Sadly, people in animal agriculture today are increasingly unlikely to be bearers of traditional rural values. Many of the people at city-based animal advocacy organizations, whether they know it or not, are from a strictly historical perspective far better representatives of rural values like respect for neighbors, straightforwardness, land stewardship, and, of course, respect for the creatures given into their hands. Since the world has changed so much, the same values don’t lead to the same choices anymore.
I’ve had a lot of hope for more sustainable grass-based cattle ranches and seen a new vigor among the remaining small family hog farms, but when it came to the poultry industry, I had all but given up hope until I met Frank Reese and visited his incredible farm. Frank and the handful of farmers he’s given some of his birds to are the only ones in a position to develop a proper alternative to the poultry factory farm model from the genetics up — and that’s what’s needed.
When I spoke to Frank about the barriers he faced, his frustration with a half-dozen issues that couldn’t be easily addressed without a significant cash influx came into focus. The other thing that was clear was that the demand for his product wasn’t only significant, but positively immense — an entrepreneur’s dream. Frank was regularly refusing orders for more birds than he had raised in his entire life because he didn’t have the capacity to meet them. The organization I founded, Farm Forward, offered to help him create a business plan. A few months later, our director and I were in Frank’s living room with the first possible investor.
We then set to the cat-herding work of bringing together the considerable influence of many of Frank’s existing admirers — reporters, academics, foodies, politicians — and coordinating their energy in the ways that would deliver results most quickly. Plans for expansion were moving along. Frank had added several breeds of heritage chickens to his turkey flocks. The first of a series of new buildings that he needed was under construction, and he was in negotiations with a major retailer for a large contract. And that’s when the slaughterhouse he used was bought and closed.
We had actually anticipated this. Still, Frank’s growers — the farmers who raise many of the birds he hatches, and stood to lose most of a year’s salary — were scared. Frank decided the only long-term solution was to build a slaughter facility that he owned, ideally a mobile slaughterhouse that could be right on the farm and eliminate the stress of transport. Of course he was right. So we started figuring out the mechanics and economics of doing this. It was new territory for me — intellectually, of course, but also emotionally. I thought the work would require regular speeches to myself correcting my resistance to kill animals. But if anything made me uncomfortable, it was my lack of discomfort. Why, I kept wondering, aren’t I at least uneasy about this?
My grandfather on my mother’s side wanted to stay in farming. He was forced out like so many others, but my mother had already grown up on a working farm. She was in a small town in the Midwest with a graduating high school class of forty. For a time, my grandfather raised pigs. He castrated and even used some confinement that was moving in the direction of today’s hog factory farms. Still, they were animals to him, and if one got sick, he made sure that individual got extra care and attention. He didn’t pull out a calculator and figure out whether it would be more profitable to let the animal languish. The thought would have been unchristian to him, cowardly, indecent.
That small victory of caring over the calculator is all you need to know to understand why I’m vegan today. And why I help build slaughterhouses. This is not paradoxical or ironic. The very same impulse that makes me personally committed to eschewing meats, eggs, and dairy has led me to devote my time to helping create a slaughterhouse that Frank would own and that could be a model for others. If you can’t beat them, join them? No. It’s a question of properly identifying who the them is.
7.
My Wager
AFTER HAVING SPENT NEARLY THREE years learning about animal agriculture, my resolve has become strong in two directions. I’ve become a committed vegetarian, whereas before I waffled among any number of diets. It’s now hard to imagine that changing. I simply don’t want anything to do with the factory farm, and refraining from meat is the only realistic way for me to do that.
In another direction, though, the vision of sustainable farms that give animals a good life (a life as good as we give our dogs or cats) and an easy death (as easy a death as we give our suffering and terminally ill companion animals) has moved me. Paul, Bill, Nicolette, and most of all Frank are not only good people, but extraordinary people. They should be among the people a president consults when selecting a secretary of agriculture. Their farms are what I want our elected officials to strive to create and our economy to support.
The meat industry has tried to paint people who take this twofold stance as absolutist vegetarians hiding a radicalized agenda. But ranchers can be vegetarians, vegans can build slaughterhouses, and I can be a vegetarian who supports the best of animal agriculture.
I feel certain that Frank’s ranch will be run honorably, but how sure can I be about the day-to-day running of other farms that follow his model? How sure do I need to be? Is the strategy of the selective omnivore “naive” in a way that vegetarianism is not?
How easy is it to avow a responsibility to the beings most within our power and at the same time raise them only to kill them? Marlene Halverson puts the strange situation of the animal farmer eloquently:
The ethical relationship of farmers to farm animals is unique. The farmer must raise a living creature that is destined to an endpoint of slaughter for food, or culling and death after a lifetime of production, without becoming emotionally attached or, conversely, without becoming cynical about the animal’s need for a decent life while the animal is alive. The farmer must somehow raise an animal as a commercial endeavor without regarding the animal as a mere commodity.
Is this a reasonable thing to ask of farmers? Given the pressures of our industrial era, is meat by necessity a disavowal, a frustration if not an outright denial of compassion? Contemporary agriculture has given us cause for skepticism, but no one knows what tomorrow’s farms will look like.
What we do know, though, is that if you eat meat today, your typical choice is between animals raised with either more (chicken, turkey, fish, and pork) or less (beef) cruelty. Why do so many of us feel we have to choose between such options? What would render such utilitarian calculations of the least horrible option beside the point? At what moment would the absurd choices readily available today give way to the simplicity of a firmly drawn line: this is unacceptable?
Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn’t motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?
We have let the factory farm replace farming for the same reasons our cultures have relegated minorities to being second-class members of society and kept women under the power of men. We treat animals as we do because we want to and can. (Does anyone really wish to deny this anymore?) The myth of consent is perhaps the story of meat, and much comes down to whether this story, when we are realistic, is plausible.
It isn’t. Not anymore. It wouldn’t satisfy anyone who didn’t have an interest in eating animals. At the end of the day, factory farming isn’t about feeding people; it’s about money. Barring some rather radical legal and economic changes, it must be. And whether or not it’s right to kill animals for food, we know that in today’s dominant systems it’s impossible to kill them without (at least) inflicting occasional torture. This is why even Frank — the most well-intentioned farmer one could imagine — apologizes to his animals as they are sent off to slaughter. He’s made a compromi
se rather than cut a fair deal.
A not particularly funny thing happened at Niman Ranch recently. Just before this book went to press, Bill was driven out of his namesake company. As he tells it, his own board forced him to leave, quite simply because they wanted to do things more profitably and less ethically than he would allow while remaining at the helm. It seems that even this company — literally the most impressive national meat provider in the United States — has sold out. I included Niman Ranch in this book because it was the best evidence that selective omnivores have a viable strategy. What am I — are we — to make of its fall?
For now, Niman Ranch remains the only nationally available brand that I can say represents a robust improvement in the lives of animals (pigs much more than cattle). But how good would you feel sending your money to these people? If animal agriculture has become a joke, perhaps this is the punch line: even Bill Niman has said he would no longer eat Niman Ranch beef.
I have placed my wager on a vegetarian diet and I have enough respect for people like Frank, who have bet on a more humane animal agriculture, to support their kind of farming. This is not in the end a complicated position. Nor is it a veiled argument for vegetarianism. It is an argument for vegetarianism, but it’s also an argument for another, wiser animal agriculture and more honorable omnivory.
If we are not given the option to live without violence, we are given the choice to center our meals around harvest or slaughter, husbandry or war. We have chosen slaughter. We have chosen war. That’s the truest version of our story of eating animals.
Can we tell a new story?
Where will it end?
1.
The Last Thanksgiving of My Childhood
THROUGHOUT MY CHILDHOOD, WE CELEBRATED Thanksgiving at my uncle and aunt’s house. My uncle, my mother’s younger brother, was the first person on that side of the family to be born on this side of the Atlantic. My aunt can trace her lineage back to the Mayflower. That unlikely pairing of histories was no small part of what made those Thanksgivings so special, and memorable, and, in the very best sense of the word, American.
We would arrive around two o’clock. The cousins would play football on the sloping sliver of a front yard until my little brother got hurt, at which point we would head up to the attic to play football on the various video game systems. Two floors beneath us, Maverick salivated at the stove’s window, my father talked politics and cholesterol, the Detroit Lions played their hearts out on an unwatched TV, and my grandmother, surrounded by her family, thought in the language of her dead relatives.
Two dozen or so mismatched chairs circumscribed four tables of slightly different heights and widths, pushed together and covered in matching cloths. No one was fooled into thinking this setup was perfect, but it was. My aunt placed a small pile of popcorn kernels on each plate, which, in the course of the meal, we were supposed to transfer to the table as symbols of things we were thankful for. Dishes came out continuously; some went clockwise, some counter, some zigzagged down the length of the table: sweet potato casserole, homemade rolls, green beans with almonds, cranberry concoctions, yams, buttery mashed potatoes, my grandmother’s wildly incongruous kugel, trays of gherkins and olives and marinated mushrooms, and a cartoonishly large turkey that had been put in the oven when last year’s was taken out. We talked and talked: about the Orioles and Redskins, changes in the neighborhood, our accomplishments, and the anguish of others (our own anguish was off-limits), and all the while, my grandmother would go from grandchild to grandchild, making sure no one was starving.
Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King. Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine’s Day, are in one way or another about being thankful. But Thanksgiving is freed from any particular thing we are thankful for. We aren’t celebrating the Pilgrims, but what the Pilgrims celebrated. (The Pilgrims weren’t even a feature of the holiday until the late nineteenth century.) Thanksgiving is an American holiday, but there’s nothing specifically American about it — we aren’t celebrating America, but American ideals. Its openness makes it available to anyone who feels like expressing thanks, and points beyond the crimes that made America possible, and the commercialization, kitsch, and jingoism that have been heaved onto the shoulders of the holiday.
Thanksgiving is the meal we aspire for other meals to resemble. Of course most of us can’t (and wouldn’t want to) cook all day every day, and of course such food would be fatal if consumed with regularity, and how many of us really want to be surrounded by our extended families every single night? (It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.) But it’s nice to imagine all meals being so deliberate. Of the thousand-or-so meals we eat every year, Thanksgiving dinner is the one that we try most earnestly to get right. It holds the hope of being a good meal, whose ingredients, efforts, setting, and consuming are expressions of the best in us. More than any other meal, it is about good eating and good thinking.
And more than any other food, the Thanksgiving turkey embodies the paradoxes of eating animals: what we do to living turkeys is just about as bad as anything humans have ever done to any animal in the history of the world. Yet what we do with their dead bodies can feel so powerfully good and right. The Thanksgiving turkey is the flesh of competing instincts — of remembering and forgetting.
I’m writing these final words a few days before Thanksgiving. I live in New York now and only rarely — at least according to my grandmother — get back to DC. No one who was young is young anymore. Some of those who transferred kernels to the table are gone. And there are new family members. (I am now we.) As if the musical chairs I played at birthday parties were preparation for all of this ending and beginning.
This will be the first year we celebrate in my home, the first time I will prepare the food, and the first Thanksgiving meal at which my son will be old enough to eat the food the rest of us eat. If this entire book could be decanted into a single question — not something easy, loaded, or asked in bad faith, but a question that fully captured the problem of eating and not eating animals — it might be this: Should we serve turkey at Thanksgiving?
2.
What Do Turkeys Have to Do with Thanksgiving?
WHAT IS ADDED BY HAVING a turkey on the Thanksgiving table? Maybe it tastes good, but taste isn’t the reason it’s there — most people don’t eat very much turkey throughout the year. (Thanksgiving Day accounts for 18 percent of annual turkey consumption.) And despite the pleasure we take in eating vast amounts, Thanksgiving is not about being gluttonous — it is about the opposite.
Perhaps the turkey is there because it is fundamental to the ritual — it is how we celebrate Thanksgiving. Why? Because Pilgrims might have eaten it at their first Thanksgiving? It’s more likely that they didn’t. We know that they didn’t have corn, apples, potatoes, or cranberries, and the only two written reports from the legendary Thanksgiving at Plymouth mention venison and wildfowl. Though it’s conceivable that they ate wild turkey, we know that the turkey wasn’t made part of the ritual until the nineteenth century. And historians have now discovered an even earlier Thanksgiving than the 1621 Plymouth celebration that English-American historians made famous. Half a century before Plymouth, early American settlers celebrated Thanksgiving with the Timucua Indians in what is now Florida — the best evidence suggests that the settlers were Catholic rather than Protestant, and spoke Spanish rather than English. They dined on bean soup.
But let’s just make believe that the Pilgrims invented Thanksgiving and were eating turkey. Putting aside the obvious fact that the Pilgrims did many things that we wouldn’t want to do now (and that we want to do many things they didn’t), the turkeys we eat have about as much in common with the turkeys the Pilgrims might have eaten as does the ever-punch-lined tofurkey. At the center of our Thanksgiving tables is an animal that never breathed fresh air or saw the sky until it was packed away for slaughter. At the end of our forks is an animal that was incapable of reproduc
ing sexually. In our bellies is an animal with antibiotics in its belly. The very genetics of our birds are radically different. If the Pilgrims could have seen into the future, what would they have thought of the turkey on our table? Without exaggeration, it’s unlikely that they would have recognized it as a turkey.
And what would happen if there were no turkey? Would the tradition be broken, or injured, if instead of a bird we simply had the sweet potato casserole, homemade rolls, green beans with almonds, cranberry concoctions, yams, buttery mashed potatoes, pumpkin and pecan pies? Maybe we could add some Timucuan bean soup. It’s not so hard to imagine it. See your loved ones around the table. Hear the sounds, smell the smells. There is no turkey. Is the holiday undermined? Is Thanksgiving no longer Thanksgiving?
Or would Thanksgiving be enhanced? Would the choice not to eat turkey be a more active way of celebrating how thankful we feel? Try to imagine the conversation that would take place. This is why our family celebrates this way. Would such a conversation feel disappointing or inspiring? Would fewer or more values be transmitted? Would the joy be lessened by the hunger to eat that particular animal? Imagine your family’s Thanksgivings after you are gone, when the question is no longer “Why don’t we eat this?” but the more obvious one: “Why did they ever?” Can the imagined gaze of future generations shame us, in Kafka’s sense of the word, into remembering?