Another part of what’s happened in response to the economic squeeze is that you gotta make an animal that produces more of the product at a lower cost. So you breed for faster growth and improved feed conversion. As long as food continues to get cheaper and cheaper relative to everything else, the farmer has no choice but to produce food at a lower production cost, and genetically he’s going to move toward an animal that accomplishes that task, which can be counterproductive to its welfare. The loss is built into the system. It’s assumed that if you have fifty thousand broilers in a shed, thousands are going to die in the first weeks. My daddy couldn’t afford to lose an animal. Now you begin by assuming you’ll lose 4 percent right off the bat.
I’ve told you the drawbacks because I’m trying to be up-front with you. But in fact, we’ve got a tremendous system. Is it perfect? No. No system is perfect. And if you find someone who tells you he has a perfect way to feed billions and billions of people, well, you should take a careful look. You hear about free-range eggs and grass-fed cattle, and all of that’s good. I think it’s a good direction. But it ain’t gonna feed the world. Never. You simply can’t feed billions of people free-range eggs. And when you hear people talking about small farming as a model, I call that the Marie Antoinette syndrome: if they can’t afford bread, let them eat cake. High-yield farming has allowed everyone to eat. Think about that. If we go away from it, it may improve the welfare of the animal, it may even be better for the environment, but I don’t want to go back to China in 1918. I’m talking about starving people.
Sure, you could say that people should just eat less meat, but I’ve got news for you: people don’t want to eat less meat. You can be like PETA and pretend that the world is going to wake up tomorrow and realize that they love animals and don’t want to eat them anymore, but history has shown that people are perfectly capable of loving animals and eating them. It’s childish, and I would even say immoral, to fantasize about a vegetarian world when we’re having such a hard time making this one work.
Look, the American farmer has fed the world. He was asked to do it after World War II, and he did it. People have never had the ability to eat like they can now. Protein has never been more affordable. My animals are protected from the elements, get all the food they need, and grow well. Animals get sick. Animals die. But what do you think happens to animals in nature? You think they die of natural causes? You think they’re stunned before they’re killed? Animals in nature starve to death or are ripped apart by other animals. That’s how they die.
People have no idea where food comes from anymore. It’s not synthetic, it’s not created in a lab, it actually has to be grown. What I hate is when consumers act as if farmers want these things, when it’s consumers who tell farmers what to grow. They’ve wanted cheap food. We’ve grown it. If they want cage-free eggs, they have to pay a lot more money for them. Period. It’s cheaper to produce an egg in a massive laying barn with caged hens. It’s more efficient and that means it’s more sustainable. Yes, I’m saying that factory farming can be more sustainable, though I know that word is often used against the industry. From China to India to Brazil, the demand for animal products is growing — and fast. Do you think family farms are going to sustain a world of ten billion?
A friend of mine had an experience a few years ago where two young guys came and asked if they could take some footage for a documentary about farm life. Seemed like nice guys, so he said sure. But then they edited it to make it look like the birds were being abused. They said the turkeys were being raped. I know that farm. I’ve visited it many times, and I can tell you those turkeys were being cared for as well as they needed to survive and be productive. Things can be taken out of context. And novices don’t always know what they’re looking at. This business isn’t always pretty, but it’s a bad mistake to confuse something unpleasant with something wrong. Every kid with a video camera thinks he’s a veterinary scientist, thinks he was born knowing what takes years and years to learn. I know there’s a necessity to sensationalize stuff in order to motivate people, but I prefer the truth.
In the eighties, the industry tried to communicate with animal groups, and we got burned real bad. So the turkey community decided there would be no more of it. We put up a wall, and that was the end. We don’t talk, don’t let people onto the farms. Standard operating procedure. PETA doesn’t want to talk about farming. They want to end farming. They have absolutely no idea how the world actually works. For all I know, I’m talking to the enemy right now.
But I believe in what I’m telling you. And it’s an important story to tell, a story that’s getting drowned out by the hollering of the extremists. I asked you not to use my name, but I have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing. You just have to understand that there’s a bigger picture here. And I’ve got bosses. I gotta put food on the table, too.
Can I make a suggestion to you? Before you rush off trying to see everything you can, educate yourself. Don’t trust your eyes. Trust your head. Learn about animals, learn about farming and the economics of food, learn the history. Start at the beginning.
4.
The First Chicken
YOUR PROGENY WILL BE KNOWN as Gallus domesticus, chicken, cock, hen, poultry, the Chicken of Tomorrow, broiler, layer, Mr. McDonald, and many other names. Each name tells a story, but no stories have been told, no names have yet been given to you or to any animal.
Like all animals in this time before the beginning, you reproduce according to your own preferences and instincts. You are not fed, forced to labor, or protected. You are not marked as a possession with brands or tagging. No one has even thought of you as something that could be possessed or owned.
As a wild rooster, you survey the landscape, warn others of intruders with complex calls, and defend mates with beak and sharp toes. As a wild hen, you begin communicating with your chicks even before they hatch, responding to peeps of distress by shifting your weight. The image of your motherly protection and care will be used in the second verse of Genesis to describe the hovering of God’s first breath over the first water. Jesus will invoke you as an image of protective love: “I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” But Genesis has not yet been written, nor Jesus born.
The First Human
ANY FOOD YOU EAT IS food you have found for yourself. For the most part, you do not live in close proximity to the animals you kill. You do not share or compete for land with them, but must go out to seek them. When you do so, you generally kill animals that you don’t know as individuals, save in the brief space of the hunt itself, and you view the animals you hunt as equals of sorts. Not in all ways (of course), but the animals you know have power: they have abilities humans lack, could be dangerous, could bring life, mean things that mean things. When you create rites and traditions, you do so with animals. You draw them in sand, in dirt, and on cave walls — not only animal figures, but also hybrid creatures that blend human and animal forms. Animals are what you are and are not. You have a complex relationship with them and, in a sense, an egalitarian one. This is about to change.
The First Problem
IT IS 8000 BCE. ONCE a wild jungle bird, the chicken is now domesticated, as are goats and cattle. This means a new kind of intimacy with humans — new kinds of care and new kinds of violence.
A common trope, ancient and modern, describes domestication as a process of coevolution between humans and other species. Basically, humans struck a deal with the animals we have named chickens, cows, pigs, and so forth: we’ll protect you, arrange food for you, etc., and, in turn, your labor will be harnessed, your milk and eggs taken, and, at times, you will be killed and eaten. Life in the wild isn’t a party, the logic goes — nature is cruel — so this is a good deal. And the animals, in their own way, have consented to it. Michael Pollan suggests this story in The Omnivore’s Dilemma:
Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans s
omehow imposed on animals some ten thousand years ago. Rather, domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and — yes — their flesh. . . . From the animals’ point of view the bargain with humanity turned out to be a tremendous success, at least until our own time.
This is the post-Darwinian version of the ancient myth of animal consent. It is offered by ranchers in defense of the violence that is part of their profession, and makes appearances in agricultural school curricula. Propping up the story is the idea that the interests of the species and those of individuals often conflict, but if there were no species there would be no individuals. If humankind went vegan, the logic goes, there would be no more farmed animals (which isn’t quite right, as there are already dozens of breeds of chickens and pigs that are “ornamental,” or raised for companionship, and others would be kept around to fertilize crops). The animals, in effect, want us to farm them. They prefer it this way. Some ranchers I met told me of times they’d accidentally left gates open, and none of the animals fled.
In ancient Greece the myth of consent was enacted at the oracle of Delphi by sprinkling water on the heads of animals before slaughter. When the animals shook off the water by nodding their heads, the oracle would interpret this as consent to be slaughtered and say, “That which willing nods . . . I say you may justly sacrifice.” A traditional formula used by Russian Yakuts reads, “You have come to me, Lord Bear, you wish me to kill you.” In the ancient Israelite tradition, the red heifer sacrificed for Israel’s atonement must walk to the altar willingly or the ritual is invalid. The myth of consent has many versions, but all imply a “fair deal” and, at least metaphorically, animal complicity in their own domestication and slaughter.
The Myth of the Myth
BUT SPECIES DON’T MAKE CHOICES, individuals do. And even if species somehow could, to imply that they would select perpetuity over individual well-being is hard to apply more broadly. By this logic, enslaving a group of humans is acceptable if the posed alternative were nonexistence. (Instead of Live free or die, the motto we script for our food animals is Die enslaved but live.) More obviously, most animals, even individually, are unable to fathom such an arrangement. Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.
That said, these objections might miss the point. Whatever the facts of the matter, most people can imagine fair and unfair treatment of, for example, the family dog or cat. And we can imagine methods of husbandry to which animals might, hypothetically, “consent.” (A dog given several years of tasty food, plenty of time outdoors with other dogs, and all the space she could want, aware of the hardships of dogs under wilder and less-regulated conditions, might conceivably agree to be eventually eaten in exchange.)
We can, do, and always have imagined such things. The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.
It is not surprising that, historically, most people seem to have accepted eating animals as a daily fact of life. Meat is filling and smells and tastes good to most. (It’s also not surprising that for virtually all of human history, some humans have kept other humans as slaves.) But as far back in time as records stretch, humans have expressed ambivalence about the violence and death dealing inherent in eating animals. So we’ve told stories.
The First Forgetting
WE SEE FARMED ANIMALS SO rarely today, it becomes easy to forget all of this. Earlier generations were more familiar than we are with both the personalities of farmed animals and the violence done to them. They would have known that pigs are playful, smart, and curious (we would say “like dogs”), and that they have complex social relationships (we would say “like primates”). They would have known the look and behavior of a caged pig, as well as the infant-like screech of a pig being castrated or slaughtered.
Having little exposure to animals makes it much easier to push aside questions about how our actions might influence their treatment. The problem posed by meat has become an abstract one: there is no individual animal, no singular look of joy or suffering, no wagging tail, and no scream. The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
Some have tried to resolve this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn’t be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn’t do it.
Killing an animal oneself is more often than not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.
The First Animal Ethics
ONCE UPON A TIME the dominant ethic toward domestic animals, rooted in the demands of husbandry and responding to the fundamental problem of life feeding on sentient life, was not don’t eat (of course), but neither was it don’t care. Rather: eat with care.
The care for domesticated animals demanded by the eat with care ethic did not necessarily correspond to any official morality: it didn’t need to, as that ethic was based on the economic necessities of raising domestic animals. The very nature of the human–domestic animal relationship required some degree of caring, in the sense of providing provisions and a safe environment for one’s flock. Care for farmed animals was, to an extent, good business. But there was a price for this guarantee of sheepdogs and clean (enough) water: castration, exhausting labor, draining blood or cutting flesh from living animals, branding, removing young animals from their mothers, and, of course, slaughter were also good business. The animals were ensured police protection in exchange for being sacrificed to those policemen: protect and serve.
The eat with care ethic lived and evolved for thousands of years. It became many different ethical systems inflected by the diverse cultures in which it appeared: in India it led to prohibitions on eating cows, in Islam and Judaism it led to mandates for quick slaughter, on the Russian tundra it led Yakuts to claim the animals wanted to be killed. But it was not to last.
The eat with care ethic didn’t become obsolete over time, but died suddenly. It was killed, actually.
The First Line Worker
BEGINNING IN CINCINNATI AND EXPANDING to Chicago in the late 1820s and ’30s, early industrial “processing” plants (a.k.a. slaughterhouses) replaced the skilled knowledge of butchers with gangs of men who would perform a coordinated series of mind-, muscle-, and joint-numbing tasks. Kill men, sticker-bleeders, tail-rippers, leggers, butters, flankers, head-skinners, head-chislers, gutters, and back-splitters (among many others). By his own acknowledgment, the efficiencies of these lines inspired Henry Ford, who brought the model into the auto industry, leading to a revolution in manufacturing. (Putting together a car is just taking apart a cow in reverse.)
The pressure to improve upon the efficiency of slaughter and processing came in part as advances in rail transport, such as the 1879 invention of the refrigerator car, allowed for increasingly large concentrations of cattle to be brought together from ever-farther distances. Today, it isn’t unusual for meat to travel almost halfway around the globe to reach your supermarket. The average distance our meat travels hovers around fifteen hundred miles. That’s like me driving from Brooklyn to the Texas Panhandle for lunch.
By 1908, conveyer systems were introduced to the disassembly lines, allowing supervisors rather than workers to control line speeds. These speeds would ramp upward for more than eighty years — in many cases doubling and even tripling — with predi
ctable increases in ineffective slaughter and associated workplace injuries.
Despite these trends in processing, at the dawn of the twentieth century, animals were still largely raised on farms and ranches in much the same manner they always had been — and as most people continue to imagine. It hadn’t yet occurred to farmers to treat living animals like dead ones.
The First Factory Farmer
IN 1923, IN THE DELMARVA (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) Peninsula, a small, almost-funny accident befell an Oceanview housewife, Celia Steele, and initiated the modern poultry industry and the global creep of factory farming. Steele, who managed her family’s small flock of chickens, allegedly received an order of five hundred chicks instead of the fifty she had requested. Rather than get rid of them, she decided to experiment with keeping the birds indoors through the winter. With the help of newly discovered feed supplements the birds survived, and the loop of her experimentations continued. By 1926, Steele had 10,000 birds, and by 1935, 250,000. (The average flock size in America in 1930 was still only 23.)