary preferences on the rest of the population.
Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things. We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us to how to use the bounty delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy. Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it, an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor, and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time.
A PROFESSOR OF comparative literature at the University of Texas, San Antonio, Kellman has written or edited numerous volumes, including The Translingual Imagination (2000) and Redemption (2005), a prize-winning biography of the novelist Henry Roth. Kellman writes literary journalism regularly for a range of newspapers and has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. In our selection, he offers a lively history of vegetarianism while explaining with verve and wit why, as a committed vegan, he prefers not to eat what George Bernard Shaw called “the scorched corpses of animals.”
from Fish, Flesh, and Foul:
The Anti-Vegetarian Animus
GIVING UP FLESH is not nearly as traumatic as giving up the ghost. Although thousands have been martyred for their refusal to eat meat, vegetarians today suffer merely a species of social death. Stop eating what George Bernard Shaw, a recovered carnivore, called “scorched corpses of animals” and you become either the pariah or the cynosure of the dinner party, either barred or badgered over culinary preferences. “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,” declared the French gourmet Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, not the first or last to demand a full accounting of a stranger’s diet. Determined to minimize suffering, I ate my last hamburger almost thirty years ago, but I still am often grilled about who I think I am.
What about the pain you cause to carrots? Do you get enough protein and vitamin B12? Are you willing to provide sanctuary to endangered cockroaches? In a dog-eat-dog world, why deny yourself the savor of a wiener? Would you be so self-righteous if you were stranded in the Sierras with the Donners? . . .
VEGETARIANISM has a history, stretching into the Paleolithic mists when, hunting and gathering, Homo sapiens distinguished himself from most other hominids by feeding on flesh. Opportunistic organisms, humans eat everything, though the invention of Alka-Seltzer is a caveat that maybe we should not. Yet, according to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve never needed flesh and blood to sustain themselves in the Garden of Eden; and Ovid—like Raphael in Milton’s Paradise Lost—imagined a Golden Age in which butchery would not be a precondition for nutrition. Ambrosia and nectar were sustenance enough for the Greek gods, and in the Homeric “Hymn to Hermes,” the messenger of Mount Olympus resisted the temptation to feast on meat, lest it make him mortal. Though it is moot whether Socrates and Plato themselves partook of meat at the banquets they attended, the ideal state imagined in The Republic is a vegetopia. Many other ancient writers, including Empedocles, Plotinus, Plutarch, Porphyry, Seneca, and Theophrastus, fixed their canons and appetites against slaughter, and the original Epicurean, Epicurus himself, found pleasure in forgoing flesh. Pythagoras’s regimen, which, for obscure reasons, banned beans as well as meat, was so exemplary that for more than two thousand years those who abstained at least from flesh were called Pythagoreans. The word vegetarian—from vegetus, Latin for sound, whole, vital—was not coined until 1847, at the founding of the Vegetarian Society of the UK in Ramsgate, England. But shadowing this history, like a fungus on a cantaloupe, is a chronicle of animosity—a persistent record of misunderstanding, mistrust, and misbehavior toward those who refuse to consume fish, flesh, or fowl. Vegephobia blights Greek comedies of the third and fourth centuries that satirize Pythagoras, and it persists in belligerent banter by the dinner-party smart-ass intent on discrediting guests who prefer aubergine in tomato to vitello tonnato. . . .
“Vegetables are interesting,” quipped the humorist Fran Lebowitz, “but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.” Such cracks are merely obnoxious; ridicule is the tribute that carnivores pay Pythagoreans. More genuinely noxious was the mob of butchers and bakers who rioted in Boston in 1837 when Sylvester Graham, Presbyterian minister and the inventor of an eponymous cracker, preached against the evils of abattoirs and white flour. It is one thing to declare—as the senior George Bush (who advertised his populist tastes by munching publicly on fried pork rinds) did in 1986—one’s abhorrence of broccoli. . . . But it is quite another matter to crucify those who feed on crucifers.
In 276 A.D., Mani, founder of the religious movement that bore his name, was tortured and executed by the Sasanian rulers of Persia for trying to convert them to his unorthodox ways, which were meatless. A century later, Timothy, the Patriarch of Alexandria, was so fearful that Manichaeanism might infiltrate Christendom that he exacted taste tests of his clergy; those who refused to eat meat were presumed Manichaean and punished severely. The dualism of the Manichaeans disturbed the early fathers more than their asceticism, but both challenged church dogma and authority, and it was easy to seize on vegetarianism as both a symptom and an assertion of heresy. Despite the best efforts of Augustine, himself a lapsed Manichaean, the doctrine was not entirely eradicated, and when it resurfaced in the eleventh century with the steak-spurning Bogomils, many were in fact burned at the stake. . . .
DESPITE centuries of persecution, vegetarianism has survived. Vegetarians, less vulnerable to heart disease, stroke, cancer, and other ills that flesh eaters are heir to, have thrived. According to the adage, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, and according to much current research, meat can be toxic to a man or woman. Though a Jewish proverb insists that “meat, not hay, makes the lion roar,” many humans whom we lionize have disagreed. Vegetarianism has not impeded the athletic achievements of Hank Aaron, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova, Paavo Nurmi, Dave Scott, or Bill Walton. Though Victor Frankenstein’s gentle creature ate no flesh, it is also true that Adolf Hitler gave up meat shortly after the suspicious death of his niece Geli Raubal in 1931. Yet so have many finer ethical minds, including Gautama Buddha, Leonardo da Vinci, John Wesley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Susan B. Anthony, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Franz Kafka, S. Y. Agnon, Albert Schweitzer, and Cesar Chavez. “For the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka,” observed Isaac Bashevis Singer, who refused to be complicit in the culinary holocaust. Vincent van Gogh became a vegetarian after visiting a slaughterhouse, and so would many others if meat were less convenient—or were not packaged in savory patties and cutlets that obscure their bloody origins.
“Animals are my friends,” explained Shaw, “and I don’t eat my friends.” Animals are not necessarily my friends, but I do not feast on sentient strangers either. Nor do I exploit them. As a vegan (a word coined in 1944, for a practice that goes back to ancient times), I avoid all animal products, including dairy, eggs, and leather. . . .
“I want there to be no peasant in my realm so poor that he will not have a chicken in his pot every Sunday,” proclaimed Henri IV. If the Bourbon monarch’s wish had been their command, every subject would have been conscripted as a carnivore. Echoing Henri IV, Herbert Hoover was elected president of the United States in 1928 with the slogan “A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage.” . . . Politicians have little to gain and, owing to the corporate clout of those who process and market animal carcasses, much to lose by publicly embracing vegetarianism. Even heavyweight Mike Tyson cannot match the clout of a lobbyist for the Tyson poultry empire. The ritual demand of any national election is that candidates sample the cuisines of the regions and ethnic groups whose support they are seeking, and they score best sharing meat: fajitas, kielbasa, gumbo, pastrami, ribs, fried chicken, prosciutto. The road to the White House is paved with the bones of slaughtered beasts. On the quintessential American holiday, Thanksgiving, any national leader who does not devour a turkey may be thought seditious. . . .
YET vegetarians are not such rare birds. The Vegetarian Times estimates that 12.5 million Americans are vegetarians. . . .
In Britain, where the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, a model for humane organizations in other countries, was founded in 1824 and where animal rights agitation has a longer and more strident history than anywhere else in the West, vegetarianism is more commonplace. Even in provincial English village pubs. . . .
A 1998 poll found that 7 percent of Britons agreed with the statement: “I am a vegetarian and eat no meat at all.” And since the prospect of pestilence tends to concentrate the mind, incidents of mad cow disease, E. coli, and salmonella have provided additional incentives to avoid red meat and poultry. The founding of the Carnivores Club in London in 1996, in the midst of the European crisis over British beef, was an act of bravado that defied the patent logic of vegetarianism. So, too, did Auberon Waugh, when, in a 1999 article in the Daily Telegraph, he railed against “the vegetarian underground, a worldwide conspiracy of animal sentimentalists working in secret, or under deep cover, using our traditional class and regional animosities to promote its repulsive cause.”
“Vegetarian underground” sounds like a mushroom factory, and whatever movement there is to encourage abstention from meat is not nearly as organized or as potent as the culture of carnivorism. Dining on chops is firmly rooted in the patriarchy. “Beefeater” is the name the English apply to the hardy, valiant yeomen of the guard, as if meat were implicit in masculinity. William Cody acquired his manly reputation and his nickname—Buffalo Bill—by slaying thousands of burly beasts. In the sexual ecology of the dinner table, salads are “lady food,” unlike steaks and roasts. According to the historian Todd L. Savitt, male slaves in antebellum Virginia were fed twice as much meat as their female counterparts. During World War I, meat was withheld from civilian women in order to provide a steady supply for fighting men. A meat-and-potatoes man is a redundancy, since, echoing cannibalistic cultures in which warriors acquire strength by devouring their foes, males nourish and affirm their virility by consuming flesh. If, like butcher shops, taverns are a man’s domain, salad bar is an oxymoron.
Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, announced Bruce Feirstein in a 1982 bestseller that spoofed the culture’s paradigm of yahoo machismo. “Real Men,” wrote Feirstein, “avoid all members of the wimp food group, including crudités, lemon mousse, crêpes, avocado, capons, chives, shrimp dip, and fruit compote.” . . . In the demographics of vegetarianism there is a notable gender gap. Women constitute a disproportionate share of the population of Pythagoreans. In the survey that found Britain 7 percent vegetarian, the figure was 10 percent for women but only 4 percent for men. In a 1997 Roper Poll in which 5 percent of Americans claimed never to eat red meat, the figure was 6 percent for women and only 4 percent for men. A man who chooses ratatouille over ribs risks aspersions over his sexual identity, as though swallowing compote earned one the derogatory epithet “fruit.” . . .
FOR most of European history, meat has been a mark of power and privilege and a rare delicacy for the peasantry. The origins of “pecuniary” in pecus, the Latin word for herd, and of “capital” in capita, Latin for head (of cattle), are a reminder that meat was long a measure of wealth. Monks renounced flesh, to demonstrate their indifference to worldly advantage, and it was not until the twentieth century, when Colonel Sanders catered to the civilian infantry and even soup kitchens put a chicken in the pot, that the implications of flesh for class were reversed. Now the gentry sups on arugula, while plebeians munch meat loaf. . . .
Standards of decency change, and arbiters of etiquette have since adopted a more decent respect for the opinions of noncarnivorous mankind. “Dieters and teetotalers should never feel it necessary to eat anything that is injurious to their health or contrary to their moral standards,” insists Emily Post. “If you are, for example, a vegetarian, you need not feel obliged to taste the roast.” And Peggy Post, advising hosts, also counsels toleration: “When you’re planning a larger party, you needn’t ask each guest about food restrictions, but to be on the safe side, make sure you include some ‘neutral’ dishes such as a vegetable platter, pasta with meatless sauce, and fresh fruit for dessert. That way, everybody will find something he or she enjoys.” If every host was required to read the Posts, vegetarianism would be less a matter of social martyrdom.
Manners were not minded in January 1998, when vegetarianism was put on trial in Amarillo, Texas. Oprah Winfrey was charged with violating the state’s food defamation law. During one of her TV shows in April 1996, vegetarian activist Howard Lyman had warned about the spread of mad cow disease into American herds. Oprah replied: “It has just stopped me cold from eating another burger.” After her statement was aired, the market for cattle dropped by about $36 million. Instead of a posse, angry ranchers organized a lawsuit. But the not-guilty verdict affirmed the rights of Americans, even in Texas, to avow in public their aversion to beef. . . .
It has long been easy to dismiss vegetarians as tender, feckless folk—like those who with Bronson Alcott created Fruitlands, the meat-free commune in nineteenth-century Massachusetts that lasted only seven months. They seem as quixotic as Esperantists, who plot world peace by evangelizing for a single artificial language. In fact, some Esperantists and vegetarians have been making gentle common cause since 1906, when they formed Tutmonda Esperantista Vegetariana Asocio.
Yet vegetarians today are more assertive. Many are no longer willing to settle for celery or gruel in schools, prisons, and restaurants. Airlines report an increase in requests for special meals. Passengers who reserve vegetarian entrées for their trips often draw envious stares from those nearby, who are forced to sate their appetites with standard fare. Airline food has probably done more than Leo Tolstoy to persuade our neighbors to pass up meat. . . .
BUT if vegetarianism has become more prominent and popular, it has also provoked a new backlash, one that differs from familiar strategies of ridicule and ostracism only in its defensiveness. Like determined smokers who continue to puff long after tobacco has been proved lethal, some meat-eaters protest too much. In Eat Fat (1996), for example, Richard Klein attacks what Orwell might call the food police, the voices heard throughout the land that inveigh against pandemic obesity. . . . Jeffrey Steingarten, too, attempts to stigmatize vegetarianism as a derangement. In The Man Who Ate Everything (1997), he celebrates his own omnivorousness and declares: “The more I contemplated food phobias, the more I became convinced that people who habitually avoid certifiably delicious foods are at least as troubled as people who avoid sex, or take no pleasure from it, except that the latter will probably seek psychiatric help, while food phobics rationalize their problem in the name of genetic inheritance, allergy, vegetarianism, matters of taste, nutrition, food safety, obesity, or a sensitive nature.” Lacking evidence of meat’s benefits for physical health, Steingarten and Klein presume that vegetarianism is harmful to mental health. Ignoring the ethical claims of vegetarianism, they can more easily dismiss it as dementia.
Assigned by a muckraking weekly called Appeal to Reason to investigate working conditions in the Chicago stockyards, Upton Sinclair was converted to vegetarianism—for merely three years, admittedly—by observing the process by which living animals are transformed into food. “One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog squeal of the universe,” he wrote in The Jungle, the novel that provoked passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. But Sinclair, who was more interested in the rights of workers than those of cattle, was disappointed at instigating food reform rather than industrial revolution. “I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” he complained.
Yet the stomach is a more reliable organ. About as virtuous as the penis, the heart can lead us into bloody deeds, but the belly is a moral compass. Haunted by the hog squeal of the world, I will not stomach nourishment that requires processing pigs into pork, calves into veal, and turkeys into drumsticks. Foie gras might be deemed a delicacy, but my conscience is too delicate to countenance any sustenance that is obtained by thrusting a spike down the throat of a living goose. It is an ichthyophagist’s self-serving fantasy that, as the StarKist ad contends, Charlie the Tuna yearns to be hooked, canned, and chewed. Kraft Foods would have us believe that the noblest avatar of a cow is the hot dog: “Oh I wish I was an Oscar Mayer wiener, for that is what I’d really like to be,” goes the genial jingle, but the reality is much crueler. . . .
Once, in a remote foreign capital, a dinner was held in my honor. To salute my presence in their country, the hosts set out on my plate a whole roast suckling pig. I stared at the unfortunate creature, a victim of brutal culinary customs, and he stared back. Though the pig was the evening’s pièce de résistance, I managed to resist. It was better to risk puzzling or antagonizing my benefactors than to bear forever the guilt of slaying a shoat. No human need eat meat, and we most honor our humanity when we do not.
THE ITALIAN FOUNDER of the enormously influential Slow Food Movement, Petrini first came to notice through his opposition to the quintessential fast food icon McDonald’s when it sought to open a branch near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In 2004 he founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont, seeking to bridge gastronomy and agriculture. In the same way, the Slow Food Movement aims to preserve traditional methods of farming, heirloom seeds and plants, even traditional breeds of livestock; and it has been a major force in combating genetic engineering and pesticides, as well as in alerting consumers to the dangers of factory farms. Through Petrini’s assiduous campaigning for its principles, the movement now has chapters worldwide and sponsors a biannual conference in Turin that brings together sympathetic farmers, producers, and food writers.
BORN AND NURTURED under the sign of Industrialization, this century first invented the machine and then modeled its lifestyle after it. Speed became our shackles. We fell prey to the same virus: the fast life that fractures our customs and assails us even in our own homes, forcing us to ingest “fast-food.”
Homo sapiens must regain wisdom and liberate itself from the “velocity” that is propelling it on the road to extinction. Let us defend ourselves against the universal madness of “the fast life” with tranquil material pleasure.
Against those—or, rather, the vast majority—who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of an adequate portion of sensual gourmandise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment.
Appropriately, we will start in the kitchen, with Slow Food. To escape the tediousness of “fast-food,” let us rediscover the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisines.
In the name of productivity, the “fast life” has changed our lifestyle and now threatens our environment and our land (and city) scapes. Slow Food is the alternative, the avant-garde’s riposte.
Real culture is here to be found. First of all, we can begin by cultivating taste, rather than impoverishing it, by stimulating progress, by encouraging international exchange programs, by endorsing worthwhile projects, by advocating historical food culture and by defending old-fashioned food traditions.
Slow Food assures us of a better-quality lifestyle. With a snail purposely chosen as its patron and symbol, it is an idea and a way of life that needs much sure but steady support.
A BEST-SELLING NOVELIST whose books include The Bean Trees, The Poisonwood Bible, and The Prodigal Summer, Kingsolver has always been concerned with the way human communities and natural ecology define our culture. To apply these issues to their own lives, she and her family moved in 2005 to a farm they inherited in Virginia, where they embarked on a year-long experiment: to raise almost all their own food, or at least to obtain from local farmers and neighbors what they could not raise themselves. Becoming passionate locavores, they not only rejected supermarket culture but threw themselves into farm life with all its gratifications and hard work. For a year their soil and their kitchen were the center of their existence. The resulting book, which includes contributions by Kingsolver’s husband and teenage daughter, tells how they raised their own chickens, learned about seeds, and evolved into a one-family slow food movement as they sought to preserve heritage crops from extinction. In our selection from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Kingsolver confronts the age-old problem of killing other beings in order to eat them. Her moral commitment is to raise each animal in the most benign of conditions and to show respect for the creature she has bred and is about to harvest.
from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:
You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day
SEPTEMBER
THE Saturday of Labor Day weekend dawned with a sweet, translucent bite, like a Golden Delicious apple. I always seem to harbor a childlike hope through the berry-stained months of June and July that summer will be for keeps. But then a day comes in early fall to remind me why it should end, after all. In September the quality of daylight shifts toward flirtation. The green berries on the spicebush shrubs along our lane begin to blink red, first one and then another, like faltering but resolute holiday lights. The woods fill with the restless singing of migrant birds warming up to the proposition of flying south. The cool air makes us restless too: jeans and sweater weather, perfect for a hike. Steven and I rose early that morning, looked out the window, looked at each other, and started in on the time-honored marital grumble: Was this your idea?
We weren’t going on a hike today. Nor would we have the postsummer Saturday luxury of sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee and watching the farm wake up. On the docket instead was a hard day of work we could not postpone. The previous morning we’d sequestered half a dozen roosters and as many tom turkeys in a room of the barn we call “death row.” We hold poultry there, clean and comfortable with water but no food, for a twenty-four-hour fast prior to harvest. It makes the processing cleaner and seems to calm the animals also. I could tell you it gives them time to get their emotional affairs in order, if that helps. But they have limited emotional affairs, and no idea what’s coming.
We had a lot more of both. Our plan for this gorgeous day was the removal of some of our animals from the world of the living into the realm of food. At five months of age our roosters had put on a good harvest weight, and had lately opened rounds of cockfighting, venting their rising hormonal angst against any moving target, including us. When a rooster flies up at you with his spurs, he leaves marks. Lily now had to arm herself with a length of pipe in order to gather the eggs. Our barnyard wasn’t big enough for this much machismo. We would certainly take no pleasure in the chore, but it was high time for the testosterone-reduction program. We sighed at the lovely weather and pulled out our old, bloody sneakers for harvest day.
THERE was probably a time when I thought it euphemistic to speak of “harvesting” animals. Now I don’t. We calculate “months to harvest” when planning for the right time to start poultry. We invite friends to “harvest parties,” whether we’ll be gleaning vegetable or animal. A harvest implies planning, respect, and effort. With animals, both the planning and physical effort are often greater, and respect for the enterprise is substantially more complex. It’s a lot less fun than spending an autumn day picking apples off trees, but it’s a similar operation on principle and the same word.
Killing is a culturally loaded term, for most of us inextricably tied up with some version of a command that begins, “Thou shalt not.” Every faith has it. And for all but perhaps the Jainists of India, that command is absolutely conditional. We know it does not refer to mosquitoes. Who among us has never killed living creatures on purpose? When a child is sick with an infection we rush for the medicine spoon, committing an eager and purposeful streptococcus massacre. We sprinkle boric acid or grab a spray can to rid our kitchens of cockroaches. What we mean by “killing” is to take a life cruelly, as in murder—or else more accidentally as in “Oops, looks like I killed my African violet.” Though the results are incomparable, what these different “killings” have in common is needless waste and some presumed measure of regret.
Most of us, if we know even a little about where our food comes from, understand that every bite put into our mouths since infancy (barring the odd rock or marble) was formerly alive. The blunt biological truth is that we animals can only remain alive by eating other life. Plants are inherently more blameless, having been born with the talent of whipping up their own food, peacefully and without noise, out of sunshine, water, and the odd mineral ingredient sucked up through their toes. Strangely enough, it’s the animals to which we’ve assigned some rights, while the saintly plants we maim and behead with moral impunity. Who thinks to beg forgiveness while mowing the lawn?
The moral rules of destroying our fellow biota get even more tangled, the deeper we go. If we draw the okay-to-kill line between “animal” and “plant,” and thus exclude meat, fowl, and fish from our diet on moral grounds, we still must live with the fact that every sack of flour and every soybean-based block of tofu came from a field where countless winged and furry lives were extinguished in the plowing, cultivating, and harvest. An estimated 67 million birds die each year from pesticide exposure on U.S. farms. Butterflies, too, are universally killed on contact in larval form by the genetically modified pollen contained in most U.S. corn. Foxes, rabbits, and bobolinks are starved out of their homes or dismembered by the sickle mower. Insects are “controlled” even by organic pesticides; earthworms are cut in half by the plow. Contrary to lore, they won’t grow into two; both halves die.
To believe we can live without taking life is delusional. Humans may only cultivate nonviolence in our diets by degree. I’ve heard a Buddhist monk suggest the number of food-caused deaths is minimized in steak dinners, which share one death over many meals, whereas the equation is reversed for a bowl of clams. Others of us have lost heart for eating any steak dinner that’s been shoved through the assembly line of feedlot life—however broadly we might share that responsibility. I take my gospel from Wendell Berry, who writes in What Are People For?, “I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants.”
I find myself fundamentally allied with a vegetarian position in every way except one: however selectively, I eat meat. I’m unimpressed by arguments that condemn animal harvest while ignoring, wholesale, the animal killing that underwrites vegetal foods. Uncountable deaths by pesticide and habitat removal—the beetles and bunnies that die collaterally for our bread and veggie-burgers—are lives plumb wasted. Animal harvest is at least not gratuitous, as part of a plan involving labor and recompense. We raise these creatures for a reason. Such premeditation may be presumed unkind, but without it our gentle domestic beasts in their picturesque shapes, colors, and finely tuned purposes would never have had the distinction of existing. To envision a vegan version of civilization, start by erasing from all time the Three Little Pigs, the boy who cried wolf, Charlotte’s Web, the golden calf, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Next, erase civilization, brought to you by the people who learned to domesticate animals. Finally, rewrite our evolutionary history, since Homo sapiens became the species we are by means of regular binges of carnivory. . . .
BELIEVING in the righteousness of a piece of work, alas, is not what gets it done. On harvest day we pulled on our stained shoes, sharpened our knives, lit a fire under the big kettle, and set ourselves to the whole show: mud, blood, and lots of little feathers. There are some things about a chicken harvest that are irrepressibly funny, and one of them is the feathers: in your hair, on the backs of your hands, dangling behind your left shoe the way toilet paper does in slapstick movies. Feathery little white tags end up stuck all over the chopping block and the butchering table like Post-it notes from the chicken hereafter. Sometimes we get through the awful parts on the strength of black comedy, joking about the feathers or our barn’s death row and the “dead roosters walking.”
But today was not one of those times. Some friends had come over to help us, including a family that had recently lost their teenage son in a drowning accident. Their surviving younger children, Abby and Eli, were among Lily’s closest friends. The kids were understandably solemn and the adults measured all our words under the immense weight of grief as we set to work. Lily and Abby went to get the first rooster from the barn while I laid out the knives and spread plastic sheets over our butchering table on the back patio. The guys stoked a fire under our fifty-gallon kettle, an antique brass instrument Steven and I scored at a farm auction.
The girls returned carrying rooster #1 upside down, by the legs. Inversion has the immediate effect of lulling a chicken to sleep, or something near to it. What comes next is quick and final. We set the rooster gently across our big chopping block (a legendary fixture of our backyard, whose bloodstains hold visiting children in thrall), and down comes the ax. All sensation ends with that quick stroke. He must then be held by the legs over a large plastic bucket until all the blood has run out. Farmers who regularly process poultry have more equipment, including banks of “killing cones” or inverted funnels that contain the birds while the processor pierces each neck with a sharp knife, cutting two major arteries and ending brain function. We’re not pros, so we have a more rudimentary setup. By lulling and swiftly decapitating my animal, I can make sure my relatively unpracticed handling won’t draw out the procedure or cause pain.
What you’ve heard is true: the rooster will flap his wings hard during this part. If you drop him he’ll thrash right across the yard, unpleasantly spewing blood all around, though the body doesn’t run—it’s nothing that well coordinated. His newly detached head silently opens and closes its mouth, down in the bottom of the gut bucket, a world apart from the ruckus. The cause of all these actions is an explosion of massively firing neurons without a brain to supervise them. Most people who claim to be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, really, are not even close. The nearest thing might be the final convulsive seconds of an All Star wrestling match.
For Rooster #1 it was over, and into the big kettle for a quick scald. After a one-minute immersion in 145-degree water, the muscle tissue releases the feathers so they’re easier to pluck. “Easier” is relative—every last feather still has to be pulled, carefully enough to avoid tearing the skin. The downy breast feathers come out by handfuls, while the long wing and tail feathers sometimes must be removed individually with pliers. If we were pros we would have an electric scalder and automatic plucker, a fascinating bucket full of rotating rubber fingers that does the job in no time flat. For future harvests we might borrow a friend’s equipment, but for today we had a pulley on a tree limb so we could hoist the scalded carcass to shoulder level, suspending it there from a rope so several of us could pluck at once. Lily, Abby, and Eli pulled neck and breast feathers, making necessary observations such as “Gag, look where his head came off,” and “Wonder which one of these tube thingies was his windpipe.” Most kids need only about ninety seconds to get from eeew gross to solid science. A few weeks later Abby would give an award-winning, fully illustrated 4-H presentation entitled “You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day.”
Laura and Becky and I answered the kids’ questions, and also talked about Mom things while working on back and wing feathers. (Our husbands were on to the next beheading.) Laura and I compared notes on our teenage daughters—relatively new drivers on the narrow country roads between their jobs, friends, and home—and the worries that come with that territory. I was painfully conscious of Becky’s quiet, her ache for a teenage son who never even got to acquire a driver’s license. The accident that killed Larry could not have been avoided through any amount of worry. We all cultivate illusions of safety that could fall away in the knife edge of one second.
I wondered how we would get through this afternoon, how she would get through months and years of living with impossible loss. I wondered if I’d been tactless, inviting these dear friends to an afternoon of ending lives. And then felt stupid for that thought. People who are grieving walk with death, every waking moment. When the rest of us dread that we’ll somehow remind them of death’s existence, we are missing their reality. Harvesting turkeys—which this family would soon do on their own farm—was just another kind of work. A rendezvous with death, for them, was waking up each morning without their brother and son.
BY early afternoon six roosters had lost their heads, feathers, and viscera, and were chilling on ice. We had six turkeys to go, the hardest piece of our work simply because the animals are larger and heavier. Some of these birds were close to twenty pounds. They would take center stage on our holiday table and those of some of our friends. At least one would be charcuterie—in the garden I had sage, rosemary, garlic, onions, everything we needed for turkey sausage. And the first two roosters we’d harvested would be going on the rotisserie later that afternoon.
And that was the end of a day’s work. I hosed down the butcher shop and changed into more civilized attire (happy to see my wedding ring was still on) while everybody else set the big picnic table on our patio with plates and glasses and all the food in the fridge we’d prepared ahead. The meat on the rotisserie smelled really good, helping to move our party’s mindset toward the end stages of the “cooking from scratch” proposition. Steven brushed the chicken skin with our house-specialty sweet-and-sour sauce and we uncorked the wine. At dusk we finally sat down to feast on cold bean salad, sliced tomatoes with basil, blue potato salad, and meat that had met this day’s dawn by crowing.
AMONG THE BEST-KNOWN contemporary American writers on food, Michael Pollan is an heir to the counterculture and back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s who has been dubbed “a liberal foodie intellectual.” He has written such classics as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In the former he recounts the myths surrounding apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes. In the latter he treats four different modes of food production: the corn-based industrial operation; the large corporate organic model; the small, local self-sufficient farm; and the ways of the hunter-forager. Currently a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and a prolific lecturer on gastronomy, agriculture, health, and the environment, Pollan was listed by Time in 2010 as one of the world’s hundred most influential persons. In our selection, he describes the horrifying circumstances in which beef cattle are currently raised. His report, from The Omnivore’s Dilemma, implicitly expands on the extract from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle included in Part I of this collection. And like Sinclair’s powerful writing, Pollan’s journalism reveals a mind that is scientific, aesthetic, witty, and sagacious.
from The Omnivore’s Dilemma:
Cattle Metropolis
THE LANDSCAPE THAT corn has made in the American Middle West is unmistakable: It forms a second great American lawn, unfurling through the summer like an absurdly deep-pile carpet of green across the vast lands drained by the Mississippi River. Corn the plant has colonized some 125,000 square miles of the American continent, an area twice the size of New York State; even from outer space you can’t miss it. It takes a bit more looking, however, to see some of the other landscapes that corn the commodity has created, in obscure places like Garden City, Kansas. Here in the high plains of western Kansas is where America’s first feedlots were built, beginning in the early fifties.
You’ll be speeding down one of Finney County’s ramrod roads when the empty, dun-colored January prairie suddenly turns black and geometric, an urban grid of steel-fenced rectangles as far as the eye can see—which in Kansas is really far. I say “suddenly” but in fact the swiftly rising odor—an aroma whose Proustian echoes are decidedly more bus station men’s room than cows in the country—has been heralding the feedlot’s approach for more than a mile. And then it’s upon you: Poky Feeders, population, thirty-seven thousand. A sloping subdivision of cattle pens stretches to the horizon, each one home to a hundred or so animals standing dully or lying around in a grayish mud that, it eventually dawns on you, isn’t mud at all. The pens line a network of unpaved roads that loop around vast waste lagoons on their way to the feedyard’s thunderously beating heart and dominating landmark: a rhythmically chugging feed mill that rises, soaring and silvery in the early morning light, like an industrial cathedral in the midst of a teeming metropolis of meat. As it does twelve hours a day seven days a week, the mill is noisily converting America’s river of corn into cattle feed.
I’d traveled to Poky early one January with the slightly improbable notion of visiting one particular resident, though as I nosed my rental car through the feedlot’s rolling black sea of bovinity, I began to wonder if this was realistic. I was looking for a young black steer with three white blazes on his face that I’d met the previous fall on a ranch in Vale, South Dakota, five hundred miles due north of here. In fact, the steer I hoped to find belonged to me: I’d purchased him as an eight-month-old calf from the Blair Ranch for $598. I was paying Poky Feeders $1.60 a day for his room and board (all the corn he could eat) and meds.
My interest in this steer was not strictly financial, or even gustatory. No, my primary interest in this animal was educational. I wanted to learn how the industrial food chain transforms bushels of corn into steaks. How do you enlist so unlikely a creature—for the cow is an herbivore by nature—to help dispose of America’s corn surplus? By far the biggest portion of a bushel of American commodity corn (about 60 percent of it, or some fifty-four thousand kernels) goes to feeding livestock, and much of that goes to feeding America’s 100 million beef cattle—cows and bulls and steers that in times past spent most of their lives grazing on grasses out on the prairie.
America’s food animals have undergone a revolution in lifestyle in the years since World War II. At the same time much of America’s human population found itself leaving the city for the suburbs, our food animals found themselves traveling in the opposite direction, leaving widely dispersed farms in places like Iowa to live in densely populated new animal cities. These places are so different from farms and ranches that a new term was needed to denote them: CAFO—Confined Animal Feeding Operation. The new animal and human landscapes were both products of government policy. The postwar suburbs would never have been built if not for the interstate highway system, as well as the G.I Bill and federally subsidized mortgages. The urbanization of America’s animal population would never have taken place if not for the advent of cheap, federally subsidized corn.
Corn itself profited from the urbanization of livestock twice. As the animals left the farm, more of the farm was left for corn, which rapidly colonized the paddocks and pastures and even the barnyards that had once been the animals’ territory. The animals left because the farmers simply couldn’t compete with the CAFOs. It cost a farmer more to grow feed corn than it cost a CAFO to buy it, for the simple reason that commodity corn now was routinely sold for less than it cost to grow. Corn profited again as the factory farms expanded, absorbing increasing amounts of its surplus. Corn found its way into the diet of animals that never used to eat very much of it (like cattle) or any corn at all, like the farmed salmon now being bred to tolerate grain. All that excess biomass has to go somewhere.
The economic logic of gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn in CAFOs is hard to argue with; it has made meat, which used to be a special occasion in most American homes, so cheap and abundant that many of us now eat it three times a day. Not so compelling is the biological logic behind this cheap meat. Already in their short history CAFOs have produced more than their share of environmental and health problems: polluted water and air, toxic wastes, novel and deadly pathogens.
Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms such as the Naylors’ used to make simple biological sense: You can feed them the waste products of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops. In fact, when animals live on farms the very idea of waste ceases to exist; what you have instead is a closed ecological loop—what in retrospect you might call a solution. One of the most striking things that animal feedlots do (to paraphrase Wendell Berry) is to take this elegant solution and neatly divide it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers) and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all).
This biological absurdity, characteristic of all CAFOs, is compounded in the cattle feedyard by a second absurdity. Here animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass must be adapted by us—at considerable cost to their health, to the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of their eaters—to live on corn, for no other reason than it offers the cheapest calories around and because the great pile must be consumed. This is why I decided to follow the trail of industrial corn through a single steer rather than, say, a chicken or a pig, which can get by just fine on a diet of grain: The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.
IT’S PROBABLE THAT no book since Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal has so awakened America to methods of restrictive animal confinement, assembly line practices at slaughterhouses, the uniformity of mass produced meals at fast food outlets, and the illnesses that accrue from eating such food, laden as it is with fat and cholesterol and given how seductively it has become a mainstay of the national diet. In calling attention to the problematic quality of industrially produced meals, Schlosser sought to publicize a growing national health problem. Not surprisingly when he undertook the research for Fast Food Nation, which was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years and become a 2006 film with the same title, he was denied access to meatpacking plants and was refused interviews with executives at McDonald’s, though he managed to arrange many meetings with workers on the line. As our excerpt shows, thing have not changed greatly from the early days of Upton Sinclair and the Chicago stockyards, so the passionate muckraking continues.
from Fast Food Nation: The Worst
SOME OF THE most dangerous jobs in meatpacking today are performed by the late-night cleaning crews. A large proportion of these workers are illegal immigrants. They are considered “independent contractors,” employed not by the meatpacking firms but by sanitation companies. They earn hourly wages that are about one-third lower than those of regular production employees. And their work is so hard and so horrendous that words seem inadequate to describe it. The men and women who now clean the nation’s slaughterhouses may arguably have the worst job in the United States. “It takes a really dedicated person,” a former member of a cleaning crew told me, “or a really desperate person to get the job done.”
When a sanitation crew arrives at a meatpacking plant, usually around midnight, it faces a mess of monumental proportions. Three to four thousand cattle, each weighing about a thousand pounds, have been slaughtered there that day. The place has to be clean by sunrise. Some of the workers wear water-resistant clothing; most don’t. Their principal cleaning tool is a high-pressure hose that shoots a mixture of water and chlorine heated to about 180 degrees. As the water is sprayed, the plant fills with a thick, heavy fog. Visibility drops to as little as five feet. The conveyor belts and machinery are running. Workers stand on the belts, spraying them, riding them like moving sidewalks, as high as fifteen feet off the ground. Workers climb ladders with hoses and spray the catwalks. They get under tables and conveyer belts, climbing right into the bloody muck, cleaning out grease, fat, manure, leftover scraps of meat.
Glasses and safety goggles fog up. The inside of the plant heats up; temperatures soon exceed 100 degrees. “It’s hot, and it’s foggy, and you can’t see anything,” a former sanitation worker said. The crew members can’t see or hear each other when the machinery’s running. They routinely spray each other with burning hot, chemical-laden water. They are sickened by the fumes. Jesus, a soft-spoken employee of DCS Sanitation Management, Inc., the company that IBP uses in many of its plants, told me that every night on the job he gets terrible headaches. “You feel it in your head,” he said. “You feel it in your stomach, like you want to throw up.” A friend of his vomits whenever they clean the rendering area. Other workers tease the young man as he retches. Jesus says the stench in rendering is so powerful that it won’t wash off; no matter how much soap you use after a shift, the smell comes home with you, seeps from your pores.
One night while Jesus was cleaning, a coworker forgot to turn off a machine, lost two fingers, and went into shock. An ambulance came and took him away, as everyone else continued to clean. He was back at work the following week. “If one hand is no good,” the supervisor told him, “use the other.” Another sanitation worker lost an arm in a machine. Now he folds towels in the locker room. The scariest job, according to Jesus, is cleaning the vents on the roof of the slaughterhouse. The vents become clogged with grease and dried blood. In the winter, when everything gets icy and the winds pick up, Jesus worries that a sudden gust will blow him off the roof into the darkness.
Although official statistics are not kept, the death rate among slaughterhouse sanitation crews is extraordinarily high. They are the ultimate in disposable workers: illegal, illiterate, impoverished, untrained. The nation’s worst job can end in just about the worst way. Sometimes these workers are literally ground up and reduced to nothing.
A brief description of some cleaning-crew accidents over the past decade says more about the work and the danger than any set of statistics. At the Monfort plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, Richard Skala was beheaded by a dehiding machine. Carlos Vincente—an employee of T and G Service Company, a twenty-eight-year-old Guatemalan who’d been in the United States for only a week—was pulled into the cogs of a conveyor belt at an Excel plant in Fort Morgan, Colorado, and torn apart. Lorenzo Marin, Sr., an employee of DCS Sanitation, fell from the top of a skinning machine while cleaning it with a high-pressure hose, struck his head on the concrete floor of an IBP plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, and died. Another employee of DCS Sanitation, Salvador Hernandez-Gonzalez, had his head crushed by a pork-loin processing machine at an IBP plant in Madison, Nebraska. The same machine had fatally crushed the head of another worker, Ben Barone, a few years earlier. At a National Beef plant in Liberal, Kansas, Homer Stull climbed into a blood-collection tank to clean it, a filthy tank thirty feet high. Stull was overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes. Two coworkers climbed into the tank and tried to rescue him. All three men died. Eight years earlier, Henry Wolf had been overcome by hydrogen sulfide fumes while cleaning the very same tank; Gary Sanders had tried to rescue him; both men died; and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) later fined National Beef for its negligence. The fine was $480 for each man’s death.
David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)
ONE OF THE most widely read young novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Wallace also wrote short stories and essays. His fiction is highly innovative, and often very long; for instance, his most renowned work, Infinite Jest, bulks to 1100 pages. Affected by a long and severe depression, Wallace hanged himself at age forty-six. During his brief lifetime, he wrote with engaging curiosity about a multitude of subjects, including tennis, travel, conservative talk radio, the porn industry, and state fairs. He loved offbeat venues, and in our selection he visits the annual Maine Lobster Festival, focusing here on the issue of whether lobsters are able to feel pain when plunged into boiling water. Part discussion of animal ethics, part discussion of comparative neuroanatomy, the essay takes no position on the matter, but the “consider” of the title means two things—think about the lobster and be kind to it—and Wallace means for us to take such considerations very seriously.
A DETAIL SO obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle. This is part of lobster’s modern appeal—it’s the freshest food there is. There’s no decomposition between harvesting and eating. And not only do lobsters require no cleaning or dressing or plucking, they’re relatively easy for vendors to keep alive. They come up alive in the traps, are placed in containers of seawater, and can—so long as the water’s aerated and the animals’ claws are pegged or banded to keep them from tearing one another up under the stresses of captivity—survive right up until they’re boiled. Most of us have been in supermarkets or restaurants that feature tanks of live lobsters, from which you can pick out your supper while it watches you point. And part of the overall spectacle of the Maine Lobster Festival is that you can see actual lobstermen’s vessels docking at the wharves along the northeast grounds and unloading fresh-caught product, which is transferred by hand or cart 150 yards to the great clear tanks stacked up around the festival’s cooker—which is, as mentioned, billed as the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker and can process over 100 lobsters at a time for the Main Eating Tent.
So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the US: Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is the whole thing just a matter of personal choice?
As you may or may not know, a certain well-known group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals thinks that the morality of lobster-boiling is not just a matter of individual conscience. In fact, one of the very first things we hear about the MLF . . . well, to set the scene: We’re coming in by cab from the almost indescribably odd and rustic Knox County Airport very late on the night before the festival opens, sharing the cab with a wealthy political consultant who lives on Vinalhaven Island in the bay half the year (he’s headed for the island ferry in Rockland). The consultant and cabdriver are responding to informal journalistic probes about how people who live in the midcoast region actually view the MLF, as in is the festival just a big-dollar tourist thing or is it something local residents look forward to attending, take genuine civic pride in, etc. The cabdriver (who’s in his seventies, one of apparently a whole platoon of retirees the cab company puts on to help with the summer rush, and wears a US-flag lapel pin, and drives in what can only be called a very deliberate way) assures us that locals do endorse and enjoy the MLF, although he himself hasn’t gone in years, and now come to think of it no one he and his wife know has, either. However, the demilocal consultant’s been to recent festivals a couple times (one gets the impression it was at his wife’s behest), of which his most vivid impression was that “you have to line up for an ungodly long time to get your lobsters, and meanwhile there are all these ex-flower children coming up and down along the line handling out pamphlets that say the lobsters die in terrible pain and you shouldn’t eat them.”
And it turns out that the post-hippies of the consultant’s recollection were activists from PETA. There were no PETA people in obvious view at the 2003 MLF, but they’ve been conspicuous at many of the recent festivals. Since at least the mid-1990s, articles in everything from the Camden Herald to the New York Times have described PETA urging boycotts of the Maine Lobster Festival, often deploying celebrity spokesmen like Mary Tyler Moore for open letters and ads saying stuff like “Lobsters are extraordinarily sensitive” and “To me, eating a lobster is out of the question.” More concrete is the oral testimony of Dick, our florid and extremely gregarious rental-car liaison, to the effect that PETA’s been around so much during recent years that a kind of brittlely tolerant homeostasis now obtains between the activists and the festival’s locals, e.g.: “We had some incidents a couple years ago. One lady took most of her clothes off and painted herself like a lobster, almost got herself arrested. But for the most part they’re let alone. [Rapid series of small ambiguous laughs, which with Dick happens a lot.] They do their thing and we do our thing.”
This whole interchange takes place on Route 1, 30 July, during a four-mile, 50-minute ride from the airport to the dealership to sign car-rental papers. Several irreproducible segues down the road from the PETA anecdotes, Dick—whose son-in-law happens to be a professional lobsterman and one of the Main Eating Tent’s regular suppliers—explains what he and his family feel is the crucial mitigating factor in the whole morality-of-boiling-lobsters-alive issue: “There’s a part of the brain in people and animals that lets us feel pain, and lobsters’ brains don’t have this part.”
Besides the fact that it’s incorrect in about nine different ways, the main reason Dick’s statement is interesting is that its thesis is more or less echoed by the festival’s own pronouncement on lobsters and pain, which is part of a Test Your Lobster IQ quiz that appears in the 2003 MLF program courtesy of the Maine Lobster Promotion Council:
The nervous system of a lobster is very simple, and is in fact most similar to the nervous system of the grasshopper. It is decentralized with no brain. There is no cerebral cortex, which in humans is the area of the brain that gives the experience of pain.
Though it sounds more sophisticated, a lot of the neurology in this latter claim is still either false or fuzzy. The human cerebral cortex is the brain-part that deals with higher faculties like reason, metaphysical self-awareness, language, etc. Pain reception is known to be part of a much older and more primitive system of nociceptors and prostaglandins that are managed by the brain stem and thalamus. On the other hand, it is true that the cerebral cortex is involved in what’s variously called suffering, distress, or the emotional experience of pain—i.e., experiencing painful stimuli as unpleasant, very unpleasant, unbearable, and so on.
Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. And comparative neuroanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience, we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.
The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to think about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive, it’s that you do it yourself—or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site. As mentioned, the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the festival’s program, is right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef Festival at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something—there’s no way.
The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism “prepared,” which in the case of lobster really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they came home in . . . whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle’s rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over.
THERE happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so has genuine interests that it may or may not be our moral duty to consider. One is how much of the neurological hardware required for pain-experience the animal comes equipped with—nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see struggling, thrashing, and lidclattering as just such pain-behavior. According to marine zoologists, it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 45 seconds to die in boiling water. (No source I could find talks about how long it takes them to die in superheated steam; one rather hopes it’s faster.)
There are, of course, other ways to kill your lobster on-site and so achieve maximum freshness. Some cooks’ practice is to drive a sharp heavy knife point-first into a spot just above the midpoint between the lobster’s eyestalks (more or less where the Third Eye is in human foreheads). This is alleged either to kill the lobster instantly or to render it insensate, and is said at least to eliminate some of the cowardice involved in throwing a creature into boiling water and then fleeing the room. As far as I can tell from talking to proponents of the knife-in-head method, the idea is that it’s more violent but ultimately more merciful, plus that a willingness to exert personal agency and accept responsibility for stabbing the lobster’s head honors the lobster somehow and entitles one to eat it (there’s often a vague sort of Native American spirituality-of-the-hunt flavor to pro-knife arguments). But the problem with the knife method is basic biology: Lobsters’ nervous systems operate off not one but several ganglia, a.k.a. nerve bundles, which are sort of wired in series and distributed all along the lobster’s underside, from stem to stern. And disabling only the frontal ganglion does not normally result in quick death or unconsciousness.
Another alternative is to put the lobster in cold saltwater and then very slowly bring it up to a full boil. Cooks who advocate this method are going on the analogy to a frog, which can supposedly be kept from jumping out of a boiling pot by heating the water incrementally. In order to save a lot of research-summarizing, I’ll simply assure you that the analogy between frogs and lobsters turns out not to hold—plus, if the kettle’s water isn’t aerated seawater, the immersed lobster suffers from slow suffocation, although usually not decisive enough suffocation to keep it from still thrashing and clattering when the water gets hot enough to kill it. In fact, lobsters boiled incrementally often display a whole bonus set of gruesome, convulsionlike reactions that you don’t see in regular boiling.
Ultimately, the only certain virtues of the home-lobotomy and slow-heating methods are comparative, because there are even worse/crueler ways people prepare lobster. Time-thrifty cooks sometimes microwave them alive (usually after poking several vent-holes in the carapace, which is a precaution most shellfish-microwavers learn about the hard way). Live dismemberment, on the other hand, is big in Europe—some chefs cut the lobster in half before cooking; others like to tear off the claws and tail and toss only these parts into the pot.
And there’s more unhappy news respecting suffering-criterion number one. Lobsters don’t have much in the way of eyesight or hearing, but they do have an exquisite tactile sense, one facilitated by hundreds of thousands of tiny hairs that protrude through their carapace. “Thus it is,” in the words of T.M. Prudden’s industry classic About Lobster, “that although encased in what seems a solid, impenetrable armor, the lobster can receive stimuli and impressions from without as readily as if it possessed a soft and delicate skin.” And lobsters do have nociceptors, as well as invertebrate versions of the prostaglandins and major neurotransmitters via which our own brains register pain.
Lobsters do not, on the other hand, appear to have the equipment for making or absorbing natural opioids like endorphins and enkephalins, which are what more advanced nervous systems use to try to handle intense pain. From this fact, though, one could conclude either that lobsters are maybe even more vulnerable to pain, since they lack mammalian nervous systems’ built-in analgesia, or, instead, that the absence of natural opioids implies an absence of the really intense pain-sensations that natural opioids are designed to mitigate. I for one can detect a marked upswing in mood as I contemplate this latter possibility. It could be that their lack of endorphin/enkephalin hardware means that lobsters’ raw subjective experience of pain is so radically different from mammals’ that it may not even deserve the term “pain.” Perhaps lobsters are more like those frontal-lobotomy patients one reads about who report experiencing pain in a totally different way than you and I. These patients evidently do feel physical pain, neurologically speaking, but don’t dislike it—though neither do they like it; it’s more that they feel it but don’t feel anything about it—the point being that the pain is not distressing to them or something they want to get away from. Maybe lobsters, who are also without frontal lobes, are detached from the neurological-registration-of-injury-or-hazard we call pain in just the same way. There is, after all, a difference between (1) pain as a purely neurological event, and (2) actual suffering, which seems crucially to involve an emotional component, an awareness of pain as unpleasant, as something to fear/dislike/want to avoid.
Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remain the facts of the frantically clanking lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering. The logic of this (preference → suffering) relation may be easiest to see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half.
Lobsters, though, are known to exhibit preferences. Experiments have shown that they can detect changes of only a degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their complex migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures they like best. And, as mentioned, they’re bottom-dwellers and do not like bright light—if a tank of food-lobsters is out in the sunlight or a store’s fluorescence, the lobsters will always congregate in whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they also clearly dislike the crowding that’s part of their captivity in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why lobster’s claws are banded on capture is to keep them from attacking one another under the stress of close-quarter storage.
In any event, at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings . . . and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETA-like screed here—at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.
Does that comparison seem a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one: Is it not possible that future generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? My own immediate reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme—and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.
Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about whether the reader can identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgments and discomforts. I am also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is confused. Given the (possible) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets evolve that allow them not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than just ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)? And for those gourmets who’ll have no truck with convictions or rationales and who regard stuff like the previous paragraph as just so much pointless navel-gazing, what makes it feel okay, inside, to dismiss the whole issue out of hand? That is, is their refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that they don’t want to think about it? Do they ever think about their reluctance to think about it? After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?
These last couple queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality, and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals, founded 1980)
PEOPLE FOR THE Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights group known by the acronym PETA, has upwards of three million members and a complex reputation. On the one hand, it has been celebrated for spearheading public awareness of abuses in the industrial killing of domesticated animals; for exposing cruel conditions on many breeding farms and for calling attention to the misuse of animals in laboratory experiments for medical research and product testing. On the other hand, PETA has been controversial for its aggressive protests and zealous undercover operations in slaughterhouses and circuses. Some scare tactics—for instance, a comic book for kids titled Your Mommy Kills Animals—have brought widespread condemnation. PETA has likened animals killed for food, however humanely, to African-American slaves and to Jews murdered by the Nazis (one campaign spoke of “the Holocaust on your plate”), a position which echoes points made by such vegetarians as Isaac Bashevis Singer and J.M. Coetzee but which has nonetheless offended some civil rights groups.
WHEN YOU SEE dead animals on the side of the road, are you tempted to stop and snack on them? Does the sight of a dead bird make you salivate? Do you daydream about killing cows with your bare hands and eating them raw? If you answered “no” to these questions, congratulations—like it or not, you’re an herbivore.
According to biologists and anthropologists who study our anatomy and our evolutionary history, humans are herbivores who are not well suited to eating meat. Humans lack both the physical characteristics of carnivores and the instinct that drives them to kill animals and devour their raw carcasses.
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY
ALTHOUGH many humans choose to eat a wide variety of plant and animal foods, earning us the dubious title of “omnivore,” we are anatomically herbivorous.
TEETH, JAWS, AND NAILS
HUMANS have short, soft fingernails and pathetically small “canine” teeth. In contrast, carnivores all have sharp claws and large canine teeth capable of tearing flesh.
Carnivores’ jaws move only up and down, requiring them to tear chunks of flesh from their prey and swallow them whole. Humans and other herbivores can move their jaws up and down and from side to side, allowing them to grind up fruit and vegetables with their back teeth. Like other herbivores’ teeth, human back molars are flat for grinding fibrous plant foods. Carnivores lack these flat molars.
Dr. Richard Leakey, a renowned anthropologist, summarizes, “You can’t tear flesh by hand, you can’t tear hide by hand. Our anterior teeth are not suited for tearing flesh or hide. We don’t have large canine teeth, and we wouldn’t have been able to deal with food sources that require those large canines.”
STOMACH ACIDITY
CARNIVORES swallow their food whole, relying on their extremely acidic stomach juices to break down flesh and kill the dangerous bacteria in meat that would otherwise sicken or kill them. Our stomach acids are much weaker in comparison because strong acids aren’t needed to digest pre-chewed fruits and vegetables.
INTESTINAL LENGTH
CARNIVORES have short intestinal tracts and colons that allow meat to pass through the animal relatively quickly, before it can rot and cause illness. Humans’ intestinal tracts are much longer than those of carnivores of comparable size. Longer intestines allow the body more time to break down fiber and absorb the nutrients from plant-based foods, but they make it dangerous for humans to eat meat. The bacteria in meat have extra time to multiply during the long trip through the digestive system, increasing the risk of food poisoning. Meat actually begins to rot while it makes its way through human intestines, which increases the risk of colon cancer.
HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY
HUMANS also lack the instinct that drives carnivores to kill animals and devour their raw carcasses. While carnivores take pleasure in killing animals and eating their raw flesh, any human who killed an animal with his or her bare hands and ate the raw corpse would be considered deranged. Carnivorous animals are excited by the scent of blood and the thrill of the chase. Most humans, on the other hand, are revolted by the sight of blood, intestines and raw flesh, and cannot tolerate hearing the screams of animals being ripped apart and killed. The bloody reality of eating animals is innately repulsive to us, another indication that we were not designed to eat meat.
IF WE WERE MEANT TO EAT MEAT,
WHY IS IT KILLING US?
CARNIVOROUS animals in the wild virtually never suffer from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, strokes, or obesity, ailments that are caused in humans in large part by the consumption of the saturated fat and cholesterol in meat.
FAT AND CHOLESTEROL
STUDIES have shown that even when fed 200 times the amount of animal fat and cholesterol that the average human consumes each day, carnivores do not develop the hardening of the arteries that leads to heart disease and strokes in humans. Researchers have actually found that it is impossible for carnivores to develop hardening of the arteries, no matter how much animal fat they consume.
Human bodies, on the other hand, were not designed to process animal flesh, so all the excess fat and cholesterol from a meat-based diet makes us sick. Heart disease, for example, is the number one killer in America according to the American Heart Association, and medical experts agree that this ailment is largely the result of the consumption of animal products. Meat-eaters have a 50 percent higher risk of developing heart disease than vegetarians!
EXCESS PROTEIN
WE consume twice as much protein as we need when we eat a meat-based diet, and this contributes to osteoporosis and kidney stones. Animal protein raises the acid level in our blood, causing calcium to be excreted from the bones to restore the blood’s natural pH balance. This calcium depletion leads to osteoporosis, and the excreted calcium ends up in the kidneys, where it can form kidney stones or even trigger kidney disease.
Consuming animal protein has also been linked to cancer of the colon, breast, prostate, and pancreas. According to Dr. T. Colin Campbell, the director of the Cornell-China-Oxford Project on Nutrition, Health, and the Environment, “In the next ten years, one of the things you’re bound to hear is that animal protein . . . is one of the most toxic nutrients of all that can be considered.”
Eating meat can also have negative consequences for stamina and sexual potency. One Danish study indicated that “Men peddling on a stationary bicycle until muscle failure lasted an average of 114 minutes on a mixed meat and vegetable diet, 57 minutes on a high-meat diet, and a whopping 167 minutes on a strict vegetarian diet.” Besides having increased physical endurance, vegan men are also less likely to suffer from impotence.
FOOD POISONING
SINCE we don’t have strong stomach acids like carnivores to kill all the bacteria in meat, dining on animal flesh can also give us food poisoning. According to the USDA, meat is the cause of 70 percent of foodborne illnesses in the United States because it’s often contaminated with dangerous bacteria like E.coli, listeria, and campylobacter. Every year in the United States alone, food poisoning sickens over 75 million people and kills more than 5,000.
Dr. William C. Roberts, M.D., editor of the authoritative American Journal of Cardiology, sums it up this way: “[A]lthough we think we are one and we act as if we are one, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”
HUMAN EVOLUTION AND THE RISE
OF MEAT-HEAVY DIETS
IF it’s so unhealthy and unnatural for humans to eat meat, why did our ancestors sometimes turn to flesh for sustenance?
During most of our evolutionary history, we were largely vegetarian. Plant foods like potatoes made up the bulk of our ancestors’ diet. The more frequent addition of modest amounts of meat to the early human diet came with the discovery of fire, which allowed us to lower the risk of being sickened or killed by parasites in meat. This practice did not turn our ancestors into carnivores but rather allowed early humans to survive in periods when plant foods were unavailable.
MODERN HUMANS
UNTIL recently, only the wealthiest people could afford to feed, raise, and slaughter animals for meat; less wealthy and poor people ate mostly plant foods. Consequently, prior to the 20th century, only the rich routinely were plagued with diseases like heart disease and obesity.
Since 1950, the per capita consumption of meat has almost doubled. Now that animal flesh has become relatively cheap and easily available (thanks to the cruel, cost-cutting practices of factory farming), deadly ailments like heart disease, strokes, cancer, and obesity have spread to people across the socio-economic spectrum. And as the Western lifestyle spills over into less developed areas in Asia and Africa, people there, too, have started to suffer and die from the diseases associated with meat-based diets.