The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [166]
The vegan utopia would also condemn people in many parts of the country to importing all their food from distant places. In New England, for example, the hilliness of the land and rockiness of the soil has dictated an agriculture based on grass and animals since the time of the Puritans. Indeed, the New England landscape, with its rolling patchwork of forest and fields outlined by fieldstone walls, is in some sense a creation of the domestic animals that have lived there (and so in turn of their eaters). The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing (and hunting) animals on it—especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein.
To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. That food chain would be in turn even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility—in the form of manures—would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature—rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls—then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.
ARE THESE good enough reasons to give up my vegetarianism? Can I in good conscience eat a happy and sustainably raised chicken? I’m mindful of Ben Franklin’s definition of a reasonable creature as one who can come up with reasons for whatever he wants to do. So I decided I would track down Peter Singer and ask him what he thought. I hatched a scheme to drive him down from Princeton to meet Joel Salatin and his animals, but Singer was out of the country, so I had to settle for an exchange of e-mail. I asked him about the implications for his position of the “good farm”—one where animals got to live according to their natures and to all appearances do not suffer.
“I agree with you that it is better for these animals to have lived and died than not to have lived at all…,” Singer wrote back. Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering, and the slaughter of an animal with no comprehension of death need not entail suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. However, this line of thinking does not obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that “has a sense of its own existence over time, and can have preferences about its own future.” In other words, it might be okay to eat the chicken or the cow, but perhaps not the (more intelligent) pig. Yet, he continued, “I would not be sufficiently confident of my argument to condemn someone who purchased meat from one of these farms.”
Singer went on to express doubts that such farms could be practical on a large scale, since the pressures of the marketplace will lead their owners to cut costs and corners at the expense of the animals. Also, since humanely raised food is more expensive, only the well-to-do can afford morally defensible animal protein. These are important considerations, but they don’t alter what seems to me the essential concession: What’s wrong with eating animals is the practice, not the principle.
What this suggests to me is that people who care about animals should be working to ensure that the ones they eat don’t suffer, and that their deaths are swift and