A couple of days ago, it was brought to my attention that the New York Times is running a small essay competition, and it was suggested that I should submit an entry. Up for the challenge, I followed the link and found that NYT had assembled what they describe as ‘a veritable murder’s row of judges,’ mostly hardline vegetarians. A good start then!
The essay didn’t have a real title. Contributors were merely asked to ‘tell us why it is ethical to eat meat’ in 600 words. Okay . . . Not sure where the goal posts are on this particular field, but let that not deter me . . .
So here is my contribution, in exactly 600 words of course (hardly enough for a proper discourse – six thousand would have been better for me!).
Tell us why it is ethical to eat meat.
What am I to make of this request? Is it a trap set by some vegetarian Witchfinder to catch an unwary omnivore in a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose equivalent of the ducking stool? Or is it an attempt to enter into serious debate? If the latter, the invitation is still booby-trapped through its lack of contextual reference. Thus the response from a hungry Pirahã or a Kalahari bushman will not be that of an overfed Westerner spoilt for choice by supermarket abundance.
Then of course there is that troublesome word, ‘ethical.’ In common with so many words used in relation to the politics of food, it has undergone something of a transformation into a handy catch-all, bandied about by those who use it to justify personal food choices. It is not to be trusted. It has a touch of the weasel about it. Words are indeed weapons, and can be dangerous in the hands of an increasingly solipsistic species. The formal concept of ethics enjoys an elevated status, yet is essentially little more than an intellectual distraction, almost an esoteric irrelevance in a society that has become dysfunctional, divided and disconnected from the natural order of the universe. An obsolete them-and-us attitude ensures that Homo arrogans still struts his puerile stuff, believing he can live outside natural laws.
It is time we grew up. We must abandon our ivory towers, climb down from our moralising and look at the world around us. An absence of hubris will enable us to contemplate the damage we have done, much of it through the massively destructive application of chemically supported industrial agriculture that has laid waste to millions of acres of fertile soils across our planet. Contrition might also be appropriate, allowing a clearer view of our relationship with our food, defining the word ‘ethical’ and giving it a valid frame of reference.
In this materialistic world in which love itself has been commoditised, the politics of food is about fear, peddled by those who have lost touch with the spirituality of eating. Love opens the door to an understanding of how we move from rapacious exploitation to nursing our soils – and our souls – back to health. Domesticated farm animals will play a major part in this future, as a return to true pasture farming is an essential component of land regeneration, underpinning a localised system of permanent polyculture. Industrialised grain and cereal production is insane, and all the arguments for ‘more of the same’ collapse into farce in the face of the evidence provided by those engaged in the planet-friendly alternative.
Thus we come at last to the question of whether it is ethical to eat meat, and the answer is surely a qualified ‘yes’ – qualified by the understanding that there is no place in our future for feedlot cattle, pig factories, grain-fed Holstein milk monsters or battery hens. Love rejects such unmitigated cruelty but accepts the highest principles of good husbandry. All living things, including us and our farm animals, are part of the food cycle. We have domesticated plant and animal alike, and we have responsibility to both, but it is well nurtured animals on managed grassland that hold the key to a healthy future. We must value their ability to convert vegetation into essential manure to help us grow plant food, but we must also accept the clear understanding that farming is management and necessitates the control of animal numbers. The meat from those animals is too precious and nutrient-dense to be wasted, but love and respectful husbandry are the essential inputs. Then, and only then, is it ethical to eat meat.
Restpectfully, you do present a cogent suite of statements, but you ignore the very simple fact that if there is no need to kill or harm a conscious creature, there is no ethical justification for doing so.
Best,
Michael.
With reciprocal respect, I should point out that in my last paragraph I refer to the (future) need to control animal numbers, therefore necessitating the killing of animals. There was insufficient scope within the restriction of 600 words to expand the idea that we will come to depend heavily on farm animals in the future in order to help us work the land once again without mechanisation, to repair damaged land and sequester carbon, but that we will still need to control aniimal numbers. We cannot escape the fact that all farming implies management, that domesticated animals have no ‘natural’ predators, and that it falls to Man the Farmer to control those numbers. Thus killing animals in unavoidable, and it would be unethical indeed to waste such a precious source of nutrient dense food.