Hmmm...
Here is an interesting book review for you. It's about the industrial farming of chickens. The reviewer hates the book and takes a very cynical approach to the authors conviction that there is something morally wrong with the chicken industry. Here's an excerpt of the review:
She starts by offering some startling statistics about the growth of the global chicken industry through intensive farming methods. At any moment there are now almost twice as many chickens alive as humans. People in Britain alone eat five times as much chicken as we did 20 years ago, now accounting for almost half the meat we consume. Britain produces more than a million tonnes of chicken a year, mostly in factory farms where big production lines can kill 9,000 birds an hour. In the USA, apparently, 24million chickens are killed every 24 hours.
The message of Planet Chicken, however, is that the rise of ‘industrially farmed creatures’ is a bad thing. It assumes that there must be something morally suspect about ‘cheap’ meat produced by factory methods. More broadly, it is an attack on the development of industry and human society, and its separation from the animal world.
For example, Joshua and I have a friend who, this summer, decided to try his hand at urban agriculture. He has done this amazing thing by renting a city lot and planting a huge garden on it and inviting his friends and acquaintances to buy a share in his farm. It works like this: You buy a share. As a result, you are bound to purchase produce from him every week. You also harvest your own produce. Perhaps I'm being romantically ideal, but there is something really amazing about digging in the dirt with your hands for potatoes, taking them home and washing them yourself and eating them. It's so much more human than buying a bag of Idaho potatoes from Kroger, when you live nowhere near Idaho and when the 10 lb bag rots before you could possibly use 10 lbs of potatoes.
I like picking my produce from Jesse's farm, talking to him while I do it. I also like buying from the farmer's market where you actually see the people who grew your tomatoes. I like buying my meat and eggs from a farmer who invests himself in the animals and the product and where 9,000 chickens an hour aren't killed on some factory line. It just seems more real - and probably is more moral in some way, though I'm not able right now to articulate fully why that is so.
I think the issue is larger than cruelty to chickens.
Also, just a picky little note: beans are a cheaper (and healthier) source of protein that chicken. So, if the author of the review is so concerned about the world's access to protein, he should think about beans.
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25 comments:
I hope RJ sees this post--I want to see what he says. You and Josh should write a book together. Here's the title:
Un-Thinking about the Connections: How the Internet and Big Agriculture are Killing Our Human-ness
Or some such.
Look, can we just agree that it's in the best interest of human health to not consume a majority of any one nutrient from a single source? Eating just beans isn't great, and neither is eating just chicken. You're far better off eating both in moderation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/21/opinion/21planck.html?ex=1337400000&en=37878847a13bd4bc&ei=5090
I'm fine with the argument that Americans eat too much meant and not enough fruits and vegetables. I'm not fine with carrying the "it's better to eat less meat" card all the way to the "it's even healthier to eat no meat." That's ridiculous. I'd be more than interested to read something about people who are vegetarian and remain as healthy as people who eat meat (yet to see this anywhere), so post or send me a link if you know of something. I'd prefer something from an internet highway, as opposed to some back-alley vegan resource website.
That said, here are the rest of my contentions-
1)Why is it more human to dig your own vegetables than buy them? Along that logic, wouldn't it be even more human to stock an urban lot full of migratory animals which I could hunt down and kill using a spear or maybe just chase them into an open pit?
2) How is a farmer who raises a few hundred chickens to slaughter more humane than one who raises thousands? Where exactly does he "invest himself" more into each chicken? What exactly is the ratio to additional chickens farmed vs. total moral compromise?
PS: What if I was able to farm in an internet game and sell produce to other players in exchange for real money that I used to buy Idaho potatoes? Where does that put me in terms of human-ness?
I had the same question as Jacks. Why is it more human to grow than not?
I just think that our pre-modern ancestors would look at our industry and say, "this means you don't have to spend all day digging potatoes? You don't have to worry about your harvest going bad? And you've invented anti-biotics and pesticides to ensure that your crops aren't destroyed by insects or infected with diseases? That's wonderful!"
I'd rather eat food I grew out of my own garden too, but if that's all I had to live on I think I'd feel differently.
Wow! Remember Lanny? He used to have his own chickens, cow, ducks. When he would chop off the head of a chicken us city people would gross out. His comment was that modern society has desensitized people to the way it always was when people were on their own for food.
Well, if we were all farmers there would not be any technology.
Finally, I highly recommend the movie "Soylent Green." Please go find it and watch it. I think it will really shed some light on this subject. I think the movie was made in the early 70's and if I recall, it was futuristic showing either 2005, or 2020. Check it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_green
Not sure how this is applicable?
"When I eat beans, I sit in my own little cloud. Nobody comes to visit me in my little cloud..."
Man, this post really opened up a can of beans... worms that is.
jackscolon the Soylent Green movie has to do with the perfect food source. Soylent yellow was the normal food, but on Tuesdays everyone was given Soylent Green for the protein source.
Look, here is why Mair can claim that digging potatoes is “more human” than buying a bag from the store and what “Soylent Green” has to do with this whole discussion.
We (human persons) aren’t very thoughtful or articulate about what it is to be human. I would like to suggest that, in part, any consideration of being a human person must entail embodiedness, not as some mere fact (i.e. the biological “hardware” that supports the “software” of personhood) but as constitutive of the person. Embodiness has all sorts of qualities that are inconvenient but are nonetheless necessarily a part of fully realized human-ness. That includes the nice things (e.g. physical agency, erotic pleasure, bodily aesthetics, etc.) as well as the not-so-nice things (e.g. sickness, frailty, dirtiness, labor, etc.).
One of the ways to think about modernity is to think about technology, rational processes, and consumer capitalism (the machinery of modernity if you will) as means of denying embodiness with regard to the not-so-nice while exalting embodiness with regard to the nice. We manipulate the physical and social world continually to that end (food production being a basic and nearly universal example).
The trouble is that, because “being human” is something that comes about through cultivation in the physical and social world, the character and quality of that world have a direct impact on the sort of human possibilities that one is able to achieve. In our current context, we are literally unable to realize the fullness of our humanity in some important ways unless we actively choose to forego much of what is presented to us as a “convenience” (which is shorthand for a means of exalting the pleasurable aspects of being human without acknowledging the difficult aspects of the same).
To the degree that we don’t, the processes that we have developed to master and manipulate the physical and social world, ironically enough, manipulate us. We imagine that instrumentalizing sentient animal life (chickens for instance) – reducing things only to that for which we can put it to immediate (often mechanistically-understood) human use - is completely separate from our ability to live a good life. In reality, the same process of instrumentalization comes to define our lives as much if not more than it does our chickens (if you don’t believe me, think Diet Pepsi, Splenda, margarine, “calorie counting,” all-you-can-eat buffets, Big Gulps, and the like).
Now, if I were a French peasant in the 13th century, I would certainly let someone mechanize my food production if they presented it to me. After all, our current situation didn’t come about by chance, it was developed for a reason and adopted for a reason. I just don’t think humans are particularly thoughtful about what they give up when they adopt things. I think the French peasant’s life (both individual and communal) would fall apart and he would never make the connection with the convenience of his new food regime, but it would be there nonetheless. His ignorance shouldn’t encourage our own.
“Soylent Green” is a dystopian vision of the rational conclusion of our entire way of thinking about food and the body and the person and society. I don’t know how it could be more relevant. Again, the way we think about things like food reflexively inform the way we think about consumers of food.
Any questions?
Any efforts you make in your urban garden are going to be small compared to actually having to cultivate all your own food. I hope JM and Mair are not advocating going backward, they just think we could use more connection with our food and its procurement than we currently enjoy. It's going to be relative because progress has closed off the past ways of doing things from our current circumstances - at least for most people. Any ways in which we reconnect with those past ways will be changed by the intervening years of cultural development.
I'm not sure how much effort I want to expend on being closer to my food's origins. I think we've made ourselves busy enough in other areas of life that we welcome the convenience. How else to explain pre-made everything in supermarkets? We don't even cook from scratch, much less plant and harvest from scratch. I'd like to see big agra re-evaluate many of its practices, but I'm not sure I'm ready to join a CSA and dedicate three hours of my day to cooking unless my circumstances can change (ie, getting another car so I can go to the farmer's market instead of being stuck at home every Tuesday afternoon).
So is it wrong of me to be choosing my current life for convenience because I cannot attain another? Is just knowing more going to cut it? I doubt it.
e.a.p.,
I think you really hit on something here: the circumstances of our lives are mutually reinforcing to one another and are experienced as givens. Critical engagements with basic components of the organization of everyday life are met with so much skepticism precisely for this reason: all of the data, systems, and stories that order our lives reinforce all the others. As such, these data, systems, and stories are part of the taken-for-granted “facts” of our existence. That has innumerable benefits for us, but has at least one major drawback: it limits our imagination about what it means to be a human person, what it might mean to live well, and how else we might order our lives (individually and communally) to achieve those ends.
So we imagine our careers, our neighborhoods, our transportation, our habits, our preferences, our consumption, and the like to be unalterable facts – and then, given those things, construct out of them a vision of a good life. I want to suggest that the promise of modernity (and, I would argue, the tyrannical burden of modernity) is that, for the first time in human history, we can (are responsible to) be thoughtful about how we organize our lives. We can draw on the wealth of sources that have come before us to inform our vision of the human person and point the way towards a life well lived. The irony is that, the same forces that make this promise available also disincentivize the exercise of them.
We mistakenly believe that guilt-free soda and cell phones and comfortable shoes and “Friends” is what makes modern life better than premodern life; the reality is that modern life is better than premodern life precisely because we can forego all of those things (the givens of our lives) in pursuit of living well.
"“convenience” (which is shorthand for a means of exalting the pleasurable aspects of being human without acknowledging the difficult aspects of the same)."
That's a pretty biased way of putting it, don't you think? Convenience isn't shorthand for exalting the "pleasurable" aspects of being human - it's simply an easier means to the same end. Your point is that "easier" means cause us to lose something valuable along with our labor, and I won't disagree with that, but I think you're stacking the deck a little when you put it that way.
While I agree with the points you're making here, I still wonder if maybe we're being a little too romantic and imagining an objective distinction between the valauble "hard" work that we did in the past and the value-less "easy" work we do now. Specifically, where do you draw the line? Do we stop using shovels because it was a more culture-building experience when everyone farmed with their hands? Do we quit farming altogether because we begin to consider it more "human" to pick food that grows naturally than grow it ourselves? What about collective farming vs. individual farming? Taking your horse drawn carriage to the market to trade goods with other farmers vs. going to the local supermarket?
I just think it's not nearly as black-and-white as you're acting. It's obviously not just a matter of embodiedness, because traveling to the market, or super-market, is an inherently physical act. Picking the food you're going to buy is inherently physical. Standing in the line is aggrevating and inherently physical.
Un-embodied food would be something like star trek - I say "apple" and my computer builds one for me. What we have is a different form of embodied eating; less directly connected with the source of our food, but still 100% physical. I think that's the real thing you're driving at - being connected to the source, seeing the results of your own work - and that's not the same thing as staying physical.
I like going to starbucks rather than making coffee in my office because I like coffee shops. It costs more and it doesn't taste a ton better, but I like having to leave my building, walk down the road, and stand in a line to get coffee. I like smelling the coffee shop smell and seeing people enjoying themselves. I think it's fun. I might like it more if I grew my own beans and brewed them myself, but I don't think it would. For me, I find it more human to enjoy the community and physicality of interacting within the constructs of our modern/post-modern world than go back to my roots.
Quite amazing response to this post.
Here is my meager, uneducated responses. Who among us wonders how someone coming from a third world country would feel when they walk into our grocery stores. When I walk into our local huge chain, Giant Eagle, the first thing I am faced with is the produce section. Can you imagine if for the first time your eyes were treated to this over abundance that we have in our tremendous country? That is something to write home about.
Next, I agree with the thought that Mair shares about buying produce from the local farmer who makes a living from his farm. It really is so much more human than buying assembly line food. The contribution to the well being of a farmer and his family seems to me to be a little more human. I always laugh when Thanksgiving comes around and we all buy white turkey, when in fact, natural, wild turkeys are black.
All in all, a day may come when Soylent Green becomes a reality.
Dad, aka Greg'ry:
I've heard tales of people moving here from ex-Soviet countries and literally passing out in the grocery store because they were so overwhelmed at the choice and abundance.
I should respond to each comment more fully, but I don't have the time right now. JMC defended my thesis pretty well and to that I say: "Yeah. That's what I meant."
Hopefully soon I can write a sum-up comment and move on.
Thank you all for your contributions.
J. Morgan: Is this your blog, or Mair's? Shut up.
But seriously- I hate to backtrack but I think Redhurt and I were making our point back in the second comment when we said:
"Why is it more human to dig your own vegetables than buy them? Along that logic, wouldn't it be even more human to stock an urban lot full of migratory animals which I could hunt down and kill using a spear or maybe just chase them into an open pit? / Do we stop using shovels because it was a more culture-building experience when everyone farmed with their hands? Do we quit farming altogether because we begin to consider it more "human" to pick food that grows naturally than grow it ourselves?"
I'm not sure how we arrived at the definition of what exactly constitutes "human-ness". To be overly reductionist to J. Morgan, it seems to me that being human to him consists of being a 13th century French peasant, as opposed to a 17th century Genoese merchant, a 10th century Viking warrior, or a pre-history hunter gatherer.
J. Morgan: you say:
"I think the French peasant’s life (both individual and communal) would fall apart and he would never make the connection with the convenience of his new food regime, but it would be there nonetheless."
I'll give you this, but it would seem to me like the same thing happened during the shift towards feudalism, or the development of organized farming thousands of years earlier. The system of procuring and consuming food changed as well as the social structure (I'm not arguing as to which causes the other).
IMHO, it seems that the only constant "human" characteristic is that we change the system (or the system changes us), and the end result is a trend towards better risk management. It's riskier to hunt saber tooth tigers than it is to farm goats, and it's riskier to scavenge wild crops than it is to farm. It's riskier to be a farmer in an individual system, it's less risky to establish a central agency where you pool food and draw when needed. Furthermore, it's much, much less risky to farm lots of different products from lots of different parts of the globe and get them all from a supermarket. When Mexican spinach gets ebola we can stop eating it, same as when Taco Bell starts giving us superAIDS.
I fail to follow how the culmination of thousands of years of human food strategy has divorced us from being human, and I fail to understand how we decide what constitutes human-ness in such absolute terms.
In three hundred years, will the imaginably illustrious descendant of J. Morgan be eating his apple from a Star Trek machine wishing he could shop at a grocery store with other people to feel human?
So many things to respond to. I know I can't hit every point, so I'm just going to throw some things out there. First of all, Dad, you said:
"Wow! Remember Lanny? He used to have his own chickens, cow, ducks. When he would chop off the head of a chicken us city people would gross out. His comment was that modern society has desensitized people to the way it always was when people were on their own for food."
Of course I remember Lanny and have very fond memories of hanging out on their farm! I think you hit on something important here and that is that people are desensitized to what is involved in procuring food. I think that's part of the original post about industrial chicken farms. I bet that even the most thoughtless consumer would be slightly shaken if they visited one of these farms and saw what happens to their food before they consume it. Another issue is consumption itself. In an age when some of us are concerned about sustainability, global warming, social justice, etc . it is imperative that we think critically about the sources of our food. So, at base, this issue is about being a thoughtful consumer before it is about "humanness". Ever since I've been back from Uganda, I can't enjoy bananas in the same way because I've tasted tree-ripened bananas and am more aware than ever of what green bananas on the grocery store shelf mean.
Secondly, to RJ and Jackcolon: I think the issue of why it's more human to dig your own potatoes, or buy them from the farmer who did, is an issue of what it means to be a moral agent. Now, let me flesh that out a little bit before everyone flips out and accuses me of saying that grocery stores are immoral. Charles Taylor identifies 3 axes of moral thinking: 1) respect for an obligation to others, 2) notions of what makes a full life, and 3) dignity, meaning our sense of ourselves as commanding respect. So let me break it down:
In our particular time and place, when Americans consume the majority of the worlds goods, part of thinking morally about food means (1) trying to assent to the need to respect our obligations to others. "Others" may be our neighbors, the global community, or those who will come after us. Part of acknowledging that respect and obligation means trying to procure food in a just and sustainable way - buying fair trade coffee so third world coffee farmers can support their families, not buying industrial meat that is produced in unsustainable ways that are disrespectful to the dialectic between human and animal, etc.
(2) Thinking morally about food means being reflective about what makes for a full life. For me, that means buying local as much as possible, not supporting gross agriculture that is unjust and unsustainable, and eating food that is healthy (broadly speaking). I think we can all agree that in 13th century France (since everyone is so hung up on those peasants!), part of a full life entailed progress and the hope for a better, easier way of getting food. For Cambodian rice workers, a full life would probably entail buying rice in the grocery store rather than drudging through rice fields 16 hours a day 7 days a week. However, our mass consumption market has ceased to resemble a full life. Walking blindly through Sam's Club, not talking to anyone, buying 50 packs of ramen noodles doesn't represent the highest form of human flourishing in our society. It is mindless consumption with almost zero regard for what makes for a full life.
3) Dignity. This one is a little bit more tricky. But, I would say, again, that the way we produce and consume foods by and large ignores the moral axis of dignity of human persons. Eating something loaded with rBGH, transfat, ungodly amounts of preservatives, ripening gas, etc., seems at odds with respecting the dignity of my human body. Walking through aisles of mass produced groceries seems to ignore the dignity of the farmers and workers who produced the food. Walking into a produce booth at my local farmers market and saying to the farmer "This is beautiful basil" and having her say "Thank you, I'm really happy about it" gives much more assent to the dignity of her work than does buying basil in Giant.
So, if we can move past the French peasant and examine our current conditions, especially through Taylor's axes of moral thinking, I think it becomes clear that there is something more "Human" (if we agree that to be human, in large part, is to be a moral agent) about digging my own potatoes.
War was so much more dignified, human and meaningful when I could slam my axe through the skulls of my enemies and see their brains splattered about the field and listen to the lamentations of their women. Tactically bombing their missile silos from 7,000 feet has totally dehumanized rape and pillage.
Are you being sarcastic or are you trying to contribute something?
Redhurt -
That has nothing to do with anything.
jmc and mair, question: is shopping at Costco/Sam's Club/Joe's Fewd Mart not ideal, or is actually worse than that?
To the war comment, it has a lot to do with everything, even if it was sarcastic. Sometimes sarcastic things can be things that contribute too. I appreciate that you both continue to regulate comments on Mary's blog here and will call me out on anything that doesn't meet your high standards.
"Walking blindly through Sam's Club, not talking to anyone, buying 50 packs of ramen noodles doesn't represent the highest form of human flourishing in our society. It is mindless consumption with almost zero regard for what makes for a full life."
No one's advocating that. I'd just like to point out that blindly burying rows of potatoes that you eat by yourself in your house in the country can be just as mindless and just as unfulfilling, and that sometimes the super market is better. It looks like you agree, from your cambodian rice farmer comment.
I think you did a much better job of justifying yourself in your comment here and I agree with you.
I think you guys have a good point here, and have every time Josh has written something similar to this on his blog or in the comments on someone elses. I'm just trying to force you to keep making that point and get away from saying things that sound like, "anything antiquated is good because the modern world and it's technology are evil." I know that's not what you mean, but when you say things like, "Gardening is more humanizing than shopping in the grocery store", I need to hear it justified in a way that doesn't simply rail on technology and progress.
I just take issue with the notion that anything old is better because it was more "human" or more "real" or more "dignified." Some things in the past were, but many that were not feel like they are because the past in and of itself is humanizing and dignifying to us when we connect with it. We romanticize the past because connecting with it, regardless of what it was, makes us more human and gives more context to our lives. It's not always the antiquated thing itself that gives us meaning, but rather fighting the dissociation we normally feel from it in the modern world.
Fine, if it was contribution through sarcasm, then I will reply.
On August 6, 1945, Paul Tibbets piloted the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber, from Tinian Island to Japan and, along with his crew, dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, killing 70,000 people. Here is an interview with Tibbets:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhZERU58RSI
Tibbets has never expressed regret over his action nor any feelings of guilt or remorse. In fact, in an interview conducted in the 1970s, he said that he “had never lost a night’s sleep over it.”
At the end of the above interview, he says, “I have been subjected many times to criticism. I have been accused of being insane, a drunkard, being everything you can an imagine a derelict to be as the result of a guilty conscience for doing this.”
He was not any of the above. He was a perfectly normal, sane man who really wasn’t plagued by guilt or remorse. How is it, then, that he could have killed 130,000 (direct and indirect kills together) people without feeling guilty? The answer, of course, is that his experience of killing was so heavily mediated that the impact of it was impossible for him to feel. Human beings cannot come to grips with the moral weight of killing in the age of button-pushing. Try saying the same for a 13th Century peasant-soldier. Without defending the ethical status of act, I want to defend the action and its implications for the actor as more dignified and human.
Redhurt,
I don't believe that my original post made any nostalgic claim about why the past was better. I was merely saying that we ought to be reflective and thoughtful about our food choices and the implications of them. Personally, I'm not comfortable with industrial farms, as they exist today. Maybe that implicitly means that I would be happier with farms 100 years ago, but that wasn't the emphasis. The emphasis was that maybe we should (to the extent that we can) opt out of such a destructive system, or at least give moral weight to them.
Charles:
You post the million dollar question. Can we completely avoid what we see as problematic? Probably not. As much as I would love to, it's just not feasible for me to shop exclusively at Whole Foods or Farmer's Markets or buy all local, all organic foods. BUT, for me, it's the spirit of the law, not the letter. I try to be thoughtful about my food choices, and sometimes I just can't do what I ideologically extol. When it is in my power to, however, I try to abide by my convictions about food. Fair?
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