EATING ANIMALS

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

BACK BAY BOOKS 2009

PART III

Chapter 3: Words/Meaning

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.

ANIMAL

Before visiting any farms, I spent more than a year wading through literature about eating animals: histories of agriculture, industry and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) materials, activist pamphlets, relevant philosophical works, and the numerous existing books about food that touch on the subject of meat.
Language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are as often used to misdirect and camouflage as they are to communicate.

Battery cage

The typical cage for egg-laying hens allows 67 square inches pf floor space – somewhere between the size of this page and a sheet of printer paper. Such cages are stacked between three and nine tiers high – Japan has the world’s highest battery cage unit, with cages stacked 18 tiers high – in windowless sheds.
Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is so crowded you are often held aloft. This is a kind of blessing, as the slanted floor is made of wire, which cuts into the feet.
After some time, those in the elevator will lose their ability to work in the interest of the group. Some will become violent; others will go mad. A few, deprived of food and hope, will become cannibalistic.
There is no respite, no relief. The doors will open once, at the end of your life, for your journey to the only place worse (see: PROCESSING).

Broiler chickens

Broilers – chickens that become meat (as opposed to layers, chickens that lay eggs) – are lucky: they tend to get close to a single square foot of space.
For the past half century, there have been two kinds of chickens – broilers and layers – each with distinct genetics. They have starkly different bodies and metabolisms, engineered for different “functions.” The egg output of layers has more than doubled since the 1930s.
Broilers make flesh. In the same period, they have been engineered to grow more than twice as large in less than half the time. The modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400%.
Male offspring of layers serve no function. More than 250 million chicks a year are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate.
Some are tossed into large plastic containers. The weak are trampled to the bottom, where they suffocate slowly. The strong suffocate slowly at the top.
Others are sent fully conscious through macerators (picture a wood chipper filled with chicks). Cruel? Depends on your definition of cruelty (see: CRUELTY).

BYCATCH

Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident – except not really “by accident,” since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods.
The average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80% to 90% of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch.
Shrimp account for only 2% of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33% of global bycatch. Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.
What if there labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 POUNDS OF OTHER SEA ANIMALS WERE KILLED AND TOSSED BACK INTO THE OCEAN FOR EVERY 1 POUND OF THIS SHRIMP.
Or take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed – gratuitously – while killing tuna are: ….
Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

CAFO

Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, a.k.a. factory farm. All CAFOs harm animals in ways that would be illegal according to even relatively weak animal welfare legislation.

COMFORT FOOD

One night, when my son was four weeks old, he developed a fever and on our pediatrician’s recommendation, we took him to the emergency room, where he spent a week.
Friends brought us lots of food – all of it comfort food. That, more than any other reason – and there are many other reasons – is why this book is dedicated to them.

CRUELTY

It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

DOWNER

1) Something or someone depressing

2) An animal that collapses from poor health and is unable to stand back up

In most of America’s 50 states it is perfectly legal (and perfectly common) to simply let downers die of exposure over days or toss them, live, into dumpsters.
My first research for this book was to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, New York, created as a place for rescued farmed animals to live out their lives.
Farm Sanctuary has become one of the most important animal protection, education, and lobbying organizations in America, with 175 acres in upstate New York and another 300-acre sanctuary in northern California.
It has more than 200,000 members, an annual budget of about $6 million, and the ability to help shape local and national legislation.

“I was driving around the Lancaster stockyard, and saw, around back, a pile of downers. I approached, and one of the sheep moved her head. I realized she was still alive, left there to suffer. So I put her in the back of my van. I’d never done anything like that before, but I couldn’t leave her like that. I took her to the vet, expecting she’d be euthanized. But after a bit of prodding, she just stood right up. We took her to our house in Wilmington, and then, when we got the farm, we took her here. She lived ten years. Ten. Good years.”

I mention this story to illustrate just how close to health downed animals can be. Any individual that close needs either to be saved or mercifully killed.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

A University of Chicago study recently found that our food choices contribute at least as much as our transportation choices to global warming.
More recent and authoritative studies by the United Nations and the Pew Commission show conclusively that globally, farmed animals contribute more to climate change than transport.
According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40% more than the entire transport sector – cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships – combined.
Animal agriculture is responsible for 37% of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2, as well as 65% of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the GWP of CO2.
The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.

The UN summarized the environmental effects of the meat industry this way: raising animals for food (whether on factory or traditional farms) “is one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. Animal agriculture should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution and loss of biodiversity. Livestock’s contribution to environmental problems is on a massive scale.” In other words, if one cares about the enviroment, and if one accepts the scientific results of such sources as the UN (or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the Center for Science in the Public Interest, or the Pew Commission, or the Union of Concerned Scientists, or the Worldwatch Institure …), one must care about eating animals. Most simply put, someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.

FREE RANGE

Applied to meat, eggs, dairy, and every now and then even fish, the free-range label is bullshit. To be considered free-range, chickens raised for meat must have “access to the outdoors,” which, if you take those words literally, means nothing.
The USDA doesn’t even have a definition of free-range for laying hens and instead relies on producer testimonials to support the accuracy of these claims.
Very often, the eggs of factory-farmed chickens – chickens packed against one another in vast barren barns – are labeled free range.

FRESH

More bullshit. There is no time component to food freshness. Pathogen-infested, feces-splattered chicken can technically be fresh, and free-range, and sold in the supermarket legally.

KFC

Formerly signifying Kentucky Fried Chicken, now signifying nothing, KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history.
KFC buys nearly a billion chickens a year, so its practices have profound ripple effects throughout all sectors of the poultry industry.
At a slaughterhouse in West Virginia that supplies KFC, workers were documented tearing the heads off live birds, spitting tobacco into their eyes, spray-paining their faces, and violently stomping on them. These acts were witnessed dozens of times.
This slaughterhouse was not a “bad apple,” but a “Supplier of the Year.” Imagine what happens at the bad apples when no one is looking.

KOSHER?

As I was taught them, in Hebrew school and at home, the Jewish dietary laws were devised as a compromise: if humans absolutely must eat animals, we should do so humanely, with respect for the other creatures in the world and with humility.
This is why when fully conscious cattle at the (then) largest kosher slaughterhouse in the world, Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, were videotaped having their tracheas and esophagi systematically pulled from their throats, languishing for up to three minutes as a result of sloppy slaughter, and being shocked with electric prods in their faces, it bothered me even more than the innumerable times I’d heard of such things happening at conventional slaughterhouses.
The president of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement, in a message sent to every one of its rabbis, asserted, “When a company purporting to be kosher violates the prohibition against tzar’ar ba’alei hayyim, causing pain to one of God’s living creatures, that company must answer to the Jewish community, and ultimately, to God.”
The Orthodox chair of the Talmud Department at Israel’s Bar Ilan University also protested, and did so eloquently: “It very well may be that any plant performing such types of kosher slaughter is guilty of hillul hashem – the desecration of God’s name – for to insist that God cares only about his ritual law and not about his moral law is to desecrate His Name.”
In a joint statement, more than fifty influential rabbis argued that “Judaism’s powerful tradition of teaching compassion for animals has been violated by these systematic abuses and needs to be reasserted.”
We have no reason to believe that the kind of cruelty that was documented at Agriprocessors has been eliminated from the kosher industry. It can’t be, so long as factory farming dominates.

ORGANIC

What does organic signify? Not nothing, but a whole lot less than we give credit for.
For meat, milk, and eggs labeled organic, the USDA requires that animals must: (1) be raised on organic feed (that is, crops raised without most synthetic pesticides and fertilizers); (2) be traced through their life cycle (that is, leave a paper trail); (3) not be fed antibiotics or growth hormones; and (4) have “access to the outdoors.”
The last criterion, sadly, has been rendered almost meaningless – in some cases “access to the outdoors” can mean nothing more than having the opportunity to look outside through a screened window.
Organic foods in general are almost certainly safer and often have a smaller ecological footprint and better health value. They are not, though, necessarily more humane.

PETA

The largest animal rights organization in the world, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has more than two million members.
No organization strikes fear in the factory farm industry and its allies more that PETA. They are effective.
Arguably the biggest PETA hater on the planet, Steve Kopperud (a meat industry consultant who has given anti-PETA seminars for a decade), puts it this way: “There’s enough understanding in the industry now of what PETA’s capable of to put the fear of God into many executives.”

Eating Animals Part 3