Flesh eaters

Nothing I could tell you about meat production will shock you. The factory farms and the routine, unrelenting torture of animals; the environmental cost of producing the amount of meat we eat; the amount of antibiotics and hormones relentlessly pumped into the animals because of how they are raised — and what those antibiotics mean for human health — you’ve heard it all before. And each time we hear a little more, we cringe, shake our heads, and take another mouthful. The only thing more shocking than the system itself, is the fact it’s still running.

We’ve seen it all before and yet the meat industry continues to thrive. It’s part of what Jonathan Safran Foer refers to as the ‘brutal forgetting’ — how you and I deliberately forget where the flesh on our plates comes from. We distance ourselves as much as possible from the processing, preferring to buy animal flesh that is pre-killed, pre-skinned, pre-cleaned, pre-chopped, pre-packed, and then renamed. Not pig, but pork; not cow, its beef.

We try as best we can to forget that what we have on the end of our forks was recently a sentient animal, at least as intelligent as the pets we keep — in the case of pigs, much more so. We do our damndest to ensure the flesh in our mouths resembles the animal it once was as little as possible.

For good measure we back-up this ‘great forgetting’ with a little of our own story telling, myths that attempt to justify the systematic brutality and environmental costs of our chicken nuggets. Oh, I need the protein. Meat is meat, and a man must eat. And my personal favourite: eating meat is part of my culture. Like tatty get-out-of-jail-free cards, we drop these little tidbits whenever our consciences start to wriggle. But more than explanations for why we continue to eat flesh despite what we know, they are social cues to change the subject, a polite way of moving along swiftly without having to actually engage with what actually happens to the animals that become the meat we eat.

Because, and let’s be frank, explaining one’s meat eating in terms of cultural practices just doesn’t hold water. It assumes that culture is unchangeable, something that can’t be negotiated or changed over time. It assumes that one’s culture is either something you follow 100%, or not at all.

If continuing to eat meat boils down to a cultural consideration, why does this consideration apply so strictly to what you eat, and not to other aspects of your life? There are many things we do on a daily basis that aren’t necessarily consistent with Our Culture, and yet we continue to do them — why can’t choosing to no longer eat meat be one more of those instances?

Even if eating meat is something that has been passed on from generation to generation, the flesh you buy from the supermarket — pumped full of antibiotics, raised on a factory farm, deprived of sunlight, barely able to support its own body weight — is nothing like the meat in your great grandfather’s potjie recipe. The animals we eat from factory farms are so deformed and pumped full of chemicals that their resemblance to animals of yesterday is only incidental. If choosing not to eat meat is breaking with cultural tradition, then eating factory farmed animals is as much a desecration.

In fact, I would argue that in some instances choosing to no longer eat meat is more culturally consistent than continuing to eat these animals would be. If respect for the environment is part of your culture, if a respect for animals is important in your culture, and if caring for one’s body and the health of one’s family is important in your culture, then taking meat off your plate is more in line with your culture than eating it would be.

I am not saying that eating meat is always wrong. I am not saying that we should never eat meat again. And I am certainly not saying that a vegetarian diet is completely benign, or without its own complexities and complications. What I am saying is that given the current conditions under which the vast majority of our meat is produced, the slipperiness of definitions like “free-range” and “organic”, and the effect mass meat production has on the environment and human health, I feel it’s right to not eat meat. One day I may be able to raise my own chickens, and slaughter them myself, I may be able to know for sure where my meat comes from, and how the animals were treated, and if so I won’t have a problem eating animals. But as things stand today, eating meat is not something I am happy with.