Click here for the whole article. The following are just edited bits:
“Where were you when Barbaro broke his leg? I was at a steakhouse, watching the race on a big screen. I saw a horse pulling up, a jockey clutching him, a woman weeping. Thus began a worldwide vigil over the fate of the great horse. Would he be euthanized? Could doctors save him? In the restaurant, people watched and wondered. Then we went back to eating our steaks. …
“The case for eating meat is like the case for other traditions: It’s natural, it’s necessary, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But sometimes, we’re mistaken. We used to think we were the only creatures that could manipulate grammar, make sophisticated plans, or recognize names out of context. In the past month, we’ve discovered the same skills in birds and dolphins. In recent years, we’ve learned that crows fashion leaves and metal into tools. Pigeons deceive each other. Rats run mazes in their dreams. Dolphins teach their young to use sponges as protection. Chimps can pick locks. Parrots can work with numbers. Dogs can learn words from context. We thought animals weren’t smart enough to deserve protection. It turns out we weren’t smart enough to realize they do.
“Maybe what we’re asking for, what God is giving us, is the wisdom to see that we can’t change our craving for meat, but we can change the way we satisfy it. …
“How? By growing meat in labs, the way we grow tissue from stem cells. That’s the great thing about cells: They’re programmed to multiply. You just have to figure out what chemical and structural environment they need to do their thing. Researchers in Holland and the United States are working on the problem. They’ve grown and sautéed fish that smelled like dinner, though FDA rules didn’t allow them to taste it. Now they’re working on pork. The short-term goal is sausage, ground beef, and chicken nuggets. Steaks will be more difficult. Three Dutch universities and a nonprofit consortium called New Harvest are involved. They need money. A fraction of what we spend on cattle subsidies would help.
“Growing meat like this will be good for us in lots of ways. We’ll be able to make beef with no fat, or with good fat transplanted from fish. We’ll avoid bird flu, mad-cow disease, and salmonella. We’ll scale back the land consumption and pollution involved in cattle farming. But 300 years from now, when our descendants look back at slaughterhouses the way we look back at slavery, they won’t remember the benefits to us, any more than they’ll remember our dried-up tears for a horse. They’ll want to know whether we saw the moral calling of our age. If we do, it’s time to pony up.”
eat less meat. I’m not saying go veggie overnight, but you could reduce the amount of meat that you do eat. Make some veggie stir frys. Eat a great big healthy salad one night. Soup, man, soup!
<
p>
This has been my strategy. I’m uncomfortable about how large farms treat animals and the environment, but I’m also somewhat picky about what non-meat items I’m willing to eat, making many restaurant and cookbook veggie dishes unappealing to me.
<
p>
So, I try to sub tofu in for Asian dishes, even if I 1/2 and 1/2 it with chicken.
<
p>
So, buy yourself some free range eggs, get as many veggies as you can direct from the farmers who grew them, and eat less meat. You’ll pay a bit more, but you’ll feel healthier and your soul will be more well nourished.
Bob,
<
p>
Thanks for raising this issue. I hope to be able to come back to it AFTER the Convention. No time right now.
<
p>
Just permit me to share that I became a vegetarian many years ago because of feelings similar to the ones you describe. We had lots of pets in my household when I was a kid, and it was just incomprehensible to me how someone could kill and eat such a creature.
<
p>
For years, I was told that I “had” to eat meat (or what? I would die, I guess?) But I finally learned enough on my own about nutrition to realize that wasn’t true.
<
p>
Of course, in today’s world, being a vegetarian, or better yet a vegan (something I haven’t been quite able to accomplish) is considered the height of health-consciousness and the environmentally correct thing to do.
<
p>
I’m proud of all the animals I haven’t killed, and the trees in the Amazon that didn’t have to be cut down to graze hamburgers.
<
p>
More anon.
Really, do we? My impression, based on very little actual information, is that what relatively little meat is produced in MA is produced on much smaller operations. Doesn’t mean they’re humane, but I don’t think we have anything of the scale of the horrifying pig farms (and accompanying lagoons of waste) in, for example, North Carolina.
Let’s find out.
From the USDA factsheet
<
p>
Average Farm size: 85 acres
<
p>
Only 0.5% of farms in MA are greater than 1000 acres.
<
p>
It looks like most of the farms are greenhouses or cranberry bogs anyway. It doesn’t look like there’s a lot of meat farming here unless you count dairy.
I drove by the Tyson chicken farm in North Carolina recently. It’s miles and miles of coops bigger than my house. The thing stretches on forever.
<
p>
I may be wrong, but I don’t think we have anything that rivals something like that here in Massachusetts.
…it doesn’t hurt that we start talking about this. I am amazed at how many progressive minded people and would-be animal lovers (like myself) eat meat regularly without even thinking about where it came from. I don’t think I am going to go totally veggie any time soon but every time I read about the horrors of factory farms I think about whether I would want my dogs treated the way livestock is treated in this country. It inspires me to eat less meat and specifically look for meat that comes from smaller (local, preferably) farms that at least think about treating their animals more humanely.
I don’t understand how anyone can explain to people in red states why it’s definitely not the government’s business whether you have an abortion or how you have sex, but the government is perfectly entitled to regulate whether and what kind of meat you eat.
Women can think for themselves, and should be allowed to do so. Pro-choice is about personal freedom. Regulation of animals, by contrast, is on a moral level a question about how to treat sentient creatures that are not people, and the implications this has for how we should treat each other; on a practical level, since most people don’t live on farms anymore, it is about how to ensure a safe food supply. The problem with regressive Republican “morality” is that they want to treat women like animals by denying their ability to make informed choices for themselves about abortions, and they want to treat animals as if they didn’t have any feelings at all. As to the practicalities of food safety, they think the market can take care of that, never mind our history of sausages filled with sawdust and feces marketed (understandably) by profit-minded corporations before progressives invented pure food and drug laws. Note, however, that the problem is not with “people in red states” — they are true-blue Americans — the problem is with irresponsible regressive Republican leaders.
…to start talking/thinking about something. That’s how intelligent decisions are made. Factory farms, even if you don’t give a damn about animal cruelty, are generally environmental disasters that pollute water supplies and release tremendous amounts of methane gas. Cows and other animals have to be administered antibiotics to fend off illnesses that result from spending 24 hours a day knee deep in their own feces. This raises all sorts of unsettling questions about antibiotic resistance that haven’t been answered yet.
<
p>
I wasn’t necessarily talking about regulation, but since you bring it up: FDA regulation on food and drugs is far more relevant to this conversation than regulation (or lack thereof) on abortion and gay rights.
Having grown up on an honest-to-God family farm in Indiana, my advice for those who don’t want to go veggie is to seek out meat raised on smaller, non-corporate farms.
<
p>
Our hogs, when we had them, weren’t free-range, but they were treated well (heat in the winter, large, extremely effective fans in the summer, and feed we grew ourselves). We were not a large operation.
<
p>
If we’d support family, organic, and small farmers, we’d help keep a dying way of life alive – AND keep ADM from controlling even more of our food supply.
<
p>
And if you DO want to go veggie, small farms grow great, flavorful fruits and vegetables too. Nothing like strawberries fresh from the patch, or green beans that you picked, canned, and cooked yourself.
<
p>
When my wife (my beloved Jawa Girl) and I do settle down somewhere and buy land, I plan on putting out a small garden.
<
p>
WF
… join a CSA — Community Supported Agriculture. We belong to The Food Project, a CSA in Lincoln. Great, organic food; actually pretty cheap considering the quantity of stuff; lots of fun, a beautiful farm, family-friendly.
<
p>
Here’s a list of CSAs in Massachusetts.
Communityfarms.org, in Waltham. We did the walk-through last week. How fun was that? I looked at my future food!
<
p>
I will be able to pick up my food in Davis Square. And sometimes go to the farm and pick some as well, such as strawberries.
<
p>
We are really looking forward to this. Pulled out all the veggie cookbooks last night!
<
p>
They also donate to local food pantries and community groups.
In my town, even — I’ll have to look into that.
Local Harvest has lots more info on CSAs.
<
p>
Carrie and I just signed on with Bear Hill Farm in Tyngsboro, and are looking forward to our first pickup of fresh veggies in a few weeks.
I make a point of buying local produce at the Waltham Farmer’s Market when it’s in season, and I generally try to get my meat and fish from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Market, where I can be reasonably sure it was raised humanely. I grew up — on Cape Cod, not in Indiana, though my girlfriend’s from there — with a vegetable garden (plagued by groundhogs though it was) and an herb garden, and likewise, if I had any land, I’d surely start growing some of my own food.
From Mother Jones, Alternet, and Common Dreams.
<
p>
I thought I saw something similar not long ago in Tricycle, one of my regular reads, but can’t place the article….
This post is funny to me because I, like David above, am not even sure these farms exist in this state so how they play out in a statewide campaign is a little unclear. That said the issue of the post is very serious to me. So in adding to the other great links that have been thrown out here (I highly recommond the Local Harvest link, it is a great site) I would like to point to a post on my blog (and hence the shameless plug) about a great book that covers this subject, among others, that I think every progressive should read. Thanks for the post and raising the issues.