The secrecy that has enabled the factory farm is breaking down. The three years I spent writing this book, for example, saw the first documentation that livestock contribute more to global warming than anything else; saw the first major research institution (the Pew Commission) recommend the total phaseout of multiple dominant intensive-confinement practices; saw the first state (Colorado) illegalize common factory farm practices (gestation and veal crates) as a result of negotiations with industry (rather than campaigns against industry); saw the first supermarket chain of any kind (Whole Foods) commit to a systematic and extensive program of animal welfare labeling; and saw the first major national newspaper (the New York Times) editorialize against factory farming as a whole, arguing that “animal husbandry has been turned into animal abuse,” and “manure . . . has been turned into toxic waste.”
When Celia Steele raised that first flock of confined chicks, she could not have foreseen the effects of her actions. When Charles Vantress crossed a red-feathered Cornish and a New Hampshire to produce the 1946 “Chicken of Tomorrow,” the ancestor of today’s factory broilers, he could not have comprehended what he was contributing to.
We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?
3.
The Truth About Eating Animals
SINCE 2000 — AFTER TEMPLE GRANDIN reported improvement in slaughterhouse conditions — workers have been documented using poles like baseball bats to hit baby turkeys, stomping on chickens to watch them “pop,” beating lame pigs with metal pipes, and knowingly dismembering fully conscious cattle. One needn’t rely on undercover videos by animal rights organizations to know of these atrocities — although they are plentiful and sufficient. I could have filled several books — an encyclopedia of cruelty — with worker testimonials.
Gail Eisnitz comes close to creating such an encyclopedia in her book Slaughterhouse. Researched over a ten-year period, it is filled with interviews with workers who, combined, represent more than two million hours of slaughterhouse experience; no work of investigative journalism on the topic is as comprehensive.
One time the knocking gun was broke all day, they were taking a knife and cutting the back of the cow’s neck open while he’s still standing up. They would just fall down and be ashaking. And they stab cows in the butt to make ’em move. Break their tails. They beat them so bad. . . . And the cow be crying with its tongue stuck out.
This is hard to talk about. You’re under all this stress, all this pressure. And it really sounds mean, but I’ve taken [electric] prods and stuck them in their eyes. And held them there.
Down in the blood pit they say that the smell of blood makes you aggressive. And it does. You get an attitude that if that hog kicks at me, I’m going to get even. You’re already going to kill the hog, but that’s not enough. It has to suffer. . . . You go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be looking up at me and I’d be sticking, and I would just take my knife and — eerk — cut its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream. One time I took my knife — it’s sharp enough — and I sliced off the end of a hog’s nose, just like a piece of bologna. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it into his nose. Now that hog really went nuts, pushing its nose all over the place. I still had a bunch of salt left on my hand — I was wearing a rubber glove — and I stuck the salt right up the hog’s ass. The poor hog didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. . . . I wasn’t the only guy doing this kind of stuff. One guy I work with actually chases hogs into the scalding tank. And everybody — hog drivers, shacklers, utility men — uses lead pipes on hogs. Everybody knows it, all of it.
These statements are disturbingly representative of what Eisnitz discovered in interviews. The events described are not sanctioned by industry, but they should not be regarded as uncommon.
Undercover investigations have consistently revealed that farmworkers, laboring under what Human Rights Watch describes as “systematic human rights violations,” have often let their frustrations loose on farmed animals or simply succumbed to the demands of supervisors to keep slaughter lines moving at all costs and without second thoughts. Some workers clearly are sadistic in the literal sense of that term. But I never met such a person. The several dozen workers I met were good people, smart and honest people doing their best in an impossible situation. The responsibility lies with the mentality of the meat industry that treats both animals and “human capital” like machines. One worker put it this way:
The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit for any period of time, you develop an attitude that lets you kill things but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking around down in the blood pit with you and think, God, that really isn’t a bad-looking animal. You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them — beat them to death with a pipe. . . . When I worked upstairs taking hogs’ guts out, I could cop an attitude that I was working on a production line, helping to feed people. But down in the stick pit I wasn’t feeding people. I was killing things.
Just how common do such savageries have to be for a decent person to be unable to overlook them? If you knew that one in one thousand food animals suffered actions like those described above, would you continue to eat animals? One in one hundred? One in ten? Toward the end of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes, “I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian. . . . Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.” He’s right that emotional responses can lead us to an arrogant disconnect. But is the person who makes an effort to act on the dream of innocence really the one to be pitied? And who, in this case, is denying reality?
When Temple Grandin first began to quantify the scale of abuse in slaughterhouses, she reported witnessing “deliberate acts of cruelty occurring on a regular basis” at 32 percent of the plants she surveyed during announced visits in the United States. It’s such a shocking statistic I had to read it three times. Deliberate acts, occurring on a regular basis, witnessed by an auditor — witnessed during announced audits that gave the slaughterhouse time to clean up the worst problems. What about cruelties that weren’t witnessed? And what about accidents, which must have been far more common?
Grandin has emphasized that conditions have improved as more meat retailers demand slaughter audits from their suppliers, but how much? Reviewing the most recent audit of chicken slaughter conducted by the National Chicken Council, Grandin found that 26 percent of slaughterhouses had abuses so severe they should have failed. (The industry itself, disturbingly, found the audit results perfectly acceptable and gave all plants a pass even when live birds were thrown, tossed in the trash, and found scalded alive.) According to Grandin’s most recent survey of beef plants, fully 25 percent of the slaughterhouses had abuses so severe that they automatically failed her audit (“hanging a sensible animal on the rail” is given as a paradigmatic example of the kind of abuse that dictates an automatic failure). In recent surveys, Grandin witnessed a worker dismembering a fully conscious cow, cows waking up on the bleed rail, and workers “poking cows in the anus area with an electric prod.” What went on when she was not looking? And what about the vast majority of plants that don’t open their doors to audits in the first place?
Farmers have lost — have had taken from them — a direct, human relationship with their work. Increasing
ly, they don’t own the animals, can’t determine their methods, aren’t allowed to apply their wisdom, and have no alternative to high-speed industrial slaughter. The factory model has estranged them not only from how they labor (hack, chop, saw, stick, lop, cut), but what they produce (disgusting, unhealthy food) and how the product is sold (anonymously and cheaply). Human beings cannot be human (much less humane) under the conditions of a factory farm or slaughterhouse. It’s the most perfect workplace alienation in the world right now. Unless you consider what the animals experience.
4.
The American Table
WE SHOULDN’T KID OURSELVES ABOUT the number of ethical eating options available to most of us. There isn’t enough nonfactory chicken produced in America to feed the population of Staten Island and not enough nonfactory pork to serve New York City, let alone the country. Ethical meat is a promissory note, not a reality. Any ethical-meat advocate who is serious is going to be eating a lot of vegetarian fare.
A good number of people seem to be tempted to continue supporting factory farms while also buying meat outside that system when it is available. That’s nice. But if it is as far as our moral imaginations can stretch, then it’s hard to be optimistic about the future. Any plan that involves funneling money to the factory farm won’t end factory farming. How effective would the Montgomery bus boycott have been if the protesters had used the bus when it became inconvenient not to? How effective would a strike be if workers announced they would go back to work as soon as it became difficult to strike? If anyone finds in this book encouragement to buy some meat from alternative sources while buying factory farm meat as well, they have found something that isn’t here.
If we are at all serious about ending factory farming, then the absolute least we can do is stop sending checks to the absolute worst abusers. For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy. For others, the decision will be a hard one. To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience. We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history. What we don’t know, though, may be just as important. How would making such a decision change us?
Setting aside the direct material changes initiated by opting out of the factory farm system, the decision to eat with such deliberateness would itself be a force with enormous potential. What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption? Tolstoy famously argued that the existence of slaughterhouses and battlefields is linked. Okay, we don’t fight wars because we eat meat, and some wars should be fought — which is not to mention that Hitler was a vegetarian. But compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.
It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism. It would have sounded equally fantastic if you were told in the early 1970s, before César Chávez’s workers’ rights campaigns, that refusing to eat grapes could begin to free farmworkers from slave-like conditions. It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it’s hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world. When America’s early settlers decided to throw a tea party in Boston, forces powerful enough to create a nation were released. Deciding what to eat (and what to toss overboard) is the founding act of production and consumption that shapes all others. Choosing leaf or flesh, factory farm or family farm, does not in itself change the world, but teaching ourselves, our children, our local communities, and our nation to choose conscience over ease can. One of the greatest opportunities to live our values — or betray them — lies in the food we put on our plates. And we will live or betray our values not only as individuals, but as nations.
We have grander legacies than the quest for cheap products. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote passionately about the time when “one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular.” Sometimes we simply have to make a decision because “one’s conscience tells one that it is right.” These famous words of King’s, and the efforts of Chávez’s United Farm Workers, are also our legacy. We might want to say that these social-justice movements have nothing to do with the situation of the factory farm. Human oppression is not animal abuse. King and Chávez were moved by a concern for suffering humanity, not suffering chickens or global warming. Fair enough. One can certainly quibble with, or even become enraged by, the comparison implicit in invoking them here, but it is worth noting that César Chávez and King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, were vegans, as is King’s son Dexter. We interpret the Chavez and King legacies — we interpret America’s legacy — too narrowly if we assume in advance that they cannot speak against the oppression of the factory farm.
5.
The Global Table
NEXT TIME YOU SIT DOWN for a meal, imagine that there are nine other people sitting with you at the table, and that together you represent all the people on the planet. Organized by nations, two of your tablemates are Chinese, two Indian, and a fifth represents all the other countries in Northeast, South, and Central Asia. A sixth represents the nations of Southeast Asia and Oceana. A seventh represents sub-Saharan Africa, and an eighth represents the remainder of Africa and the Middle East. A ninth represents Europe. The remaining seat, representing the countries of South, Central, and North America, is for you.
If we allocate seats by native language, only Chinese speakers would get their own representative. All English and Spanish speakers together would have to share a chair.
Organized by religion, three people are Christian, two are Muslim, and three practice Buddhism, traditional Chinese religions, or Hinduism. Another two belong to other religious traditions or identify as nonreligious. (My own Jewish community, which is smaller than the margin of error in the Chinese census, can’t even squeeze half of a tuches onto a chair.)
If seated by nourishment, one person is hungry and two are obese. More than half eat a mostly vegetarian diet, but that number is shrinking. The stricter vegetarians and vegans have one seat at the table, but barely. And more than half of the time any one of you reaches for eggs, chicken, or pork, they will have come from a factory farm. If current trends continue for another twenty years, the beef and mutton you reach for also will.
The United States is not even close to getting its own seat when the table is organized by population, but it would have somewhere between two and three seats when people are seated by how much food they consume. No one loves to eat as much as we do, and when we change what we eat, the world changes.
I’ve restricted myself to mostly discussing how our food choices affect the ecology of our planet and the lives of its animals, but I could have just as easily made the entire book about public health, workers’ rights, decaying rural communities, or global poverty — all of which are profoundly affected by factory farming. Factory farming, of course, does not cause all the world’s problems, but it is remarkable just how many of them intersect there. And it is equally remarkable, and completely improbable, that the likes of you and me would have real influence over factory farming. But no one can seriously doubt the influence of US consumers on global farm practices.
I realize that I’m coming dangerously close to suggesting that quaint notion that every person can make a difference. The reality is more complicated, of course. As a “solitary eater,” your decisions will, in and of themselves, do nothing to alter the industry. That said, unless you obtain your food in secret
and eat it in the closet, you don’t eat alone. We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can’t stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.
As anyone who has been a vegetarian for a number of years might tell you, the influence that this simple dietary choice has on what others around you eat can be surprising. The body that represents restaurants in America, the National Restaurant Association, has advised every restaurant in the nation to have at least one vegetarian entrée. Why? It’s simple: their own polling data indicates that more than a third of restaurant operators have observed an uptick in demand for vegetarian meals. A leading restaurant industry periodical, Nation’s Restaurant News, advises restaurants to “add vegetarian or vegan dishes to the mix. Vegetarian dishes, aside from being less expensive . . . also mitigate the veto vote. Usually, if you have a vegan in your party, that will dictate where the party eats.”
Millions upon millions of advertising dollars are spent simply to make sure that we see people drinking milk or eating beef in movies, and millions more are spent to make sure that when I have a soda in my hand, you can tell (probably from some distance) whether it is Coke or Pepsi. The National Restaurant Association doesn’t make these recommendations, and multinational corporations don’t spend millions on product placement, to make us feel good about the influence we have on others around us. They simply recognize the fact that eating is a social act.
When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farmworkers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision — eating “like everyone else” — is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic. Without question, in most places and in most times, to decide one’s diet by not deciding — to eat like everyone else — was probably a fine idea. Today, to eat like everyone else is to add another straw to the camel’s back. Our straw may not be the backbreaker, but the act will be repeated — every day of our lives, and perhaps every day of the lives of our children and our children’s children. . . .