NEWS: It Died for Us -- NYT 6/25/06

[Guest guest]

Just another snapshot of where public opinion is going in the matter of

animal slaughter. As most of you may know, a major health foods outlet,

Whole Foods, said it would no longer sell live lobsters. Seems like at

least a step in the right direction, but it's interesting that people

are so concerned about the welfare of lobsters and geese -- and not so

concerned with the welfare of cows -- who have demonstrable emotions

much more like human beings.

 

Anyway, here's the article -- including the letters to the editor at the

end, in which at least one writer recommends vegetarianism

 

your servant,

 

Hare Krsna dasi

 

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New York Times June 25, 2006

 

IT DIED FOR US

 

By Frank Bruni

 

DO oysters have little bivalve souls? Do they dream briny dreams, scream

briny screams? On a level that I suppose is selfish and somewhat silly,

I hope not, because they are alive when they are shucked right in front

of us, their deaths more proximal than those of so many creatures we eat.

 

They don't thrash like the lobster in its scalding pot, but should we

nonetheless worry about how they meet their end? And whether that end is

a sufficiently compassionate one?

 

These questions seem less ridiculous than they once did. This month

Whole Foods announced that it would no longer sell live lobsters, saying

that keeping them in crammed tanks for long periods doesn't demonstrate

a proper concern for animal welfare. The Chicago City Council recently

outlawed the sale of foie gras to protest the force-feeding of the ducks

and geese that yield it. California passed a similar law, which doesn't

take effect until 2012, and other states and cities are considering such

measures.

 

All of these developments dovetail with a heightened awareness in these

food-obsessed times of what we eat: where it came from, what it was fed,

how it was penned, how it perished. If the success of best sellers like

''Fast Food Nation'' and ''The Omnivore's Dilemma'' and stores like

Whole Foods is any indication, more Americans are spending more time

mulling the nutritional, environmental and, yes, ethical implications of

their diets.

 

They prefer that their beef carry the tag ''grass fed,'' which evokes a

verdant pasture rather than a squalid feed lot, and that their poultry

knew the glories of a ''free range,'' a less sturdy assurance than many

people believe.

 

But these concerns are riddled with intellectual inconsistencies and

prompt infinite questions. Are the calls for fundamental changes in the

mass production of food simply elitist, the privilege of people wealthy

enough to pay more at the checkout counter? Does fretting about ducks

give people a pass on chickens? Does considering the lobster allow

seafood lovers to disregard the tuna?

 

''Foie gras and lobster are not at the heart of the real tough issues of

animal welfare, which are feed lots and pigs and cattle and chickens and

how billions of animals are treated,'' said Michael Pollan, author of

''The Omnivore's Dilemma,'' which traces the messy back stories of our

meals. ''On the other hand, the fact that we're having this conversation

at all -- that we're talking about ethics in relation to what we're

eating every day -- strikes me as a very healthy thing,'' he said last week.

 

Mr. Pollan is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, and

the reaction to a 2002 article of his illustrates how random people's

concerns over animal welfare can be. The article depicted the life on a

Kansas feed lot of a young steer that Mr. Pollan had purchased, a steer

slated for slaughter several months later.

 

After the article appeared, Mr. Pollan received appeals from readers

willing to pay large sums of money to buy and save the steer. One

reader, he recalled, was a Hollywood producer who wanted to let the

animal graze on his lawn in Beverly Hills, Calif.

 

''He kept coming after me,'' Mr. Pollan said, describing a crusade that

culminated in an offer of a meal at a famous emporium of porterhouses in

Brooklyn. ''He finally said, 'I'm coming to New York, we're going to

have dinner at Peter Luger to discuss this.' I'm like, 'Excuse me, we're

going to have a steak dinner to discuss the rescue of this steer?' How

disconnected can we be?''

 

The dinner never happened. The steer was killed. Mr. Pollan didn't eat

its flesh, but he does eat beef, trying to make sure it's not from feed

lots. He said he won't eat veal, but has not sworn off foie gras. For

different omnivores there are different codes.

 

And there is often as much sentiment as sense. The anecdote about the

producer suggests the ways in which many people make distinctions and

decisions based primarily on the degree to which they have become

familiar with the creatures they ingest, the degree to which they have

anthropomorphized them.

 

''People look at the lobster and try to imagine what its experience

would be like, but they don't look at a package of chicken breasts and

imagine what the experience would be like,'' said Jay Weinstein, a

Manhattan caterer whose book ''The Ethical Gourmet'' was published this

month. ''It's because they're closer to the final step of the killing.''

 

While the lives of ''free-range'' chickens are hardly ideal, the lives

of other chickens are even worse, Mr. Weinstein said. The birds' feet

are lacerated by the wire they are forced to stand on, while their beaks

are clipped so they can't peck at each other in the tight quarters they

occupy. He questioned whether any of that was less offensive than the

force feeding of ducks.

 

Foie gras and lobster may be drawing special attention because they're

luxury foods whose consumption, like the wearing of a mink, cannot be

defended on the grounds of necessity. But even that attention entails

contradictions.

 

Eric Ripert, the chef and a co-owner of the seafood restaurant Le

Bernardin in Manhattan, said he made a point of killing lobsters not by

throwing them into boiling water -- where, he said, ''it looks like

they're suffering'' -- but by slicing their heads with a sharp blade.

 

''I feel good about doing that,'' he said in a telephone interview.

 

But where do the restaurant's lobsters await their appointment with the

knife? For as many as 24 hours, as many as 40 lobsters inhabit a

container that's just 3-feet long by 1-foot wide, he said. It doesn't

sound much comfier than a Whole Foods holding tank.

 

''I should be more compassionate, I guess,'' Mr. Ripert said.

 

But, he added: ''When you think about treating animals in a humane way,

it's unlimited. If you start with the lobster, then next month you

should think about the clam, and then you have to think about the fish,

which is suffocating outside the water after we catch it.''

 

Even before it suffocates, a hooked or netted fish flails in a doomed

effort to avoid its fate. The process is traumatic enough that David

Pasternack, a fisherman and co-owner of the Manhattan seafood restaurant

Esca, noted that ''you can see the struggle in the flesh of a fish.''

 

If the fish hasn't gone down quickly, he said, ''The meat feels and

looks stressed out.'' Does that struggle deserve as much heed as the

grisly realities of the abattoir?

 

Maybe not. Ample scientific evidence suggests that various creatures

have varying levels of consciousness. ''There really is a difference

between the sentience of an oyster and the sentience of a lobster and

the sentience of a cat,'' Mr. Pollan said. ''These lines really can be

drawn.''

 

And advocates of animal welfare argue that some lines are better than

none, that inconsistencies are better than inaction.

 

But there are human considerations as well. Even in a country as rich as

ours,some people can't afford chickens reared according to exacting

standards. Other people's livelihoods depend on the status quo.

 

In a memoir published last year, ''The Summer of Ordinary Ways,'' the

Minnesota writer Nicole Lea Helget described her childhood on a family

farm. She said she was surprised when much of the reaction to her book

focused on the way animals were treated instead of her family's travails.

 

An anecdote about her father's killing a recalcitrant cow with a

pitchfork was meant to illustrate his frustrations, she said. The

Publishers Weekly review of the book frames that story as ''a staggering

example of her father's brutality'' and refers to him as merciless.

 

''I thought it really reflected what can happen to a person,'' Ms.

Helget said in an interview. ''I wasn't really thinking about what was

happening to the cow.''

 

She expressed confusion about the concern for animals serving a purpose

as essential as food. ''I just spent a little time in New York,'' she

said. ''What seems abnormal to me is having a Great Dane in a

one-bedroom apartment. I guess it's all a matter of perspective.''

 

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LETTERS TO THE EDITOR New York Times 6/28/06

 

To the Editor:

 

Re ''It Died for Us,'' by Frank Bruni (Critic's Notebook, Week in

Review, June 25):

 

There is no ethical difference between eating a dog, cat, chicken, pig

or fish. If anything, eating your dogs or cats would be morally

preferable, since they would have led a good life until you killed them.

 

According to a 2003 Gallup Poll, 96 percent of Americans believe that

animals deserve some legal protection from harm. Yet the almost 40 land

animals each American eats every year have their bodies mutilated

without pain relief. They're given growth-promoting drugs that often

cripple them and are cooped up in their own waste for their entire

lives, denied even a modicum of pleasure. They're slaughtered in ways

that would be illegal in the European Union.

 

Every stage of the process would warrant felony cruelty charges were

dogs or cats so abused.

 

If you oppose cruelty, try vegetarianism.

 

Bruce G. Friedrich

 

Norfolk, Va.

 

June 25, 2006

 

The writer is vice president for international grass-roots campaigns,

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

 

 

 

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To the Editor:

 

If we lived in the land of the Houyhnhnms as imagined by Jonathan Swift,

the horses would be in charge and we poor s would be a lower order

under them.

 

But we live in a world where Homo sapiens is in charge, and other orders

are subject to our whims and rules. And so, as long as animals are

treated with a measure of respect, we need them to satisfy our hunger.

We also use them as sled dogs, racehorses, pets and draft animals. Is

that cruel? Humane treatment means what humans decide.

 

I, for one, will continue to enjoy lobster and beefsteaks. Others choose

to fight against their definition of cruelty by committing cruel acts.

 

Carl Gutman

 

Albuquerque

 

June 26, 2006

 

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To the Editor:

 

Perhaps Whole Foods should consider no longer selling processed lobster

meat as well as live lobsters. Processed lobster comes from lobsters

that die inside enormous automated crushing machines. They are loaded

alive into a cylinder, and the water around them is compressed to

several times the pressure found in the deepest trenches of the ocean.

 

Tests by animal-welfare experts are under way, but it is not yet clear

how long the lobsters suffer inside these high-pressure processors

before they die.

 

While perhaps more humane than boiling alive, it is certainly not more

humane than pithing a lobster with a kitchen knife before you put it in

the pot.

 

Trevor Corson

 

Washington

 

June 25, 2006

 

The writer is the author of a book about the biology of lobsters.

 

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To the Editor:

 

Frank Bruni's Critic's Notebook raises the fundamental question

underlying every consumer and lifestyle choice we make: What is our

purpose in this life?

 

If our purpose is to maximize our own pleasure or convenience, we are

likely to allow all kinds of suffering in the name of our palate, our

taste in clothing and our desire for the highest return on our

investments. Any consequences of those decisions are a kind of

collateral damage.

 

But if our purpose is to reduce suffering whenever we can, we derive

happiness from the knowledge that our choices are minimizing the

collateral damage, while raising the consciousness of the collective.

 

Mary Martin

 

Jupiter, Fla.

 

June 25, 2006

 

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To the Editor:

 

Frank Bruni's essay illustrates the frustration I'm feeling in regard

to, well, just about everything.

 

I volunteer at an animal shelter. The question I hear is, ''Well, what

about the animals you don't have room for?'' I also mentor a child, and

I hear, ''Well, what about all the other children at her school?''

 

I stopped eating chicken when I learned about the torture they endure at

factory farms, and the question is: ''Well, what about cows? Don't you

care about them?''

 

I care about cows, and about homeless animals, and tortured prisoners,

and our soldiers dying in Iraq, and children growing up in poverty, and

rapes in Congo, and our national debt, and North Korean missiles. What

can I do?

 

With that said, I will not eat chicken or foie gras, and I will not drop

a live lobster into a pot of boiling water.

 

Celia Ballew Jones

 

Richmond, Va.

 

June 25, 2006

 

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