Transcription Series, V: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
This book is SO overdue... just two more things I wanted to note before turning it in. So this is the second-to-last in the transcription series and the last one is a couple of short humorous bits -- nothing particularly heavy at all.
This one is a bit of a continuation from the last one I posted about regarding food ethics.
I respect every diner who makes morally motivated choices about consumption. And I stand with nonviolence, as one of those extremist moms who doesn't let kids at her house pretend to shoot each other, ever, or make any game out of human murder. But I've come to different conclusions about livestock. The ve-vangelical pamphlets showing jam-packed chickens and sick downer-cows usually declare, as their first principle, that all meat is factory-farmed. [I have no idea if this is true; I haven't looked at any such pamphlets recently.] That is false, and an affront to those of us who work to raise animals humanely, or who support such practices with our buying power. I don't want to cause any creature misery, so I won't knowingly eat anything that has stood belly deep in its own poop wishing it was dead until bam, one day it was. (In restaurants I go for the fish, or the vegetarian option.)
But meat, poultry, and eggs from animals raised on open pasture are the traditional winter fare of my grandparents, and they serve us well here in the months when it would cost a lot of fossil fuels to keep us in tofu. Should I overlook the suffering of victims of hurricanes, famines, and wars brought on this world by profligate fuel consumption? Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator-trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees. pp. 224-225
Kingsolver goes on to talk about the environmental impact of growing vegetables versus growing animals for meat (etc.) and how the prevalent arguments (e.g. "it takes up to ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain") only work for certain types of ecologies and climates and not at all for others, like marginal lands where only scrub grows. It's really interesting and something I hadn't before considered.
In a section written by Kingsolver's eldest daughter, Camille, we learn how the family came to their own decision on what meat they would and would not eat:
The summer I was eleven, our family took a detour through the Midwest on our annual drive back from our farm in Virginia to Tuscon. We passed by one feedlot after another. The odor was horrifying to me, and the sight of the animals was haunting: cows standing on mountains of their own excrement, packed so tightly together they had no room to walk. All they could do was wearily moo and munch on grain mixed with the cow pies under their feet.
Looking out the window at these creatures made my heart sink and my stomach lose all interest. The outdoor part of the operation seemed crueler than anything that might go on inside a slaughterhouse. Whether or not it was scheduled to die, no living thing, I felt, should have to spend its life the way those cows were. When we got home I told my parents I would never eat beef from a feedlot again. Surprisingly, they agreed and took the same vow. p. 238
So they effectively became vegetarian/pescatarian when in public -- no regular school lunches, no meat at restaurants, no meat at friends' places unless they were certain it was pastured meat. It was only when they went to the Farmers Diner in Vermont that the youngest daughter was able to eat meat in a restaurant for the first time.
This one is a bit of a continuation from the last one I posted about regarding food ethics.
I respect every diner who makes morally motivated choices about consumption. And I stand with nonviolence, as one of those extremist moms who doesn't let kids at her house pretend to shoot each other, ever, or make any game out of human murder. But I've come to different conclusions about livestock. The ve-vangelical pamphlets showing jam-packed chickens and sick downer-cows usually declare, as their first principle, that all meat is factory-farmed. [I have no idea if this is true; I haven't looked at any such pamphlets recently.] That is false, and an affront to those of us who work to raise animals humanely, or who support such practices with our buying power. I don't want to cause any creature misery, so I won't knowingly eat anything that has stood belly deep in its own poop wishing it was dead until bam, one day it was. (In restaurants I go for the fish, or the vegetarian option.)
But meat, poultry, and eggs from animals raised on open pasture are the traditional winter fare of my grandparents, and they serve us well here in the months when it would cost a lot of fossil fuels to keep us in tofu. Should I overlook the suffering of victims of hurricanes, famines, and wars brought on this world by profligate fuel consumption? Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator-trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees. pp. 224-225
Kingsolver goes on to talk about the environmental impact of growing vegetables versus growing animals for meat (etc.) and how the prevalent arguments (e.g. "it takes up to ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain") only work for certain types of ecologies and climates and not at all for others, like marginal lands where only scrub grows. It's really interesting and something I hadn't before considered.
In a section written by Kingsolver's eldest daughter, Camille, we learn how the family came to their own decision on what meat they would and would not eat:
The summer I was eleven, our family took a detour through the Midwest on our annual drive back from our farm in Virginia to Tuscon. We passed by one feedlot after another. The odor was horrifying to me, and the sight of the animals was haunting: cows standing on mountains of their own excrement, packed so tightly together they had no room to walk. All they could do was wearily moo and munch on grain mixed with the cow pies under their feet.
Looking out the window at these creatures made my heart sink and my stomach lose all interest. The outdoor part of the operation seemed crueler than anything that might go on inside a slaughterhouse. Whether or not it was scheduled to die, no living thing, I felt, should have to spend its life the way those cows were. When we got home I told my parents I would never eat beef from a feedlot again. Surprisingly, they agreed and took the same vow. p. 238
So they effectively became vegetarian/pescatarian when in public -- no regular school lunches, no meat at restaurants, no meat at friends' places unless they were certain it was pastured meat. It was only when they went to the Farmers Diner in Vermont that the youngest daughter was able to eat meat in a restaurant for the first time.