Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [121]
We felt tired to our bones but anointed by life in a durable, companionable way, for at least the present moment. We the living take every step in tandem with death, naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven, whether we can see that or not. We bear it by the grace of friendship, good meals, and if we need them, talking turkey heads.
* * *
Carnivory
BY CAMILLE
The summer I was eleven, our family took a detour through the Midwest on our annual drive back from our farm in Virginia to Tucson. We passed by one feedlot after another. The odor was horrifying to me, and the sight of the animals was haunting: cows standing on mountains of their own excrement, packed so tightly together they had no room to walk. All they could do was wearily moo and munch on grain mixed with the cow pies under their feet.
Looking out the window at these creatures made my heart sink and my stomach lose all interest. The outdoor part of the operation seemed crueler than anything that might go on inside a slaughterhouse. Whether or not it was scheduled to die, no living thing, I felt, should have to spend its life the way those cows were. When we got home I told my parents I would never eat beef from a feedlot again. Surprisingly, they agreed and took the same vow.
I had another eye-opening experience that fall, in my junior high cafeteria: most people, I learned, really don’t want to know what their hamburger lived through before it got to the bun. Some of the girls at my usual lunch table stopped sitting with me because they didn’t like the reasons I gave them for not eating the ground-beef spaghetti sauce or taco salad the lunch ladies were serving. I couldn’t imagine my friends would care so little about something that seemed so important. To my shock, they expressed no intention of changing their ways, and got mad at me for making them feel badly about their choice. A very important lesson for me.
Nobody (including me) wants to be told what church to attend or how to dress, and people don’t like being told what to eat either. Food is one of our most intensely personal systems of preference, so obviously it’s a touchy subject for public debate. Eight years after my cafeteria drama, I can see plainly now I was wrong to try to impose my food ethics on others, even friends. I was recently annoyed when somebody told me I should not eat yogurt because “If I were a cow, how would I like to be milked?” At the same time, we create our personal and moral standards based on the information we have, and most of us (beyond grade seven) want to make informed choices.
Egg and meat industries in the United States take some care not to publicize specifics about how they raise animals. Phrases like “all natural” on packaged meat in supermarkets don’t necessarily mean the cow or chicken agrees. Animals in CAFOs live under enormous physiological stress. Cows that are fed grain diets in confinement are universally plagued with gastric ailments, most commonly subacute acidosis, which leads to ulceration of the stomach and eventually death, though the cattle don’t usually live long enough to die of it. Most cattle raised in this country begin their lives on pasture but are sent to feedlots to fatten up during the last half of life. Factory-farmed chickens and turkeys often spend their entire lives without seeing sunlight.
On the other hand, if cattle remain on pasture right to the end, that kind of beef is called “grass finished.” The differences between this and CAFO beef are not just relevant to how kindly you feel about animals: meat and eggs of pastured animals also have a measurably different nutrient composition. A lot of recent research has been published on this subject, which is slowly reaching the public. USDA studies found much lower levels of