The Soulful Eye

Elizabeth Kolbert reviewing “Eating Animals“,

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious.

Indeed.
Reminds me of B.R. Myers railing against Michael Pollen, in which he describes his position as essentially

reducing man’s moral nature to an extension of our instincts

and nails the thesis to the door with the money quote,

But the idolatry of food cuts across class lines. This can be seen in the public’s toleration of a level of cruelty in meat production that it would tolerate nowhere else. If someone inflicts pain on an animal for visual, aural, or sexual gratification, we consider him a monster, and the law makes at least a token effort at punishment. If someone’s goal is to put the “product” in his mouth? Chacun à son goût.

Kolbert picks up this point with a section of dialogue in Foer’s book,

“If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy,” she later told Foer. “How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.”

Later on in her review she gives a welcome place to the actual merits of eschewing only flesh products if the concern is based in animal welfare; i.e. where to draw the moral line in our current habits of consumption when we do actually have the choice to choose otherwise

Meanwhile, it could be argued that even a vegetarian diet falls short. As Foer is well aware, some of the animals that suffer most from the factory-farm system aren’t the ones that end up on the table. Most dairy cows spend their lives in sheds, where they are milked two or three times a day by machine. Many develop chronic udder infections. Laying chickens are kept in cages, jammed in so tightly that they don’t have room to spread their wings. To prevent them from cannibalizing one another, their beaks are trimmed with a hot blade. When their production begins to decline, they are starved for a week or two to reset their biological clocks. Foer never says anything about forgoing eggs or dairy, which seems to imply that he consumes them. In “The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food” (Norton; $24.95), Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson offers many of the same observations about factory farming as Foer. To align his food choices with his ethics, Masson writes, he had to take the “final step” and become a vegan.

Coming to question whether even veganism is “enough” Kolbert gets to the realization that

Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on other organisms without being sickened.

This is true to some extent but I have approached this realization from two different angles.  One is represented exceptionally well here … that no, veganism doesn’t represent “enough” but it is instead the baseline.

Veganism is essentially refraining from contributing to the exploitation and intentional killing or slaughter of nonhuman beings. Preventing accidental and incidental human fatalities in traffic accidents and police action – even foreseen human deaths – is not required by laws prohibiting slavery and murder. In the same way, preventing accidental and incidental deaths in traffic accidents or harvesting crops – even foreseen deaths – is not required by veganism. In other words, abolitionist animal rights, as currently conceived, and the corresponding moral baseline of veganism are precisely the same in “line-drawing” as laws prohibiting chattel slavery and murder. Laws prohibiting slavery and murder say nothing about preventing motor vehicle injuries and fatalities, or how much cost we should incur in saving an injured child’s life, or “friendly fire” (unintended killing) in a justified war of self-defense. We should certainly take appropriate measures to reduce such deaths as much as possible, but again, veganism is merely a first and minimum standard, not the final or the best standard.

The second is that while from a Christian perspective especially there is “no pure land”, there is also no excuse for not doing what we can actually do in our own time and in our own way following a God who we believe can and will reconcile  ”all things … whether things on the earth, or things in the heavens”  through Jesus Col. 1:16-20, including what we call the natural world,  which Paul describes as “groaning” and “waiting with eager longing” in hopes that the children of God will set it free from its “futility”, its “bondage to decay” Rom 8:19-23.

Kolbert ends her review with

“Eating Animals” closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us.

A lot of fun?  When I had my first vegetarian Thanksgiving I saw first hand how much my own traditions were really missing the point.  If you believe that you literally can’t “do” Thanksgiving without a dead bird then you’ve essentially admitted that it isn’t primarliy about general notions of fellowship and thankfulness at all.  It’s similar to the notion that you can’t “do” a proper Christmas or Easter without a dead pig.   I think we should consider very carefully the full ramifications of defining these traditions, these holidays secular and religious,  in terms of somehow requiring sacrificial victims.   As a Christian I am free to make my own choice about food.   The extent to which I’m able to live a life free of bloody sacrificial victims is precisely one of the things I’m most thankful for.