Archive for the ‘Meat Eating’ Category

EXPOSED! What the Beef Industry Pumps Into Your Dinner!

Posted: December 14, 2012 in Beyond Beef, Flesh Diet, Flesh Foods, Food Contamination, Meat Eating, Meat Industry
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Revealed: What the Beef Industry Pumps Into Your Dinner

A common industry practice puts consumers at higher risks for eating food contaminated by deadly pathogens — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Photo Credit: © Lisovskaya Natalia/ Shutterstock.com

 If acclaimed authors Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Jeremy Rifkin (Beyond Beef) and John Robbins (Diet for a New America) haven’t given you enough reasons over the last century to be wary of the meat industry, then a year-long investigation by the Kansas City Star may do the trick.

Mike McGraw kicks off the KC Star’s investigative series by introducing Margaret Lamkin, who has been forced to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life, after a medium-rare steak she ordered three years ago at Applebee’s was contaminated with a pathogen. The resulting illness destroyed her colon.

Of course we already know about E. coli and other food-borne pathogens; people have gotten sick from everything from spinach to peanut butter. But the news here is that what sickened Lamkin wasn’t just the meat, but a process the industry uses to tenderize it. McGraw explains:

The Kansas City Star investigated what the industry calls “bladed” or “needled” beef, and found the process exposes Americans to a higher risk of E. coli poisoning than cuts of meat that have not been tenderized.

… Although blading and injecting marinades into meat add value for the beef industry, that also can drive pathogens — including the E. coli O157:H7 that destroyed Lamkin’s colon — deeper into the meat.

By using this process (which according to the story, 90 percent of processors will use, depending on the cut), people are at a greater risk of exposure to life-threatening illness. And consumers have no way of knowing whether their meat has undergone this process.

Ending up with a fecal-contaminated burger is bad, but it’s just the beginning of what the investigation uncovered. Here are the other key findings, as McGraw writes:

•  Large beef plants, based on volume alone, contribute disproportionately to the incidence of meat-borne pathogens.

•  Big Beef and other processors are co-mingling ground beef from many different cattle, some from outside the United States, adding to the difficulty health officials have tracking contaminated products to their source. The industry also has resisted labeling some products, including mechanically tenderized meat, to warn consumers and restaurants to cook it thoroughly.

•  Big Beef is injecting millions of dollars of growth hormones and antibiotics into cattle, partly to fatten them quickly for market. Many experts believe that years of overuse and misuse of such drugs contributes to antibiotic-resistant pathogens in humans, meaning illnesses once treated with a regimen of antibiotics are much harder to control.

•  Big Beef is using its political pull, public relations campaigns and the supportive science it sponsors to influence federal dietary guidelines and recast steaks and burgers as “health foods” people should eat every day. It even persuaded the American Heart Association to certify beef as “heart healthy.”

Read the full investigation, and think about how this scenario fits into the larger picture of what we deem acceptable as a food system. Just last month Consumer Reports shared frightening findings about pork.

And there is a ray of good news. Ocean Robbins wrote today:

People are taking an increasing interest in the way that the animals raised for food are treated. In fact, a poll conducted by Lake Research partners found that 94 percent of Americans agree that animals raised for food on farms deserve to be free from cruelty. Nine U.S. states have now joined the entire European Union in banning gestational crates for pigs, and Australia’s two largest supermarket chains now sell only cage-free eggs in their house brands.

The demand is growing for food that is organic, sustainable, fair trade, GMO-free, humane, and healthy. In cities around the world, we’re seeing more and more farmer’s markets (a nearly three-fold increase in the last decade), and more young people getting back into farming. Grocery stores (even big national chains) are displaying local, natural and organic foods with pride. The movements for healthy food are growing fast, and starting to become a political force.

Investigations like the one done by the Kansas City Star are crucial for public education, as is support for the growing food movement that needs help in turning purchasing power at the market into political power that can affect decisions about food safety and industry practices.

“Big agribusiness would probably like us all to sit alone in the dark, munching on highly processed, genetically engineered, chemical-laden, pesticide-contaminated pseudo-foods,” Robbins writes. “But the tide of history is turning, and regardless of how much they spend attempting to maintain their hold on our food systems, more and more people are saying NO to foods that lead to illness, and YES to foods that help us heal.”

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Eat, Pray, Kill | The Basic Brutality of Eating

Posted: May 21, 2012 in Animal Cruelty, Killing Animals, Meat Eating, Vegetarianism
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Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating

By Beatrice Marovich

“Bloody beetroots”: image courtesy flickr user kudla, via a Creative Commons license

Beatrice Marovich

[Beatrice is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Division of Religion at Drew University in Madison, NJ. She also works as a writer, editor, and communications consultant, specializing in ideas at the crowded intersection of theology, philosophy, faith and public/political life in North America.]

Some humans are deeply passionate about their meat. They love it, they gnash their teeth for it. In her 2006 spiritual travelogue Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert confessed a kind of affinity with the sensual Tuscan culture of meat. Shop windows in the Italian town, she writes, are loaded with sausages “stuffed like ladies’ legs into provocative stockings” or the “lusty buttocks” of ham. The net effect, she suggests, is the emanation of a “you know you want it” kind of sensuality. Make no mistake. Meat—the flesh of non-human animals—is a force of desire in human life.

But is there an ethical argument in favor of flesh consumption? That is, can a meat-eating human find solid moral ground for her more carnivorous appetites? Is there a soul-cure for the stomachache that comes from eating the body of another sentient creature? Are these questions that the vast storehouses of religious traditions can help us navigate?

In a culture where plates are piled high with the spoils of profligate factory farming, it would seem that the growing surge of vegans and vegetarians have claim to the moral high ground. One might even make the argument that religious vegetarianism is one of the few things that makes modern religions look good. But not everyone is satisfied with this solution. “Ethically speaking, vegetables get all the glory,” Ariel Kaminer lamented in the New York Times, playing the role of the paper’s esteemed Ethicist. And so, in an attempt to buck this trend the paper launched an essay contest in March of this year: in search of the ethical argument for meat.

Essays were judged by a star-studded panel that included vocal vegetarians like Peter Singer and Jonathan Safran Foer as well as more cautiously omnivorous foodies such as Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman. Controversy ensued over the fact that the panel was comprised entirely of men. But, gender issues be damned, results were published in late April. Six essays made the cut. The final stage was to give Times readers four days to vote on their personal favorite. Almost 40 percent of voters appeared to favor the ethical argument in favor of in vitro meat. “Aside from accidental roadkill or the fish washed up dead on the shore, it is perhaps the only ethical meat,” essayist Ingrid Newkirk baldly proffered.

If Peas Can Talk…

The argument that stirred me most, however, was one of the lower-scoring essays—earning a mere 10 percent of voter approval. Interestingly, it wasn’t really an argument in favor of meat at all, so much as it was an attempt to dramatize the moral stakes of the practice.

“We would be foolish to deny that there are strong moral considerations against eating meat,” philosophy professor Bob Fischer begins. Eating meat is clearly, from an ethical perspective, “wrong” on several counts. But morality is an ideal, he notes, something we aim for, and fall short of. This makes the moral world “tragic,” as he puts it. Moral work is a tragedy, played out on a cosmic stage. Rather than wallow in remorse, he sees this as reason to be suspicious of “any proposal that would steer us through these complexities too quickly.”

When it comes to the consumption of meat, in other words, our human hands have long been dirty. This isn’t a discouragement to stop striving for the good. But a moral proposal that promises to wash our filthy fingers spotlessly clean—in seconds flat—is suspect. Because they will still be dirty. The pressing moral question, of meat, becomes: given that human hands are obviously soiled, what can be done with these polluted tools?

The easy answer, most often, is: go vegetarian. If it feels wrong to eat meat, then stop eating it. Why waste time, really? Just go vegan. Start cleaning your hands by refusing to eat your fellow creatures. The ethical argument for meat, in other words, is an impossibility. Ending flesh consumption is one step in right direction, toward a kinder future. Some might argue, however, that the argument from empathy is a slippery slope argument. Vegetarians will surely protest. But philosopher Michael Marder, writing recently for the Times, points to research on pea plant communication as evidence of a kind of plant subjectivity. The title of his column begs the incendiary question: “If peas can talk, should we eat them?”

There are, perhaps, some practitioners of the Jain tradition who would give a resounding “no.” Strict ascetic practices in Jainism disavow not only the consumption of meat, but the practice of farming—because of the damage that agricultural tools to do the earth. The consumption of root vegetables may be prohibited (as you would be yanking the vegetable to its death), as well as the consumption of a living pea shoot, which can (as Marder suggests) talk.

These practices find their basis in ahimsa—the Sanskrit term that describes a posture of nonviolence toward all living creatures. The power of ahimsa can be genealogically traced into the vegetarian strains and variants of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Is it when we turn to the wisdom of religious traditions that we finally find the spiritual purity we’re looking for? The sort that can clean our dirty hands from the inside out, starting with our nasty and brutish souls?

A Screaming Silence

My own thinking around religion and animals, particularly around the conundrum of eating them, was complexified at a recent conference, put on by the Graduate Student’s Association in Columbia’s Religion Department. The consumption of animal flesh was not the primary subject matter of “Pray, Eat, Kill: Relating to Animals Across Religious Traditions,” but it was perhaps the most absorbing. It was also the subject of Wendy Doniger’s keynote address. The legendary scholar of myth and religion dipped back into ancient text, citing myriad strange injunctions regarding the consumption of food in The Laws of Manu. What she finds, in these codes, is not only an attempt to deal with the old, and apparently always agonizing, moral pain of eating animal flesh. She also spoke of references, in these ancient texts, to the “screaming silence” of vegetables.

Doniger finds, in other words, a long history of reflection on the basic brutality of eating, rooted in a reflection on this concept of ahimsa. But, interestingly, what she finds is that this sympathy and compassion for animals did not always lead to the condemnation of eating animal flesh.

The fact is, religious ethics are practices that are crafted in conversation with culture and geography. There have been times when the meaning of ahimsa, or practices of animal compassion, have taken a backseat to necessity. Geoff Barstow, for example, spoke of the 18th-century Tibetan Buddhist Jigme Lingpa who displayed an extreme form of compassion for animals (addressing them as his mother). He believed that meat was a poison that bore a heavy karmic burden. But he stopped just sort of commending vegetarianism. Meat was, as Barstow put it, a kind of “necessary evil.” Was this in recognition of the fact that there simply aren’t a lot of vegetables to be had in the mountainous regions of Tibet?

Is the purity (or the arid ethical high ground) we might be aiming for a myth, itself? Is it possible to both consume and remain morally chaste? Doniger suggests that, perhaps, the most common and lasting effect we can see—as reverent humans attempt to deal with the moral ambivalence of eating meat—is that they make lists. They attempt to rationalize this ambivalence, to find a way of controlling its power. The Laws of Manu are filled with long lists of things you can and cannot eat (mushrooms, solitary animals), things you can and cannot do with animals (sacrifice is good, unlawful slaughter is bad).

Such lists are not unique to the Hindu tradition. Indeed, we see both simple and complex dietary regulations in a host of traditions and cultures. Even here in the U.S., we have “secular” regulations that prevent us from eating dogs. Many of us follow our own little personal hodgepodge of injunctions that (we believe) contributes to a more sustainable form of life, or a healthy planet.

In a larger sense, the thicket of little rules and regulations seems absurd. The “real” question, it seems, is whether or not to eat animals at all—whether to have all or nothing, flesh or no flesh. But such universal injunctions seem problematic to me. Human history is littered with smaller lists, smaller injunctions, created in ethical conversation with a particular context.

When we look back at the stages set by the history, via religion, I think we will see this moral drama—the encounter of human and non-human animal—played out in many different ways. In the messy, violent, ambivalence this encounter generates, and the stopgap measures put in place to resolve it, we see thousands of small (often contradictory, often bizarre) solutions. We might read thousands of lists! But this is not a sign of our human failure. Rather, I think we can see it as an encouragement to keep making those small lists.

Morality is a messy business—why should we expect its rules to be singular, or simple?

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