CSotD: Happy Meals
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Soup to Nutz offers a grim but funny — yes, that's possible — commentary on the search for humane meat.
I do believe in humane treatment of animals, even those destined for the table. What life they have, however short, should not be brutal, at least beyond the facts of life, their fact of life being "You are food."
And that is the fact, for them: "Circle of Life" and all that.
Perhaps I've said this here already, because it's been on my mind recently, but when I was a kid, there was a very common coming-of-age story in children's fiction and on television: The 4H kid who raises a calf, wins a blue ribbon and then has to deal with the reality that the calf is headed for market, and what that means.
There are tears, and there's plenty of sympathy from adults who remember their own coming-of-age, but it's one of those things a farm kid needed to go through.
Adapting to reality doesn't mean becoming insensitive: Even tough little pioneer girls Laura and Mary Ingalls ran inside and covered their ears when Pa slaughtered the hog.
But "Charlotte's Web" took the opposite tack, and maybe that was a bridge between those old countrified days and modern Sesame Street times: E.B.White, for all his affection for country life, was a transplant from the city, in a century in which the flow was inexorably headed the other direction.
In the old stories, one lesson was that you don't name your food.
You can name the milk cow and you can name the horses or oxen, whichever you have, but you don't name the chickens and, having once made the mistake of naming your 4H project, you learn to refer, thenceforth, to the calf as "the calf."
But the lesson of naming your pig "Wilbur" was not to suck it up and learn about life but to … well, I don't know.
White never wrote a sequel, but my guess is that Fern, having never really adapted to farm life, got herself a scholarship to Bryn Mawr and wound up as an editorial assistant somewhere where meat comes in little foam trays covered with Saran Wrap.
I was editing a story this week about the new tiger exhibit at the Denver Zoo, and my 11-year-old reporter wrote that the tigers are happy because they have twice as much space as in their old quarters.
I changed it to "seem more relaxed" because, beyond whether or not he was qualified to psychoanalyze a tiger, I remembered what the director of the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo told me years ago, when they had just built a new space for their Siberian tigers.
He noted that Siberian tigers in particular have an enormous range in the wild and that, while it was good to get them on grass and not concrete and to give them a pond and a log to play on, the fact is, if they had what they really wanted, none of the tourists would ever see them, and that this was true of all the animals in the zoo.
That's not a slam on zoos, which not only educate and inspire the public, but do a great deal these days to preserve endangered species.
After all, the fact that we still have bison in the wild is due in large part to a herd that had lived in the Bronx Zoo until it was set free on the plains more than a century ago.
And the Denver Zoo is an active participant in a program in Mongolia centered on a wildlife preserve there.
But the bottom line is that making animals "happy" is quite a different matter, a very complicated, anthropomorphic pursuit about which only pure vegans have standing to comment.
(By "pure vegans" I mean not those who simply do not eat animal products but those who also only wear clothing made from animals who died hundreds of millions of years ago, in the Plasticine Period.)
Specific to chickens and pork and beef and such, I think we did better when our food was raised on local farms and ranches, before it became centralized in factories, both in terms of how the animals lived before they no longer did, and in terms of how healthful and tasty they may have been when they arrived at the table.
But, again, you have to figure out when you think that line was crossed. It seems that letting cattle run wild across the Texas plains was wonderfully humane, but at some point, if we were going to have cities, we had to round them up, shove them into boxcars and transport them to Chicago to be put into feedlots and then turned into beef to feed those cities.
The operative phrase being "if we were going to have cities."
I don't think we would be able to depopulate the cities in order to end factory farming and I'm not sure it would be a good idea anyway.
We've built up the population of our cities to the point where turning them all loose would simply fill the countryside with city folks who had been raised in cramped, inhumane little apartments where they had to be kept from pecking each other to death and who have, over generations, had all their natural instincts bred out of them.
They'd probably just wander aimlessly around in LL Bean clothes, writing essays about the philosophical wonders of country life for NPR and buying chickens to which they would give names, rendering them inedible.
Not that they'd be making very many new mistakes. Fact is, they're a tradition that goes way back.
For instance:
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