Wholly Cow

Maybe it’s the dreads I had until recently, maybe it’s the fact that I work on an organic vegetable farm, maybe it’s because I care about the environment. Whatever the reason, people are always assuming I am a vegetarian, if not a vegan. I resent this, to an extent that is not logical. It bothers me that people automatically equate caring for the environment with vegetarianism. It bothers me that people believe being a vegan makes one moral. And honestly, it bothers me when non-farmers espouse uninformed opinions about agricultural ethics.

I think I may have a serious problem.

“Hi, I’m Alison and I like to argue with vegans and vegetarians.”
“Hi, Alison!”

Several things have set me off on writing this essay. The first was a teenage volunteer who, when asked why she decided to be a vegetarian, answered “Well, I just decided that animals aren’t, like, just walking around waiting to be eaten, so I, like, shouldn’t eat them.” The second was an aggravating group from California eating lunch with us who loudly—and smugly—announced that they were vegans. The final reason is that I have very strong opinions about the ethics of eating meat that I have thought out at great length, and I have been feeling the need to get all my ideas down in one place. So here goes: my philosophy of life as applies to food.


Cruelty-Free

One of the main reasons I hear that people become vegetarians is that they want to eat in a way that is cruelty-free. I don’t want to discredit this concern—I think it is noble and well-meaning, and the first step toward eating with intentionality. However, I feel that looking at food and deciding that the death of animals is the only ethical problem with our food system is not taking the issue far enough.

The idea that animals raised for meat suffer their whole lives, only to end at the slaughter house, assumes a certain kind of agriculture, one that is wholly concerned with producing massive amounts of meat as quickly and as cheaply as possible with no consideration for the lives of the animals. This type of farming is typically called “conventional farming,” but I prefer to use the term “industrial farming,” since raising food in this manner has only been widespread for a mere blip in the great expanse of human history. Industrial farming of animals that live lives of misery to feed our gross appetite for cheap meat is wrong, and I cannot defend it. However, there are ways to raise animals humanely, where they have plenty of space to graze, shade to lie in, and fresh water to drink. Sustainably-raised animals are given a chance to live out their lives in the way they were meant to, and allowed to express their animal nature. Animals who live this way do not suffer through their lives, and if they are processed in a small, humane slaughter house, do not suffer in their death.

Any vegetarian worth her tofu would point out here that it doesn’t matter that the animal didn’t suffer, it is still dying so that I can eat. To this I would respond that animals die all the time so that she can eat vegetables. Industrial vegetable farms spray insecticides that kill not only the targeted pests but caterpillars, butterflies, moths, ladybugs, and many other helpful insects. Farm machinery squishes and rips animals to pieces—I was once riding on a tractor mowing a pasture, watching beautiful, vibrant green frogs fling themselves out of the way of the sickle mower. All I could think about was the ones we didn’t miss. Small-scale organic agriculture does not cause as widespread destruction, but the death of animals is still involved. At my farm this summer, we killed two chipmunks that were wrecking havoc on the seedlings in the greenhouse, and relocated another chipmunk and a groundhog which, but for the benevolence of Heath, would have been killed. We regularly walked through the potato plants, hunting down and squishing potato bug larvae. We also killed tomato hornworms, aphids, stink bugs, squash bugs, and box elder bugs. If I had a gun and the skill to use it, I would have been out there waiting for the deer, rabbits, raccoons and groundhogs.

How do we rate the importance of animal life? Vegetarianism seeks to equalize all life--"I don't eat anything with a face," as the common bumpersticker proudly proclaims. We will not eat the cow, with her soft, curious eyes, but we will eat the potato that was saved with chemicals from hundreds of potato bugs. I do not like this way of organizing my culinary ethic, as it causes beings to decrease in value as their physique diverges from our own. I admit I am guilty of it--I would not so blithely pinch the life out of a cute little chipmunk as I would a hornworm, and it is only because the chipmunk is capable of looking into my eyes, and has arms and legs in the same general location as the friend standing beside me. I have no answer to this conundrum. But I would like everyone to realize that passing up the hamburger is not the end of the discussion. Indeed, if you truly equalize each life, then eating a hamburger, one death which provides many meals, is superior to a tomato that required the deaths of countless insects.

Many presumed innocent vegetarian and vegan foods are produced in ways that are dangerous, unhealthy, unethical, unsafe, inhumane, and bad for the earth. Farm workers are required to work around noxious chemicals, sometimes going back to work in the fields too soon after spraying. Even large-scale organic can be hard on workers with long hours, hard conditions, and low wages. Food, even organic food, that is raised this way is dripping in oil; oil used for farm machinery, processing, packaging, and shipping the food across the country. In the summer we can buy vegetables locally, but in the winter in Wisconsin, if we do not eat local animal products, we would be dependant on distant sources for vegetables and soy products. Winter farmers markets are bursting with meats, cheeses, eggs, everything we need to survive the winter. But they are rather short on tofu.

The question that I feel we must ask is, Where does cruelty-free begin and end? What does it encompass? Does it end when we eat a meal that has no meat, milk or eggs? Or does it include the underpaid migrant worker who, at the end of a day spent cutting spinach does not have enough food to feed her children? I feel that while we ought to look at the short term result of saving animals' lives, it is as important if not more important to consider how other parts of the world are affected in the long run by the way we eat.

The more I look at it, the more I am convinced that there is no ethically pure way of eating. At least, not if "ethically pure" means killing no living creatures. But if we can change ethically pure to mean closely examining the way we eat and the effects it has on our fellow humans and the world at large, avoiding causing others to suffer and honestly facing death when we encounter it, then I believe that there is a way to live and eat ethically. If we can look critically at our lives in this way, look at the food industry in all its parts and our place in it and still arrive at vegetarianism or veganism from a perspective that is simultaneously local and global, that is great. But until we look at the whole system in this way, refusing all animal products seems to me to be too easy of a solution to the clustercuss that is our food system. It is a way to turn our backs on the problem by claiming no part in it, when in fact there are serious ramifications to eating non-animal products as well. I am not claiming sainthood here, or saying that a vegetarian diet is no better than a completely thoughtless omnivorous diet. I am saying that there is a lot more to the ethics of eating than the issue of meat and animal products.

Where do we draw the line? Can we draw it exactly parallel to the species line, refusing to eat animals on that side of the line but eating anything, oil-based vegetables or slave-labor chocolate included, from this side of it?


"Not Nutritionally Necessary"

I have been told that it is not nutritionally necessary to eat animal products. Well, I have yet to meet a vegetarian farmer. Working on the farm this summer, I craved meat. We did not get it much, so every time was like a religious experience. When I ate meat I felt my body rejoicing, renewed and reinvigorated. I listened to my physically active body, and I heard it call for meat.

Think of all the other things we eat that are not "nutritionally necessary," sugar and chocolate being the two that come to mind. Both are farmed by underpaid exploited workers in the global south and shipped great distances to us. Again, there are just so many issues with food that cannot be left behind by not eating animal products.


Shit Happens

In a world where animals are not for eating, where does the manure come from? Manure is precious on a farm; it is scrimped and saved and spread on the fields to bring new life. Many farms keep animals primarily for the manure. In a vegan world manure is still necessary, but no farmer could afford to keep a half dozen cows into old age just to provide manure. Animals also help to avoid waste by eating scraps inedible to humans, and turning it into rich manure.

And where are the animals in this vegan world? The cow, the chicken, the goat, pig, sheep, duck, goose, turkey...are simply gone. They would not last a moment in the wild, and I'd like to see how long a sanctuary for unused farm animals would last. These are domesticated animals. For Tom the turkey, being killed and eaten may not be his favorite thing ever, but for Turkey as a species, domestication was a great idea. Through domestication, animals are given food and water and are protected by their humans, who work darn hard to provide all this. Really, they have the better end of the deal.

In short we need animals to grow vegetables, and they need us to use them to survive.

Ethics and Spirituality

People in our western tradition are afraid of death, and this fear makes us uncomfortable about eating animals. “People in [America],” Kirsty Zahnke says in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle", “do everything to cheat death, it seems. Instead of being happy with each moment, they worry so much about what comes next. I think this gets transposed to animals—the preoccupation with ‘taking a life.’” We fail to realize, in a very crucial way, that death is a natural part of life. Michael Pollan believes that there is something deeply important in eye contact with animals. When humans and animals lived in closer contact with one another, we had a “daily reminder that animals were both crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, courage) but also something irretrievably other (?!).” This relationship helped humans reconcile their moral dilemma, and allowed them to both honor and eat animals with respect and understanding. With our migration away from animals and from this ancient relationship, a new relationship has been created “in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality.”

I believe that cows have a special place in the world. I also believe that humans have a special place in the world. That place is not above the cow, nor is it below it. That special place is this earth we share as co-dependant, mutually beneficial and equally loved beings. This interaction extends through birth, life and death, and I believe that denying that our lives require the death of other beings effectively removes us from this beautiful and fluent system. As Barbara Kingsolver writes, “[y]ou can leave the killing to others and pretend it never happened, or you can look it in the eye and know it.” ("Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.")

Michael Pollan writes that “either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even the antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or the both-ands.” Drawing the line of food ethics firmly along the species division buries us in this either-or construction. Either you are a vegetarian and a moral person or a thoughtless omnivore. When I was little, I knew smoking was bad, so I assumed all people who smoked were bad. I am only now overcoming this black and white view of the world, where people and their actions fit into neat little boxes. I am trying to move away from this human invention of either-or and to accept that there is never one answer to my questions, no cookie cutter people or situations. My ethic of eating, as described above, is what happened when I stepped away from my plate to look at the system as a whole, and to draw no discriminating lines.



That, in a nutshell, (a very large nutshell,) is my food ethic. This is why I am not a vegetarian, and I never will be. This is why I sometimes get upset when I hear people smugly declare themselves vegan; my food ethic is not something that has a name, something that is offered at the cafeteria, labeled with a little cartoon carrot icon. It is something that, apparently, will test the word limit of my blog provider. I believe that understanding and analyzing our food system, as something that we all need every day, is critical to understanding how our place on the earth fits with that of all other beings, and that through food we can begin to move toward a more holistic and thoughtful world.

Like the afterimage of a light that only by not
looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.
All its beings belong wholly to it. They flourish
in dying as in being born. It is the life of its death.

—Wendell Berry, The Dream