Eating songbirds

When the platters of songbirds arrived, everyone would start to chirp. Except for the birds, of course. They would be plucked bare, squeezed between bread and pork, tiny, with the useless stumps that used to be their wings looking like broken arms bent backwards. Mostly, you’d notice their big, empty eye sockets and their beaks.

The beaks were generally the subject of conversation once people started eating: are you or are you not one of those people who eats the beak? The birds were so small and fragile that the usual breast, thigh, drumstick division didn’t apply; people would just hold the beak between their manicured thumbs and forefingers and nosh their way through the entire bird, bones and all. They would say a little rhyme, “Anche la Regina Margherita mangia il pollo con le dita,” (even Queen Margaret ate chicken with her fingers), to excuse themselves before digging in.

-- Clare Mahon

Distancing and concealment

“The sheer volume, scale and rate of killing,” [says] Timothy Pachirat, “the way the animals form a continuous stream rather than individual creatures, makes it clear the animals are seen as raw material. The cattle are called ‘beef’ even while they’re alive — and that not only protects people from acknowledging what they’re doing and that they’re doing it to sentient beings, it’s also accurate, a reflection of the process itself.” 

...The most publicized stories about industrial agriculture represent the exceptions that prove the rule: the uncommon torture of animals by perverse individuals in rogue operations. But torture is inherent in the routine treatment of animals as widgets, and the system itself is perverse. What makes Every Twelve Seconds different from (for example) a Mercy for Animals exposé is, says Pachirat, “that the day-in and day-out experience produces invisibility. Industrialized agriculture perpetuates concealment at every level of the process, and rather than focusing on the shocking examples we should be focusing on the system itself.”

-- from The Human Cost of Animal Suffering Mark Bittman

The Matrix and the Rambunctious Garden

Matt Ridley has a vision of the future:

With much of the world’s meat grown, brain-free and legless, in factories, and much of its fruit and vegetables in multi-storey urban farms lit with cheap fusion power, there will again be vast steppes, savannahs, prairies and rain forests, teeming with herds of wild game. Perhaps even a few woolly mammoths among them.

To some, parts of this scenario may look more like a nightmare.  Even on the most optimistic reasonable view there are grounds for doubt. How do we know future 're-wilded' ecosystems will take the form we want them to if system interactions and changes are more complex than we can model and predict? The uncertainties are even greater if,  as the evidence indicates,  large scale  changes to the Earth system as a whole are also already underway?

Perhaps, in the event of relatively benign outcomes in which humans are still a major presence, the future will see not so much 'the revival of wild ecosystems' as the creation of new ones -- hard to predict combinations of old and new by human hand and accident.

See Emma Marris on the Rambunctious Garden and Garry Hamilton on Welcome Weeds: How alien invasion could save the Earth.

And on this blog Sperm to worm, womb to tomb and erection to resurrection.

Chickens in heaven

Manufacturing #17: Deda Chicken Processing Plant, Dehui City, Jilin Province, China (2005) by Edward Burtynsky.

'The goddess must have blood'

In the main event, 250 appointed residents with traditional kukri knives began their task of decapitating more than 10,000 buffalo in a dusty enclosure guarded by high walls and armed police.

Frightened calves galloped around in vain as the men, wearing red bandanas and armbands, pursued them and chopped off their heads.

Take, eat; this is my body

Foer relates how, one night, he sneaked onto a California turkey farm with an animal-rights activist he calls C. Most of the buildings were locked, but the two managed to slip into a shed that housed tens of thousands of turkey chicks. At first, the conditions seemed not so bad. Some of the chicks were sleeping. Others were struggling to get closer to the heat lamps that substitute for their mothers. Then Foer started noticing how many of the chicks were dead. They were covered with sores, or matted with blood, or withered like dry leaves. C spotted one chick splayed out on the floor, trembling. Its eyes were crusted over and its head was shaking back and forth. C slit its throat.

-- from Elizabeth Kolbert's review of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. Kolbert makes no mention of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. [1] Does Foer?

The story goes that Franz Kafka visited the Berlin aquarium and, gazing into the illuminated tanks, addressed the fish directly. “Now at last I can look at you in peace,” he told them. “I don’t eat you anymore.”

But should we cut out meat (and fish) altogether? And, as Kolbert points out, what about all other animal products? Can one imagine a world where many fewer animals are kept in excellent conditions and only consumed on special occasions? If not, how about 'Meat 2.0?' (or its dark side 'secret burgers')?

Would a world in which humans eat no animals be palid, etiolated? A more sustainable (more plausible) alternative, perhaps, would be one with a smaller human population which both reveres and eats a limited number of animals, rather as some nomadic peoples still do today. [2], [3]

And then there is Kafka's hunger artist (with whom I have some sympathy).

Image: a lake of blood and excrement near Granjas Caroll, Mexico

Footnote

[1] An overview from more than a year ago but still useful is Andy Revkin's Can people have meat and a planet too?

[2] A non-dreadful scenario for reduction in the total size of the human population would most likely be an accelerated and peaceful demographic transition: billions of freely made choices by more and more people to have just one or two children. Global population would peak at about 9 billion mid century and start to decline thereafter. Quality of life would continue to improve: 'Malthus' well and truly vanquished.

[3] (added 7 Nov) Or, as John Berger sees it (Why look at animals? 1977), as peasants in agricultural societies have long done:

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away the pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.

Nar Fin

This summer, [the Icelandic company] Hvalur hf caught 125 fins [whales] - a huge expansion on previous years. The company's owner [Kristjan Loftsson] says he will export as much as 1,500 tonnes to Japan. This would substantially increase the amount of whalemeat in the Japanese market.

....The fin is globally listed as an endangered species.

-- BBC report

Scape pig

David Steven at Global Dashboard on the consequences of hysteria in Egypt. The symbolism of burying the pigs alive is surely not lost on the country's Christians.

Egypt's total human population is currently growing by nearly 1.4 million per year.

A zabaleen: pictured in a 20 Sep NYT article on this topic.

Meat your maker

A genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever

writes Mike Davis. This "lays bear the meat industry's monstrous power".

See also Tom Philpott (added 29 April: but don't jump to conclusions, says Merritt Clifton).

Last year in his letter to the president Michael Pollan highlighted feedlot meat as a major flaw in the U.S. agricultural system:

As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution -- animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete -- and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

The raw and the cooked

I haven’t eaten a mammal in about 30 years, except a couple of times during the 1990s, when I ate some raw monkey the chimps had killed and left behind.

-- Richard Wrangham, who says early humans were able to evolve because cooked foods were richer, healthier and required less eating time:

Homo erectus, our...immediate ancestor, ha[d] long legs and a lean, striding body. In fact, he could walk into a Fifth Avenue shop today and buy a suit right off a peg.

Image: H. ergaster by Viktor Deak

P.S. 27 May: Why Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid

Diet for a crowded planet

Eating less meat "could wipe $20 trillion off the cost of fighting climate change."

A glass-walled slaughterhouse

[Temple] Grandin is in favor of almost total openness — she’s among the writers who believe that slaughterhouses should have glass walls. “No animal should spend its last conscious moments in a state of terror,” she writes, and any visitor should be able to observe that they do not.

-- from Dwight Garner's review of Animals make us human.

A turkey

Little shop of hors d'oeuvres

by Banksy. More footage here.

By this part of the century few are left who believe
in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
are sounds of shadows that possess no future
there is still game for the pleasure of killing
and there are pets for the children but the lives that followed
courses of their own other than ours and older
have been migrating before us...

-- from Green Fields by W.S. Merwin

Love, loyalty and goose liver pâté

...To this day, when tucking into a pork chop, I always feel as if it is my intellectual equal.

Then there were the geese, the most admirable creatures I’ve ever met...

-- from A farm boy reflects on animal rights by Nicholas Kristof

Meat 2.0?

Frankly, if the end product is to be the white meat of a month-old broiler chicken or the minced meat of a hamburger, prepared without care and eaten absent-mindedly, why make the detour through a sentient vertebrate which needs kilos of grain just to keep upright and has a brain that may feel fear and frustration?

-- Anna Olsson.