The Big Bad Wolf

The story of the three little pigs; the wolf the evil villain with the ultimate goal of consumption and the pigs with the one goal of sustaining their lives. Interestingly the story all boiled down to what kept the wolf out and kept the pig in. As a child having this story read to me at night created more conviction on why my family did not eat meat (even though my parents choices were more nutritionally based than sympathy based). As I got older and started learning about animal instinct and the whole cycle of life, prey to predator, I tended to sympathize with the wolf. Was he just succumbing to his natural instinct of a need to fulfill hunger? His sharp teeth evolved for the purpose of tearing flesh and likewise his digestive system made to process animal meat. A carnivore true to form! Interestingly enough this cycle of life is not only about eating, but also nature sustaining a natural order of population of living things.

This brings up the question of where humans fit into the equation: Do we sympathize with the human frying up a pan of bacon because she is only following an instinctual guide to eating meat? Or do we sympathize with the pig that unknowingly lived her life to become bacon? I think that these questions can only be answered individually. However, Michael Pollan brings up an alternative perspective of viewing animals as meat, not so much in whether or not we should eat meant, but how the meat is produced and killed. In the chapter so endearingly named “The Ethics of Eating Animals,” Pollan states “The proper measure of their suffering, in other words is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts” (p. 310). So by keeping cattle, pigs and chickens in close quarters and only providing them a limited diet that they did not evolve to eat, is this a form of induced suffering? Interestingly, I have had long debates with my partner, Tim on this matter, because in his younger years he spent a good six months working at a “pig factory” in Missouri. His job in the assembly line was to skin the pigs from snout to tail (the previous person in line had already killed the animal). I have constantly deluged him with questions about how this type of job affected him. Did he hold any empathy for the pigs? Did he get depressed? “No” to both questions. “Meat is meat.” Interestingly enough, he did admit to not liking how they were kept enclosed in compact spaces, reminiscent of Pollan’s description of Poky farms. Tim’s reasoning came down to it being against the natural way of things. So Tim’s issue was not in the method in which they were killed (he said it was very swift), but the method in which they were kept alive prior to being killed.

So how do I view this whole dilemma, to eat meat or not to eat meat? I am writing this after devouring beef kabobs over the weekend—no, not organic or grass fed beef, but the cheapest cubes we could find. For me the cheapness of meat items creates an ease of mind in buying it. Interestingly, as Michael Pollan points out, if we deconstruct this industrialization and essentially brutalization of animals, “Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve” (p. 333).