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Back When a Ring Ding Tasted, Guiltily, Like America ­ The New York Times
http://nyti.ms/QjFGbn
U.S.
Back When a Chocolate Puck Tasted,
Guiltily, Like America
Dan Barry
THIS LAND NOV. 16, 2012
There was a time; admit it. There was a time when, if given a choice between a
warm pastry fresh from a baker’s oven and an ageless package of Ring Dings
fresh from the 7­Eleven, you would have chosen those Ring Dings. Not even
close.
After opening the tinfoil or cellophane wrapping with curatorial care, so
as not to disturb the faux­chocolate frosting, you would have gently removed
the puck­shaped treat and taken a bite deep enough to reveal crème — not
cream, but crème — so precious that a cow’s participation was incidental to its
making.
You did not care that this processed food product in your trembling hand
was an industrial step or two removed from becoming the heel of a shoe. You
already knew that not everything is good for you, and this was never truer than
with a Twinkie, a Sno Ball, or a Ring Ding — the Ding Dong equivalent in the
Northeast.
To you, they all tasted like, like: America.
Now, from Irving, Tex., comes word of the closing of Hostess Brands, your
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friendly neighborhood baking conglomerate, the maker of Ring Dings, Ho
Hos, Funny Bones and other treats whose names conjure a troupe of third­rate
clowns.
“We ceased baking this morning,” Anita­Marie Laurie, a Hostess
spokeswoman, said Friday morning. This means Hostess, and Drake’s, and
Dolly Madison, oh my.
Though the bankrupt company attributes its closing to a strike by a union
with a mouthful of a name — the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and
Grain Millers International — the truth is that the bad­snack market has been
in decline for years. All of a sudden, it seems, nosy consumers want to know
what it is that they are ingesting, and that’s not good if you manufacture edible
curiosities like SuzyQs and Raspberry Zingers.
Beyond the heart­aching loss of many, many jobs, a Hostess shutdown
doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers, particularly the dietetically tone­
deaf, have eaten their last Twinkie. Some industry analysts express confidence
that as Hostess sells off its assets in this saddest of bake sales, an iconic treat
like the Twinkie will be snatched up by a savvy opportunist — perhaps one
who might resume production using a novel application for the famously
indestructible Twinkie (a loofah sponge you can eat!).
Speaking personally, the news sent me into a panic. A Hostess shutdown
would mean an end to certain rare and delicious moments of guilty bliss, those
few seconds that come right after devouring a Ring Ding and right before the
stomach realizes what has happened.
It would also mean an end to measuring the passage of time by the color
of Hostess Sno Balls, those marshmallow­y mounds of cake and gunk that
appear to be some kind of confectionary prank. Normally the pinkish color and
approximate texture of an eraser, they turn green for St. Patrick’s Day, orange
for Halloween and lavender for the Easter celebration of the death and
resurrection of Christ. Or maybe the lavender just means springtime.
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Hurrying to the nearest food store, I barreled past the fruit and fresh
produce section, fully aware of the eyes of potatoes narrowing in
disappointment, and the heads of lettuce turning away in judgment. I nursed
dark, violent thoughts about making a salad, and kept going.
And there, in the supermarket equivalent of the timeout room, were the
food chain’s nutritional delinquents. Your Hostess cupcakes. Your Funny
Bones. Your Yodels. Your Yankee Doodles and Sunny Doodles, the ebony and
ivory of cupcakes. And, yes, your Ring Dings. Make that my Ring Dings.
I held a package of two Ring Dings in my hands. Reading the nutrition
facts, I took comfort in seeing that the word nutrition was not in quotation
marks. I skipped past unimportant details — the 310 calories, the 13 grams of
fat, the 37 grams of sugar — and found validation in the 2 grams of dietary
fiber.
The package says that’s 8 percent — count ’em — 8 percent of your “daily
values.” Whatever that means.
Then I turned my eyes to the block of white type listing the ingredients
that help to make the “devil’s food cake” resilient enough to be enjoyed in
whatever comes after the End of Days. Well, I thought, you can never have too
much “sodium stearoyl lactylate,” and I headed to the checkout counter with
my single item.
Here is the eat­your­broccoli part of the Hostess saga. According to
Harvey Hartman, a food­industry researcher and consultant in Bellevue,
Wash., the country’s food culture is rapidly changing. Consumers want less
processed foods, he says, and more information about “the story behind their
food” — which might not be something that a Sno Ball would want told.
But Mr. Hartman understands the allure. The careful unfolding of a Yodel
or Ho Ho, but only after the frosting has been nibbled away. The scraping of
teeth against the piece of white cardboard for that last remnant of a SuzyQ.
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The connection in a Twinkie, or a Funny Bone, to what he calls the “soulful
elements of our past.”
That is why, one night this fall, or maybe this winter, or perhaps in the
spring — there’s no rush — I will wait until the kids are asleep, their tummies
content with kale chips and quinoa. Then, basked in the bluish glow of some
black­and­white television show, I will eat my faux­chocolate, crème­filled,
Bloomberg­infuriating, chemical­rich, bad­for­me, really­really­bad­for­me,
all­but­extinct Ring Dings.
Both of them.
A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition
with the headline: Back When a Chocolate Puck Tasted, Guiltily, Like America.
© 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/us/back­when­a­ring­ding­tasted­guiltily­like­america.html
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How caffeine created the modern world.
1.
The original Coca­Cola was a late­nineteenth­century concoction known as Pemberton’s French
Wine Coca, a mixture of alcohol, the caffeine­rich kola nut, and coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine.
In the face of social pressure, first the wine and then the coca were removed, leaving the more
banal modern beverage in its place: carbonated, caffeinated sugar water with less kick to it than a
cup of coffee. But is that the way we think of Coke? Not at all. In the nineteen­thirties, a
commercial artist named Haddon Sundblom had the bright idea of posing a portly retired friend of
his in a red Santa Claus suit with a Coke in his hand, and plastering the image on billboards and
advertisements across the country. Coke, magically, was reborn as caffeine for children, caffeine
without any of the weighty adult connotations of coffee and tea. It was–as the ads with Sundblom’s
Santa put it–”the pause that refreshes.” It added life. It could teach the world to sing.
One of the things that have always made drugs so powerful is their cultural adaptability, their way
of acquiring meanings beyond their pharmacology. We think of marijuana, for example, as a drug
of lethargy, of disaffection. But in Colombia, the historian David T. Courtwright points out in
“Forces of Habit” (Harvard; $24.95), “peasants boast that cannabis helps them to quita el
cansancio or reduce fatigue; increase their fuerza and ánimo, force and spirit; and become
incansable, tireless.” In Germany right after the Second World War, cigarettes briefly and suddenly
became the equivalent of crack cocaine. “Up to a point, the majority of the habitual smokers
preferred to do without food even under extreme conditions of nutrition rather than to forgo
tobacco,” according to one account of the period. “Many housewives… bartered fat and sugar for
cigarettes.” Even a drug as demonized as opium has been seen in a more favorable light. In the
eighteen­thirties, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano II made the family
fortune exporting the drug to China, and Delano was able to sugarcoat his activities so plausibly
that no one ever accused his grandson of being the scion of a drug lord. And yet, as Bennett Alan
Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer remind us in their marvellous new book “The World of Caffeine”
(Routledge; $27.50), there is no drug quite as effortlessly adaptable as caffeine, the Zelig of
chemical stimulants.
At one moment, in one form, it is the drug of choice of café intellectuals and artists; in another, of
housewives; in another, of Zen monks; and, in yet another, of children enthralled by a fat man who
slides down chimneys. King Gustav III, who ruled Sweden in the latter half of the eighteenth
century, was so convinced of the particular perils of coffee over all other forms of caffeine that he
devised an elaborate experiment. A convicted murderer was sentenced to drink cup after cup of
coffee until he died, with another murderer sentenced to a lifetime of tea drinking, as a control.
(Unfortunately, the two doctors in charge of the study died before anyone else did; then Gustav was
murdered; and finally the tea drinker died, at eighty­three, of old age–leaving the original
murderer alone with his espresso, and leaving coffee’s supposed toxicity in some doubt.) Later, the
various forms of caffeine began to be divided up along sociological lines. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in
his book “Tastes of Paradise,” argues that, in the eighteenth century, coffee symbolized the rising
middle classes, whereas its great caffeinated rival in those years–cocoa, or, as it was known at the
time, chocolate–was the drink of the aristocracy. “Goethe, who used art as a means to lift himself
out of his middle class background into the aristocracy, and who as a member of a courtly society
maintained a sense of aristocratic calm even in the midst of immense productivity, made a cult of
chocolate, and avoided coffee,” Schivelbusch writes. “Balzac, who despite his sentimental allegiance
to the monarchy, lived and labored for the literary marketplace and for it alone, became one of the
most excessive coffee­drinkers in history. Here we see two fundamentally different working styles
and means of stimulation–fundamentally different psychologies and physiologies.” Today, of
course, the chief cultural distinction is between coffee and tea, which, according to a list drawn up
by Weinberg and Bealer, have come to represent almost entirely opposite sensibilities:
Coffee Aspect Male Boisterous Indulgence Hardheaded Topology Heidegger Beethoven Libertarian Promiscuous
Tea Aspect Female Decorous Temperance Romantic Geometry Carnap Mozart Statist Pure
That the American Revolution began with the symbolic rejection of tea in Boston Harbor, in other
words, makes perfect sense. Real revolutionaries would naturally prefer coffee. By contrast, the
freedom fighters of Canada, a hundred years later, were most definitely tea drinkers. And where
was Canada’s autonomy won? Not on the blood­soaked fields of Lexington and Concord but in the
genteel drawing rooms of Westminster, over a nice cup of Darjeeling and small, triangular
cucumber sandwiches.
2.
All this is a bit puzzling. We don’t fetishize the difference between salmon eaters and tuna eaters, or
people who like their eggs sunny­side up and those who like them scrambled. So why invest so
much importance in the way people prefer their caffeine? A cup of coffee has somewhere between a
hundred and two hundred and fifty milligrams; black tea brewed for four minutes has between
forty and a hundred milligrams. But the disparity disappears if you consider that many tea drinkers
drink from a pot, and have more than one cup. Caffeine is caffeine. “The more it is pondered,”
Weinberg and Bealer write, “the more paradoxical this duality within the culture of caffeine
appears. After all, both coffee and tea are aromatic infusions of vegetable matter, served hot or cold
in similar quantities; both are often mixed with cream or sugar; both are universally available in
virtually any grocery or restaurant in civilized society; and both contain the identical psychoactive
alkaloid stimulant, caffeine.”
It would seem to make more sense to draw distinctions based on the way caffeine is metabolized
rather than on the way it is served. Caffeine, whether it is in coffee or tea or a soft drink, moves
easily from the stomach and intestines into the bloodstream, and from there to the organs, and
before long has penetrated almost every cell of the body. This is the reason that caffeine is such a
wonderful stimulant. Most substances can’t cross the blood­brain barrier, which is the body’s
defensive mechanism, preventing viruses or toxins from entering the central nervous system.
Caffeine does so easily. Within an hour or so, it reaches its peak concentration in the brain, and
there it does a number of things–principally, blocking the action of adenosine, the neuromodulator
that makes you sleepy, lowers your blood pressure, and slows down your heartbeat. Then, as
quickly as it builds up in your brain and tissues, caffeine is gone–which is why it’s so safe. (Caffeine
in ordinary quantities has never been conclusively linked to serious illness.)
But how quickly it washes away differs dramatically from person to person. A two­hundred­pound
man who drinks a cup of coffee with a hundred milligrams of caffeine will have a maximum caffeine
concentration of one milligram per kilogram of body weight. A hundred­pound woman having the
same cup of coffee will reach a caffeine concentration of two milligrams per kilogram of body
weight, or twice as high. In addition, when women are on the Pill, the rate at which they clear
caffeine from their bodies slows considerably. (Some of the side effects experienced by women on
the Pill may in fact be caffeine jitters caused by their sudden inability to tolerate as much coffee as
they could before.) Pregnancy reduces a woman’s ability to process caffeine still further. The half­
life of caffeine in an adult is roughly three and a half hours. In a pregnant woman, it’s eighteen
hours. (Even a four­month­old child processes caffeine more efficiently.) An average man and
woman sitting down for a cup of coffee are thus not pharmaceutical equals: in effect, the woman is
under the influence of a vastly more powerful drug. Given these differences, you’d think that,
instead of contrasting the caffeine cultures of tea and coffee, we’d contrast the caffeine cultures of
men and women.
3.
But we don’t, and with good reason. To parse caffeine along gender lines does not do justice to its
capacity to insinuate itself into every aspect of our lives, not merely to influence culture but even to
create it. Take coffee’s reputation as the “thinker’s” drink. This dates from eighteenth­century
Europe, where coffeehouses played a major role in the egalitarian, inclusionary spirit that was then
sweeping the continent. They sprang up first in London, so alarming Charles II that in 1676 he tried
to ban them. It didn’t work. By 1700, there were hundreds of coffeehouses in London, their
subversive spirit best captured by a couplet from a comedy of the period: “In a coffeehouse just now
among the rabble / I bluntly asked, which is the treason table.” The movement then spread to Paris,
and by the end of the eighteenth century coffeehouses numbered in the hundreds–most famously,
the Café de la Régence, near the Palais Royal, which counted among its customers Robespierre,
Napoleon, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Rousseau, and the Duke of Richelieu.
Previously, when men had gathered together to talk in public places, they had done so in bars,
which drew from specific socioeconomic niches and, because of the alcohol they served, created a
specific kind of talk. The new coffeehouses, by contrast, drew from many different classes and
trades, and they served a stimulant, not a depressant. “It is not extravagant to claim that it was in
these gathering spots that the art of conversation became the basis of a new literary style and that a
new ideal of general education in letters was born,” Weinberg and Bealer write.
It is worth noting, as well, that in the original coffeehouses nearly everyone smoked, and nicotine
also has a distinctive physiological effect. It moderates mood and extends attention, and, more
important, it doubles the rate of caffeine metabolism: it allows you to drink twice as much coffee as
you could otherwise. In other words, the original coffeehouse was a place where men of all types
could sit all day; the tobacco they smoked made it possible to drink coffee all day; and the coffee
they drank inspired them to talk all day. Out of this came the Enlightenment. (The next time we so
perfectly married pharmacology and place, we got Joan Baez.)
In time, caffeine moved from the café to the home. In America, coffee triumphed because of the
country’s proximity to the new Caribbean and Latin American coffee plantations, and the fact that
throughout the nineteenth century duties were negligible. Beginning in the eighteen­twenties,
Courtwright tells us, Brazil “unleashed a flood of slave­produced coffee. American per capita
consumption, three pounds per year in 1830, rose to eight pounds by 1859.”
What this flood of caffeine did, according to Weinberg and Bealer, was to abet the process of
industrialization–to help “large numbers of people to coordinate their work schedules by giving
them the energy to start work at a given time and continue it as long as necessary.” Until the
eighteenth century, it must be remembered, many Westerners drank beer almost continuously,
even beginning their day with something called “beer soup.” (Bealer and Weinberg helpfully
provide the following eighteenth­century German recipe: “Heat the beer in a saucepan; in a
separate small pot beat a couple of eggs. Add a chunk of butter to the hot beer. Stir in some cool
beer to cool it, then pour over the eggs. Add a bit of salt, and finally mix all the ingredients together,
whisking it well to keep it from curdling.”) Now they began each day with a strong cup of coffee.
One way to explain the industrial revolution is as the inevitable consequence of a world where
people suddenly preferred being jittery to being drunk. In the modern world, there was no other
way to keep up. That’s what Edison meant when he said that genius was ninety­nine per cent
perspiration and one per cent inspiration. In the old paradigm, working with your mind had been
associated with leisure. It was only the poor who worked hard. (The quintessential pre­industrial
narrative of inspiration belonged to Archimedes, who made his discovery, let’s not forget, while
taking a bath.) But Edison was saying that the old class distinctions no longer held true–that in the
industrialized world there was as much toil associated with the life of the mind as there had once
been with the travails of the body.
In the twentieth century, the professions transformed themselves accordingly: medicine turned the
residency process into an ordeal of sleeplessness, the legal profession borrowed a page from the
manufacturing floor and made its practitioners fill out time cards like union men. Intellectual
heroics became a matter of endurance. “The pace of computation was hectic,” James Gleick writes
of the Manhattan Project in “Genius,” his biography of the physicist Richard Feynman. “Feynman’s
day began at 8:30 and ended fifteen hours later. Sometimes he could not leave the computing
center at all. He worked through for thirty­one hours once and the next day found that an error
minutes after he went to bed had stalled the whole team. The routine allowed just a few breaks.”
Did Feynman’s achievements reflect a greater natural talent than his less productive forebears had?
Or did he just drink a lot more coffee? Paul Hoffman, in “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers,”
writes of the legendary twentieth­century mathematician Paul Erdös that “he put in nineteen­hour
days, keeping himself fortified with 10 to 20 milligrams of Benzedrine or Ritalin, strong espresso
and caffeine tablets. ‘A mathematician,’ Erdös was fond of saying, ‘is a machine for turning coffee
into theorems.’” Once, a friend bet Erdös five hundred dollars that he could not quit amphetamines
for a month. Erdös took the bet and won, but, during his time of abstinence, he found himself
incapable of doing any serious work. “You’ve set mathematics back a month,” he told his friend
when he collected, and immediately returned to his pills.
Erdös’s unadulterated self was less real and less familiar to him than his adulterated self, and that
is a condition that holds, more or less, for the rest of society as well. Part of what it means to be
human in the modern age is that we have come to construct our emotional and cognitive states not
merely from the inside out–with thought and intention–but from the outside in, with chemical
additives. The modern personality is, in this sense, a synthetic creation: skillfully regulated and
medicated and dosed with caffeine so that we can always be awake and alert and focussed when we
need to be. On a bet, no doubt, we could walk away from caffeine if we had to. But what would be
the point? The lawyers wouldn’t make their billable hours. The young doctors would fall behind in
their training. The physicists might still be stuck out in the New Mexico desert. We’d set the world
back a month.
4.
That the modern personality is synthetic is, of course, a disquieting notion. When we talk of
synthetic personality–or of constructing new selves through chemical means–we think of hard
drugs, not caffeine. Timothy Leary used to make such claims about LSD, and the reason his
revolution never took flight was that most of us found the concept of tuning in, turning on, and
dropping out to be a bit creepy. Here was this shaman, this visionary–and yet, if his consciousness
was so great, why was he so intent on altering it? More important, what exactly were we supposed
to be tuning in to? We were given hints, with psychedelic colors and deep readings of “Lucy in the
Sky with Diamonds,” but that was never enough. If we are to re­create ourselves, we would like to
know what we will become.
Caffeine is the best and most useful of our drugs because in every one of its forms it can answer that
question precisely. It is a stimulant that blocks the action of adenosine, and comes in a multitude of
guises, each with a ready­made story attached, a mixture of history and superstition and whimsy
which infuses the daily ritual of adenosine blocking with meaning and purpose. Put caffeine in a
red can and it becomes refreshing fun. Brew it in a teapot and it becomes romantic and decorous.
Extract it from little brown beans and, magically, it is hardheaded and potent. “There was a little
known Russian émigré, Trotsky by name, who during World War I was in the habit of playing chess
in Vienna’s Café Central every evening,” Bealer and Weinberg write, in one of the book’s many
fascinating café yarns:
A typical Russian refugee, who talked too much but seemed utterly harmless, indeed, a pathetic
figure in the eyes of the Viennese. One day in 1917 an official of the Austrian Foreign Ministry
rushed into the minister’s room, panting and excited, and told his chief, “Your excellency . . . Your
excellency . . . Revolution has broken out in Russia.” The minister, less excitable and less credulous
than his official, rejected such a wild claim and retorted calmly, “Go away . . . Russia is not a land
where revolutions break out. Besides, who on earth would make a revolution in Russia? Perhaps
Herr Trotsky from the Café Central?”
The minister should have known better. Give a man enough coffee and he’s capable of anything.
© 2016 Malcolm Gladwell.
A DISSERTATION UPON
ROAST PIG
BY
CHARLES LAMB
ILLUSTRATED BY L. J. BRIDGMAN
1888
A Dissertation upon Roast Pig by Charles Lamb.
This edition was created and published by Global Grey 2015.
©GlobalGrey 2015
Get more free eBooks at:
www.globalgrey.co.uk
Charles Lamb
1
A D ISSERTATION UPON R OAST P IG
YE DELIGHTFUL PIG
BO–BO PLAYETH WITH FIRE
Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read
and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or
biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not
obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane
Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho–fang, literally the
Cooks' holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling
2
(which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner
following: The swineherd, Ho–ti, having gone out in the woods one morning, as his
manner was, to collect masts for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son
Bo–bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age
commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly,
spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to
ashes. Together with the cottage, (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may
think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new–farrowed pigs, no less
than nine in number, perished. China pigs had been esteemed a luxury all over the East,
from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo–bo was in the utmost consternation, as
you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could
easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labour of an hour or two, at any
time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father,
and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers,
an odour assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What
could it proceed from?—not from the burnt cottage—he had smelt that smell before—
indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occured through
the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any
known herb, weed, or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed
his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there
were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his
booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away
with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life indeed, for before
him no man had known it) he tasted—crackling! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It
did not burn him so much now, still he licked his finger from a sort of habit. The truth at
length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig
that tasted so delicious; and surrendering himself up to the newborn pleasure, he fell to
tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming
it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters,
armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon
the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hailstones, which Bo–bo heeded not any more
than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure which he experienced in his lower
regions, had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those
remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he
had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation,
something like the following dialogue ensued:
3
YE FIRST TASTE
"You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not enough that you
have burnt me down three houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you, but you
must be eating fire, and I know not what—what have you got there, I say?"
"O father, the pig, the pig! do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats."
The ears of Ho–ti tingled with horror. He cursed his son, and he cursed himself that ever
he should beget a son that should eat burnt pig.
Bo–bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another
pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of
Ho–ti, still shouting out, "Eat, eat, eat the burnt pig, father, only taste—O Lord,"—with
such–like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke.
HO–TI BEATETH HIS SON
4
Ho–ti trembled every joint while he grasped the abominable things wavering whether
he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling
scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he
in his turn tasted some of its flavour, which, make what sour mouths he would for a
pretence, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript
here is a little tedious) both father and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off
till they had despatched all that remained of the litter.
Bo–bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbors would
certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of
improving upon the good meat which God had sent them. Nevertheless, strange stories
got about. It was observed that Ho–ti's cottage was burnt down now more frequently
than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day,
others in the night–time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho–ti to
be in a blaze; and Ho–ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising
his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched,
the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at
Pekin, than an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself
produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury
begged that some of the burnt pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed
into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it, and burning their fingers, as Bo–bo
and his father had done before them, and nature prompting to each of them the same
remedy, against the face of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever
given,—to the surprise of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all
present—without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they
brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty.
YE FAMILY REJOICETH
5
The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision;
and, when the court was dismissed, went privily, and bought up all the pigs that could
be had for love or money. In a few days his Lordship's town house was observed to be
on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fires in every
direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insurance
offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was
feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world.
Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript,
a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of swine, or indeed of
any other animal, might be cooked (burnt, as they call it) without the necessity of
consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron.
Roasting by the string, or spit, came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty.
By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful, and seemingly the
most obvious arts, make their way among mankind.
YE MYSTERY IS SOLVED
Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed, that if a
worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in
these days) could be assigned in favour of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse
might be found in roast pig.
Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most
delicate—princeps obsoniorum.
6
I speak not of your grown porkers—things between pig and pork—those
hobbydehoys—but a young and tender suckling—under a moon old—guiltless as yet of
the sty—with no original speck of the amor immunditiæ, the hereditary failing of the
first parent, yet manifest—his voice as yet not broken, but something between a
childish treble, and a grumble—the mild forerunner, or præludium, of a grunt.
He must be roasted. I am not ignorant that our ancestors ate them seethed, or boiled—
but what a sacrifice of the exterior tegument!
YE JURY GIVETH ITS VERDICT
There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well–watched,
not over–roasted, crackling, as it is well called—the very teeth are invited to their share
of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance—with the
adhesive oleaginous—O call it not fat—but an indefiable sweetness growing up to it—
the tender blossoming of fat—fat cropped in the bud—taken in the shoot—in the first
innocence—the cream and quintessence of the child–pig's yet pure food—the lean, no
lean, but a kind of animal manna—or, rather, fat and lean (if it must be so) so blended
and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or
common substance.
Behold him, while he is doing—it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, then a scorching
heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string!—Now he is just
done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age, he hath wept out his pretty
eyes—radiant jellies—shooting stars—
7
See him in the dish, his second cradle, how meek he lieth!—wouldst thou have had this
innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany maturer
swinehood? Ten to one he would have proved a glutton, a sloven, an obstinate,
disagreeable animal—wallowing in all manner of filthy conversation—from these sins
he is happily snatched away—
Ere sin could blight, or sorrow fade,
Death came with timely care—
his memory is odoriferous—no clown curseth, while his stomach half rejecteth, the rank
bacon—no coalheaver bolteth him in reeking sausages—he hath a fair sepulchre in the
grateful stomach of the judicious epicure—and for such a tomb might be content to die.
YE JUDGE SPECULATETH
He is the best of sapors. Pineapple is great. She is indeed almost too transcendent—a
delight, if not sinful, yet so like to sinning, that really a tender–conscienced person
would do well to pause—too ravishing for mortal taste, she woundeth and excoriateth
the lips that approach her—like lover's kisses, she biteth—she is a pleasure bordering
on pain from the fierceness and insanity of her relish—but she stoppeth at the palate—
she meddleth not with the appetite—and the coarsest hunger might barter her
consistently for a mutton chop.
8
Pig—let me speak his praise—is no less provocative of the appetite, than he is
satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on
him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices.
Unlike to mankind's mixed characters, a bundle of virtues and vices, inexplicably
intertwisted, and not to be unravelled without hazard, he is—good throughout. No part
of him is better or worse than another. He helpeth, as far as his little means extend, all
around. He is the least envious of banquets. He is all neighbors' fare.
YE SAGE MAKETH A DISCOVERY
I am one of those, who freely and ungrudgingly impart a share of the good things of this
life which fall to their lot (few as mine are in this kind) to a friend. I protest I take as
great an interest in my friend's pleasures, his relishes, and proper satisfactions, as in
mine own. "Presents," I often say, "endear Absents." Hares, pheasants, partridges,
snipes, barn–door chickens (those "tame villatic fowl"), capons, plovers, brawn, barrels
of oysters, I dispense as freely as I receive them. I love to taste them, as it were, upon the
tongue of my friend. But a stop must be put somewhere. One would not, like Lear, "give
everything." I make my stand upon pig. Methinks it is an ingratitude to the Giver of all
good flavours, to extra–domiciliate, or send out of the house, slightingly (under pretext
of friendship, or I know not what), a blessing so particularly adapted, predestined, I may
say, to my individual palate—It argues an insensibility.
9
YE PIG TWIRLETH
I remember a touch of conscience in this kind at school. My good old aunt, who never
parted from me at the end of a holiday without stuffing a sweetmeat, or some nice thing,
into my pocket, had dismissed me one evening with a smoking plum–cake, fresh from
the oven. In my way to school (it was over London Bridge) a gray–headed old beggar
saluted me (I have no doubt at this time of day that he was a counterfeit). I had no pence
to console him with, and in the vanity of self–denial, and the very coxcombry of charity,
schoolboy–like, I made him a present of—the whole cake! I walked on a little, buoyed
up, as one is on such occasions, with a sweet soothing of self–satisfaction; but before I
had got to the end of the bridge, my better feelings returned, and I burst into tears,
thinking how ungrateful I had been to my good aunt, to go and give her good gift away
to a stranger, that I had never seen before, and who might be a bad man for aught I
knew; and then I thought of the pleasure my aunt would be taking in thinking that I—I
myself, and not another—would eat her nice cake—and what should I say to her the
next time I saw her—how naughty I was to part with her pretty present—and the odour
of that spicy cake came back upon my recollection, and the pleasure and the curiosity I
had taken in seeing her make it, and her joy when she sent it to the oven, and how
disappointed she would feel that I had never had a bit of it in my mouth at last—and I
blamed my impertinent spirit of almsgiving, and out–of–place hypocrisy of goodness,
and above all I wished never to see the face again of that insiduous, good–for–nothing,
old gray impostor.
Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of
pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom.
The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical
10
light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a
substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a
violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure
the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto—
YE AROMATIC PIG
I remember an hypothesis, argued upon by the young students, when I was at St.
Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, "Whether,
supposing that the flavor of a pig who obtained his death by whipping (per
flagellationem extremam) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense
than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that
method of putting the animal to death?" I forget the decision.
His sauce should be considered. Decidedly, a few bread crumbs, done up with his liver
and brains, and a dash of mild sage. But, banish, dear Mrs. Cook, I beseech you, the
whole onion tribe. Barbecue your whole hogs to your palate, steep them in shalots, stuff
them out with plantations of the rank and guilty garlic; you cannot poison them, or
make them stronger than they are—but consider, he is a weakling—a flower.
THE END
An Animal's Place
By MICHAEL POLLAN (NYT) 8915 words
Published: November 10, 2002
Correction Appended
The first time I opened Peter Singer's ''Animal Liberation,'' I was dining alone at the
Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good
recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous
as it might seem, to supporters of animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to
reading ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852.
Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people
will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age.
Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sport: all
these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we
will come to view ''speciesism'' -- a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes -as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism.
Even in 1975, when ''Animal Liberation'' was first published, Singer, an Australian
philosopher now teaching at Princeton, was confident that he had the wind of history at
his back. The recent civil rights past was prologue, as one liberation movement followed
on the heels of another. Slowly but surely, the white man's circle of moral consideration
was expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexuals. In each case, a group
once thought to be so different from the prevailing ''we'' as to be undeserving of civil
rights was, after a struggle, admitted to the club. Now it was animals' turn.
That animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of moral progress is
no longer the fringe idea it was back in 1975. A growing and increasingly influential
movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the
great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals.
So far the movement has scored some of its biggest victories in Europe. Earlier this year,
Germany became the first nation to grant animals a constitutional right: the words ''and
animals'' were added to a provision obliging the state to respect and protect the dignity of
human beings. The farming of animals for fur was recently banned in England. In several
European nations, sows may no longer be confined to crates nor laying hens to ''battery
cages'' -- stacked wired cages so small the birds cannot stretch their wings. The Swiss are
amending their laws to change the status of animals from ''things'' to ''beings.''
Though animals are still very much ''things'' in the eyes of American law, change is in the
air. Thirty-seven states have recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a
crime, 21 of them by ballot initiative. Following protests by activists, McDonald's and
Burger King forced significant improvements in the way the U.S. meat industry
1 slaughters animals. Agribusiness and the cosmetics and apparel industries are all
struggling to defuse mounting public concerns over animal welfare.
Once thought of as a left-wing concern, the movement now cuts across ideological lines.
Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea on behalf of animals, a new book called
''Dominion,'' was written by a former speechwriter for President Bush. And once
outlandish ideas are finding their way into mainstream opinion. A recent Zogby poll
found that 51 percent of Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as
human children.
What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural confusion, for one thing. For at the
same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to
animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more
animals than at any time in history. One by one, science is dismantling our claims to
uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language
and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet
most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who
famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling.
There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and
brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this
year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig -- an animal easily as
intelligent as a dog -- that becomes the Christmas ham.
We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view. When's the
last time you saw a pig? (Babe doesn't count.) Except for our pets, real animals -- animals
living and dying -- no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery
store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The
disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there's no reality
check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. This is pretty much where we live now,
with respect to animals, and it is a space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of
the world can evidently thrive equally well.
Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ''Why Look at
Animals?'' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and
animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the
terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had
provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in
their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and
something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they
felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that
accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away
or become vegetarians. For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing.
Which might explain how I found myself reading ''Animal Liberation'' in a steakhouse.
This is not something I'd recommend if you're determined to continue eating meat.
Combining rigorous philosophical argument with journalistic description, ''Animal
2 Liberation'' is one of those rare books that demand that you either defend the way you
live or change it. Because Singer is so skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to
change. His book has converted countless thousands to vegetarianism, and it didn't take
long for me to see why: within a few pages, he had succeeded in throwing me on the
defensive.
Singer's argument is disarmingly simple and, if you accept its premises, difficult to
refute. Take the premise of equality, which most people readily accept. Yet what do we
really mean by it? People are not, as a matter of fact, equal at all -- some are smarter than
others, better looking, more gifted. ''Equality is a moral idea,'' Singer points out, ''not an
assertion of fact.'' The moral idea is that everyone's interests ought to receive equal
consideration, regardless of ''what abilities they may possess.'' Fair enough; many
philosophers have gone this far. But fewer have taken the next logical step. ''If possessing
a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her
own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?''
This is the nub of Singer's argument, and right around here I began scribbling objections
in the margin. But humans differ from animals in morally significant ways. Yes they do,
Singer acknowledges, which is why we shouldn't treat pigs and children alike. Equal
consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out: children have
an interest in being educated; pigs, in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests
are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And
the one all-important interest that we share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an
interest in avoiding pain.
Here Singer quotes a famous passage from Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian
philosopher, that is the wellspring of the animal rights movement. Bentham was writing
in 1789, soon after the French colonies freed black slaves, granting them fundamental
rights. ''The day may come,'' he speculates, ''when the rest of the animal creation may
acquire those rights.'' Bentham then asks what characteristic entitles any being to moral
consideration. ''Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse?'' Obviously
not, since ''a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a
more conversable animal, than an infant.'' He concludes: ''The question is not, Can they
reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?''
Bentham here is playing a powerful card philosophers call the ''argument from marginal
cases,'' or A.M.C. for short. It goes like this: there are humans -- infants, the severely
retarded, the demented -- whose mental function cannot match that of a chimpanzee.
Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions, we nevertheless
include them in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the
chimpanzee?
Because he's a chimp, I furiously scribbled in the margin, and they're human! For Singer
that's not good enough. To exclude the chimp from moral consideration simply because
he's not human is no different from excluding the slave simply because he's not white. In
3 the same way we'd call that exclusion racist, the animal rightist contends that it is
speciesist to discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he's not human.
But the differences between blacks and whites are trivial compared with the differences
between my son and a chimp. Singer counters by asking us to imagine a hypothetical
society that discriminates against people on the basis of something nontrivial -- say,
intelligence. If that scheme offends our sense of equality, then why is the fact that
animals lack certain human characteristics any more just as a basis for discrimination?
Either we do not owe any justice to the severely retarded, he concludes, or we do owe it
to animals with higher capabilities.
This is where I put down my fork. If I believe in equality, and equality is based on
interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the interests of the steer I'm
eating into account or concede that I am a speciesist. For the time being, I decided to
plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak.
But Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the days afterward, it grew and grew,
watered by the other animal rights thinkers I began reading: the philosophers Tom Regan
and James Rachels; the legal theorist Steven M. Wise; the writers Joy Williams and
Matthew Scully. I didn't think I minded being a speciesist, but could it be, as several of
these writers suggest, that we will someday come to regard speciesism as an evil
comparable to racism? Will history someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans
who went about their ordinary lives in the shadow of Treblinka? Precisely that question
was recently posed by J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, in a lecture delivered at
Princeton; he answered it in the affirmative. If animal rightists are right, ''a crime of
stupefying proportions'' (in Coetzee's words) is going on all around us every day, just
beneath our notice.
It's an idea almost impossible to entertain seriously, much less to accept, and in the weeks
following my restaurant face-off between Singer and the steak, I found myself
marshaling whatever mental power I could muster to try to refute it. Yet Singer and his
allies managed to trump almost all my objections.
My first line of defense was obvious. Animals kill one another all the time. Why treat
animals more ethically than they treat one another? (Ben Franklin tried this one long
before me: during a fishing trip, he wondered, ''If you eat one another, I don't see why we
may not eat you.'' He admits, however, that the rationale didn't occur to him until the fish
were in the frying pan, smelling ''admirably well.'' The advantage of being a ''reasonable
creature,'' Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.)
To the ''they do it, too'' defense, the animal rightist has a devastating reply: do you really
want to base your morality on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too.
Besides, humans don't need to kill other creatures in order to survive; animals do.
(Though if my cat, Otis, is any guide, animals sometimes kill for sheer pleasure.)
4 This suggests another defense. Wouldn't life in the wild be worse for these farm animals?
''Defenders of slavery imposed on black Africans often made a similar point,'' Singer
retorts. ''The life of freedom is to be preferred.''
But domesticated animals can't survive in the wild; in fact, without us they wouldn't exist
at all. Or as one 19th-century political philosopher put it, ''The pig has a stronger interest
than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no
pigs at all.'' But it turns out that this would be fine by the animal rightists: for if pigs don't
exist, they can't be wronged.
Animals on factory farms have never known any other life. Singer replies that ''animals
feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around,
whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this.'' The measure of their
suffering is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their
instincts.
O.K., the suffering of animals is a legitimate problem, but the world is full of problems,
and surely human problems must come first! Sounds good, and yet all the animal people
are asking me to do is to stop eating meat and wearing animal furs and hides. There's no
reason I can't devote myself to solving humankind's problems while being a vegetarian
who wears synthetics.
But doesn't the fact that we could choose to forgo meat for moral reasons point to a
crucial moral difference between animals and humans? As Kant pointed out, the human
being is the only moral animal, the only one even capable of entertaining a concept of
''rights.'' What's wrong with reserving moral consideration for those able to reciprocate it?
Right here is where you run smack into the A.M.C.: the moral status of the retarded, the
insane, the infant and the Alzheimer's patient. Such ''marginal cases,'' in the detestable
argot of modern moral philosophy, cannot participate in moral decision making any more
than a monkey can, yet we nevertheless grant them rights.
That's right, I respond, for the simple reason that they're one of us. And all of us have
been, and will probably once again be, marginal cases ourselves. What's more, these
people have fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, which makes our interest in their
welfare deeper than our interest in the welfare of even the most brilliant ape.
Alas, none of these arguments evade the charge of speciesism; the racist, too, claims that
it's natural to give special consideration to one's own kind. A utilitarian like Singer would
agree, however, that the feelings of relatives do count for something. Yet the principle of
equal consideration of interests demands that, given the choice between performing a
painful medical experiment on a severely retarded orphan and on a normal ape, we must
sacrifice the child. Why? Because the ape has a greater capacity for pain.
Here in a nutshell is the problem with the A.M.C.: it can be used to help the animals, but
just as often it winds up hurting the marginal cases. Giving up our speciesism will bring
5 us to a moral cliff from which we may not be prepared to jump, even when logic is
pushing us.
And yet this isn't the moral choice I am being asked to make. (Too bad; it would be so
much easier!) In everyday life, the choice is not between babies and chimps but between
the pork and the tofu. Even if we reject the ''hard utilitarianism'' of a Peter Singer, there
remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral
consideration, and this seems impossible to deny. And if we do owe them moral
consideration, how can we justify eating them?
This is why killing animals for meat (and clothing) poses the most difficult animal rights
challenge. In the case of animal testing, all but the most radical animal rightists are
willing to balance the human benefit against the cost to the animals. That's because the
unique qualities of human consciousness carry weight in the utilitarian calculus: human
pain counts for more than that of a mouse, since our pain is amplified by emotions like
dread; similarly, our deaths are worse than an animal's because we understand what death
is in a way they don't. So the argument over animal testing is really in the details: is this
particular procedure or test really necessary to save human lives? (Very often it's not, in
which case we probably shouldn't do it.) But if humans no longer need to eat meat or
wear skins, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh
the interests of the animal?
I suspect that this is finally why the animal people managed to throw me on the
defensive. It's one thing to choose between the chimp and the retarded child or to accept
the sacrifice of all those pigs surgeons practiced on to develop heart-bypass surgery. But
what happens when the choice is between ''a lifetime of suffering for a nonhuman animal
and the gastronomic preference of a human being?'' You look away -- or you stop eating
animals. And if you don't want to do either? Then you have to try to determine if the
animals you're eating have really endured ''a lifetime of suffering.''
Whether our interest in eating animals outweighs their interest in not being eaten
(assuming for the moment that is their interest) turns on the vexed question of animal
suffering. Vexed, because it is impossible to know what really goes on in the mind of a
cow or a pig or even an ape. Strictly speaking, this is true of other humans, too, but since
humans are all basically wired the same way, we have excellent reason to assume that
other people's experience of pain feels much like our own. Can we say that about
animals? Yes and no.
I have yet to find anyone who still subscribes to Descartes's belief that animals cannot
feel pain because they lack a soul. The general consensus among scientists and
philosophers is that when it comes to pain, the higher animals are wired much like we are
for the same evolutionary reasons, so we should take the writhings of the kicked dog at
face value. Indeed, the very premise of a great deal of animal testing -- the reason it has
value -- is that animals' experience of physical and even some psychological pain closely
resembles our own. Otherwise, why would cosmetics testers drip chemicals into the eyes
of rabbits to see if they sting? Why would researchers study head trauma by traumatizing
6 chimpanzee heads? Why would psychologists attempt to induce depression and ''learned
helplessness'' in dogs by exposing them to ceaseless random patterns of electrical shock?
That said, it can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of
magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language
and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine
alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we
would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals
experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few
animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain
intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame,
humiliation and dread.
Consider castration. No one would deny the procedure is painful to animals, yet animals
appear to get over it in a way humans do not. (Some rhesus monkeys competing for
mates will bite off a rival's testicle; the very next day the victim may be observed mating,
seemingly little the worse for wear.) Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend
the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate its aftermath,
represents an agony of another order.
By the same token, however, language and all that comes with it can also make certain
kinds of pain more bearable. A trip to the dentist would be a torment for an ape that
couldn't be made to understand the purpose and duration of the procedure.
As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against
projecting on to them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer
force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself
that this is not Sean Penn in ''Dead Man Walking,'' that in a bovine brain the concept of
nonexistence is blissfully absent. ''If we fail to find suffering in the [animal] lives we can
see,'' Dennett writes in ''Kinds of Minds,'' ''we can rest assured there is no invisible
suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without
difficulty.''
Which brings us -- reluctantly, necessarily -- to the American factory farm, the place
where all such distinctions turn to dust. It's not easy to draw lines between pain and
suffering in a modern egg or confinement hog operation. These are places where the
subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where
everything we've learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply . . . set
aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world
that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian
principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can
possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of
disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on
the part of everyone else.
7 From everything I've read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America
at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that
makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with
a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their
confinement, at least don't spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch
a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled
together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this
magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a
range of behavioral ''vices'' that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her
body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering?
Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptors, like
''vices'' and ''stress.'' Whatever you want to call what's going on in those cages, the 10
percent or so of hens that can't bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production.
And when the output of the others begins to ebb, the hens will be ''force-molted'' -starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of
egg laying before their life's work is done.
Simply reciting these facts, most of which are drawn from poultry-trade magazines,
makes me sound like one of those animal people, doesn't it? I don't mean to, but this is
what can happen when . . . you look. It certainly wasn't my intention to ruin anyone's
breakfast. But now that I probably have spoiled the eggs, I do want to say one thing about
the bacon, mention a single practice (by no means the worst) in modern hog production
that points to the compound madness of an impeccable industrial logic.
Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth
(compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormoneand antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong
craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the
animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig
has stopped caring. ''Learned helplessness'' is the psychological term, and it's not
uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire
lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon
metal slats suspended over a manure pit. So it's not surprising that an animal as sensitive
and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be
chewed on to the point of infection. Sick pigs, being underperforming ''production units,''
are clubbed to death on the spot. The U.S.D.A.'s recommended solution to the problem is
called ''tail docking.'' Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail
is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to
remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the
tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.
Much of this description is drawn from ''Dominion,'' Matthew Scully's recent book in
which he offers a harrowing description of a North Carolina hog operation. Scully, a
Christian conservative, has no patience for lefty rights talk, arguing instead that while
God did give man ''dominion'' over animals (''Every moving thing that liveth shall be
meat for you''), he also admonished us to show them mercy. ''We are called to treat them
8 with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality but . . .
because they stand unequal and powerless before us.''
Scully calls the contemporary factory farm ''our own worst nightmare'' and, to his credit,
doesn't shrink from naming the root cause of this evil: unfettered capitalism. (Perhaps this
explains why he resigned from the Bush administration just before his book's
publication.) A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize
efficiency and the moral imperatives of religion or community, which have historically
served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is one of ''the
cultural contradictions of capitalism'' -- the tendency of the economic impulse to erode
the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward animals is one such casualty.
More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish
glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint.
Here in these places life itself is redefined -- as protein production -- and with it
suffering. That venerable word becomes ''stress,'' an economic problem in search of a
cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping or, in the industry's latest plan,
by simply engineering the ''stress gene'' out of pigs and chickens. ''Our own worst
nightmare'' such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky
enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a
''production unit'' in the days before the suffering gene was found.
Vegetarianism doesn't seem an unreasonable response to such an evil. Who would want
to be made complicit in the agony of these animals by eating them? You want to throw
something against the walls of those infernal sheds, whether it's the Bible, a new
constitutional right or a whole platoon of animal rightists bent on breaking in and
liberating the inmates. In the shadow of these factory farms, Coetzee's notion of a
''stupefying crime'' doesn't seem far-fetched at all.
But before you swear off meat entirely, let me describe a very different sort of animal
farm. It is typical of nothing, and yet its very existence puts the whole moral question of
animal agriculture in a different light. Polyface Farm occupies 550 acres of rolling
grassland and forest in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, Joel Salatin and his
family raise six different food animals -- cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and sheep
-- in an intricate dance of symbiosis designed to allow each species, in Salatin's words,
''to fully express its physiological distinctiveness.''
What this means in practice is that Salatin's chickens live like chickens; his cows, like
cows; pigs, pigs. As in nature, where birds tend to follow herbivores, once Salatin's cows
have finished grazing a pasture, he moves them out and tows in his ''eggmobile,'' a
portable chicken coop that houses several hundred laying hens -- roughly the natural size
of a flock. The hens fan out over the pasture, eating the short grass and picking insect
larvae out of the cowpats -- all the while spreading the cow manure and eliminating the
farm's parasite problem. A diet of grubs and grass makes for exceptionally tasty eggs and
contented chickens, and their nitrogenous manure feeds the pasture. A few weeks later,
9 the chickens move out, and the sheep come in, dining on the lush new growth, as well as
on the weed species (nettles, nightshade) that the cattle and chickens won't touch.
Meanwhile, the pigs are in the barn turning the compost. All winter long, while the cattle
were indoors, Salatin layered their manure with straw, wood chips -- and corn. By March,
this steaming compost layer cake stands three feet high, and the pigs, whose powerful
snouts can sniff out and retrieve the fermented corn at the bottom, get to spend a few
happy weeks rooting through the pile, aerating it as they work. All you can see of these
pigs, intently nosing out the tasty alcoholic morsels, are their upturned pink hams and
corkscrew tails churning the air. The finished compost will go to feed the grass; the grass,
the cattle; the cattle, the chickens; and eventually all of these animals will feed us.
I thought a lot about vegetarianism and animal rights during the day I spent on Joel
Salatin's extraordinary farm. So much of what I'd read, so much of what I'd accepted,
looked very different from here. To many animal rightists, even Polyface Farm is a death
camp. But to look at these animals is to see this for the sentimental conceit it is. In the
same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal
happiness is unmistakable, too, and here I was seeing it in abundance.
For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely
character -- its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle speaks of each
creature's ''characteristic form of life.'' For domesticated species, the good life, if we can
call it that, cannot be achieved apart from humans -- apart from our farms and, therefore,
our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where animal rightists betray a profound
ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of
enslavement or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship, to project a
human idea of power onto what is, in fact, an instance of mutualism between species.
Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a
regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago.
Rather, domestication happened when a small handful of especially opportunistic species
discovered through Darwinian trial and error that they were more likely to survive and
prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with
food and protection, in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk
and eggs and -- yes -- their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the relationship:
animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves (evolution tends to edit
out unneeded traits), and the humans gave up their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled
life of agriculturists. (Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as a
tolerance for lactose as adults.)
From the animals' point of view, the bargain with humanity has been a great success, at
least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats and chickens have thrived, while their
wild ancestors have languished. (There are 10,000 wolves in North America, 50,000,000
dogs.) Nor does their loss of autonomy seem to trouble these creatures. It is wrong, the
rightists say, to treat animals as ''means'' rather than ''ends,'' yet the happiness of a
working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving as a ''means.'' Liberation is the
10 last thing such a creature wants. To say of one of Joel Salatin's caged chickens that ''the
life of freedom is to be preferred'' betrays an ignorance about chicken preferences -which on this farm are heavily focused on not getting their heads bitten off by weasels.
But haven't these chickens simply traded one predator for another -- weasels for humans?
True enough, and for the chickens this is probably not a bad deal. For brief as it is, the
life expectancy of a farm animal would be considerably briefer in the world beyond the
pasture fence or chicken coop. A sheep farmer told me that a bear will eat a lactating ewe
alive, starting with her udders. ''As a rule,'' he explained, ''animals don't get 'good deaths'
surrounded by their loved ones.''
The very existence of predation -- animals eating animals -- is the cause of much
anguished hand-wringing in animal rights circles. ''It must be admitted,'' Singer writes,
''that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal
Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it.'' Some animal rightists
train their dogs and cats to become vegetarians. (Note: cats will require nutritional
supplements to stay healthy.) Matthew Scully calls predation ''the intrinsic evil in nature's
design . . . among the hardest of all things to fathom.'' Really? A deep Puritan streak
pervades animal rights activists, an abiding discomfort not only with our animality, but
with the animals' animality too.
However it may appear to us, predation is not a matter of morality or politics; it, also, is a
matter of symbiosis. Hard as the wolf may be on the deer he eats, the herd depends on
him for its well-being; without predators to cull the herd, deer overrun their habitat and
starve. In many places, human hunters have taken over the predator's ecological role.
Chickens also depend for their continued well-being on their human predators -- not
individual chickens, but chickens as a species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of
the chicken would be to grant chickens a ''right to life.''
Yet here's the rub: the animal rightist is not concerned with species, only individuals.
Tom Regan, author of ''The Case for Animal Rights,'' bluntly asserts that because ''species
are not individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to
anything, including survival.'' Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals have
interests. But surely a species can have interests -- in its survival, say -- just as a nation or
community or a corporation can. The animal rights movement's exclusive concern with
individual animals makes perfect sense given its roots in a culture of liberal
individualism, but does it make any sense in nature?
In 1611 Juan da Goma (aka Juan the Disoriented) made accidental landfall on Wrightson
Island, a six-square-mile rock in the Indian Ocean. The island's sole distinction is as the
only known home of the Arcania tree and the bird that nests in it, the Wrightson giant sea
sparrow. Da Goma and his crew stayed a week, much of that time spent in a failed bid to
recapture the ship's escaped goat -- who happened to be pregnant. Nearly four centuries
later, Wrightson Island is home to 380 goats that have consumed virtually every scrap of
vegetation in their reach. The youngest Arcania tree on the island is more than 300 years
old, and only 52 sea sparrows remain. In the animal rights view, any one of those goats
11 have at least as much right to life as the last Wrightson sparrow on earth, and the trees,
because they are not sentient, warrant no moral consideration whatsoever. (In the mid80's a British environmental group set out to shoot the goats, but was forced to cancel the
expedition after the Mammal Liberation Front bombed its offices.)
The story of Wrightson Island (recounted by the biologist David Ehrenfeld in ''Beginning
Again'') suggests at the very least that a human morality based on individual rights makes
for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world. This should come as no surprise:
morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations. It's
very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn't provide an adequate guide
for human social conduct, isn't it anthropocentric to assume that our moral system offers
an adequate guide for nature? We may require a different set of ethics to guide our
dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and
animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights suit us humans today.
To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm is to appreciate just how
parochial and urban an ideology animals rights really is. It could thrive only in a world
where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose a
threat to us and human mastery of nature seems absolute. ''In our normal life,'' Singer
writes, ''there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.''
Such a statement assumes a decidedly urbanized ''normal life,'' one that certainly no
farmer would recognize.
The farmer would point out that even vegans have a ''serious clash of interests'' with other
animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice,
while the farmer's tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop
songbirds from the sky. Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has
estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, the total number of
animals killed every year would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row
crops. Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people
should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land:
grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no
matter what we choose to eat.
When I talked to Joel Salatin about the vegetarian utopia, he pointed out that it would
also condemn him and his neighbors to importing their food from distant places, since the
Shenandoah Valley receives too little rainfall to grow many row crops. Much the same
would hold true where I live, in New England. We get plenty of rain, but the hilliness of
the land has dictated an agriculture based on animals since the time of the Pilgrims. The
world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is
by grazing animals on it -- especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into
protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land.
The vegetarian utopia would make us even more dependent than we already are on an
industrialized national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent
than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel
12 farther and manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a
more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food
production. If our concern is for the health of nature -- rather than, say, the internal
consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls -- then eating animals may
sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.
There is, too, the fact that we humans have been eating animals as long as we have lived
on this earth. Humans may not need to eat meat in order to survive, yet doing so is part of
our evolutionary heritage, reflected in the design of our teeth and the structure of our
digestion. Eating meat helped make us what we are, in a social and biological sense.
Under the pressure of the hunt, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around
the fire where the meat was cooked, human culture first flourished. Granting rights to
animals may lift us up from the brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice of
part of our identity -- our own animality.
Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize
all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most
unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge
that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We
might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational
preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.
Are any of these good enough reasons to eat animals? I'm mindful of Ben Franklin's
definition of the reasonable creature as one who can come up with reasons for whatever
he wants to do. So I decided I would track down Peter Singer and ask him what he
thought. In an e-mail message, I described Polyface and asked him about the implications
for his position of the Good Farm -- one where animals got to live according to their
nature and to all appearances did not suffer.
''I agree with you that it is better for these animals to have lived and died than not to have
lived at all,'' Singer wrote back. Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the
sum of happiness and suffering and the slaughter of an animal that doesn't comprehend
that death need not involve suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal
happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. However, he
added, this line of thinking doesn't obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that ''has a
sense of its own existence over time and can have preferences for its own future.'' In other
words, it's O.K. to eat the chicken, but he's not so sure about the pig. Yet, he wrote, ''I
would not be sufficiently confident of my arguments to condemn someone who
purchased meat from one of these farms.''
Singer went on to express serious doubts that such farms could be practical on a large
scale, since the pressures of the marketplace will lead their owners to cut costs and
corners at the expense of the animals. He suggested, too, that killing animals is not
conducive to treating them with respect. Also, since humanely raised food will be more
expensive, only the well-to-do can afford morally defensible animal protein. These are
13 important considerations, but they don't alter my essential point: what's wrong with
animal agriculture -- with eating animals -- is the practice, not the principle.
What this suggests to me is that people who care should be working not for animal rights
but animal welfare -- to ensure that farm animals don't suffer and that their deaths are
swift and painless. In fact, the decent-life-merciful-death line is how Jeremy Bentham
justified his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was himself a
carnivore. In a passage rather less frequently quoted by animal rightists, Bentham
defended eating animals on the grounds that ''we are the better for it, and they are never
the worse. . . . The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a
speedier and, by that means, a less painful one than that which would await them in the
inevitable course of nature.''
My guess is that Bentham never looked too closely at what happens in a slaughterhouse,
but the argument suggests that, in theory at least, a utilitarian can justify the killing of
humanely treated animals -- for meat or, presumably, for clothing. (Though leather and
fur pose distinct moral problems. Leather is a byproduct of raising domestic animals for
food, which can be done humanely. However, furs are usually made from wild animals
that die brutal deaths -- usually in leg-hold traps -- and since most fur species aren't
domesticated, raising them on farms isn't necessarily more humane.) But whether the
issue is food or fur or hunting, what should concern us is the suffering, not the killing. All
of which I was feeling pretty good about -- until I remembered that utilitarians can also
justify killing retarded orphans. Killing just isn't the problem for them that it is for other
people, including me.
During my visit to Polyface Farm, I asked Salatin where his animals were slaughtered.
He does the chickens and rabbits right on the farm, and would do the cattle, pigs and
sheep there too if only the U.S.D.A. would let him. Salatin showed me the open-air
abattoir he built behind the farmhouse -- a sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab, with
stainless-steel sinks, scalding tanks, a feather-plucking machine and metal cones to hold
the birds upside down while they're being bled. Processing chickens is not a pleasant job,
but Salatin insists on doing it himself because he's convinced he can do it more humanely
and cleanly than any processing plant. He slaughters every other Saturday through the
summer. Anyone's welcome to watch.
I asked Salatin how he could bring himself to kill a chicken.
''People have a soul; animals don't,'' he said. ''It's a bedrock belief of mine.'' Salatin is a
devout Christian. ''Unlike us, animals are not created in God's image, so when they die,
they just die.''
The notion that only in modern times have people grown uneasy about killing animals is
a flattering conceit. Taking a life is momentous, and people have been working to justify
the slaughter of animals for thousands of years. Religion and especially ritual has played
a crucial part in helping us reckon the moral costs. Native Americans and other huntergathers would give thanks to their prey for giving up its life so the eater might live (sort
14 of like saying grace). Many cultures have offered sacrificial animals to the gods, perhaps
as a way to convince themselves that it was the gods' desires that demanded the slaughter,
not their own. In ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (priests! -- now
we entrust the job to minimum-wage workers) would sprinkle holy water on the
sacrificial animal's brow. The beast would promptly shake its head, and this was taken as
a sign of assent. Slaughter doesn't necessarily preclude respect. For all these people, it
was the ceremony that allowed them to look, then to eat.
Apart from a few surviving religious practices, we no longer have any rituals governing
the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps to explain why we find ourselves
where we do, feeling that our only choice is to either look away or give up meat. Frank
Perdue is happy to serve the first customer; Peter Singer, the second.
Until my visit to Polyface Farm, I had assumed these were the only two options. But on
Salatin's farm, the eye contact between people and animals whose loss John Berger
mourned is still a fact of life -- and of death, for neither the lives nor the deaths of these
animals have been secreted behind steel walls. ''Food with a face,'' Salatin likes to call
what he's selling, a slogan that probably scares off some customers. People see very
different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a chicken or a steer -- a being
without a soul, a ''subject of a life'' entitled to rights, a link in a food chain, a vessel for
pain and pleasure, a tasty lunch. But figuring out what we do think, and what we can eat,
might begin with the looking.
We certainly won't philosophize our way to an answer. Salatin told me the story of a man
who showed up at the farm one Saturday morning. When Salatin noticed a PETA bumper
sticker on the man's car, he figured he was in for it. But the man had a different agenda.
He explained that after 16 years as a vegetarian, he had decided that the only way he
could ever eat meat again was if he killed the animal himself. He had come to look.
''Ten minutes later we were in the processing shed with a chicken,'' Salatin recalled. ''He
slit the bird's throat and watched it die. He saw that the animal did not look at him
accusingly, didn't do a Disney double take. The animal had been treated with respect
when it was alive, and he saw that it could also have a respectful death -- that it wasn't
being treated as a pile of protoplasm.''
Salatin's open-air abattoir is a morally powerful idea. Someone slaughtering a chicken in
a place where he can be watched is apt to do it scrupulously, with consideration for the
animal as well as for the eater. This is going to sound quixotic, but maybe all we need to
do to redeem industrial animal agriculture in this country is to pass a law requiring that
the steel and concrete walls of the CAFO's and slaughterhouses be replaced with . . .
glass. If there's any new ''right'' we need to establish, maybe it's this one: the right to look.
No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians.
Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers like Salatin. There are more
of them than I would have imagined. Despite the relentless consolidation of the American
meat industry, there has been a revival of small farms where animals still live their
15 ''characteristic form of life.'' I'm thinking of the ranches where cattle still spend their lives
on grass, the poultry farms where chickens still go outside and the hog farms where pigs
live as they did 50 years ago -- in contact with the sun, the earth and the gaze of a farmer.
For my own part, I've discovered that if you're willing to make the effort, it's entirely
possible to limit the meat you eat to nonindustrial animals. I'm tempted to think that we
need a new dietary category, to go with the vegan and lactovegetarian and piscatorian. I
don't have a catchy name for it yet (humanocarnivore?), but this is the only sort of meat
eating I feel comfortable with these days. I've become the sort of shopper who looks for
labels indicating that his meat and eggs have been humanely grown (the American
Humane Association's new ''Free Farmed'' label seems to be catching on), who visits the
farms where his chicken and pork come from and who asks kinky-sounding questions
about touring slaughterhouses. I've actually found a couple of small processing plants
willing to let a customer onto the kill floor, including one, in Cannon Falls, Minn., with a
glass abattoir.
The industrialization -- and dehumanization -- of American animal farming is a relatively
new, evitable and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food
animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry
to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it
this way. Tail-docking and sow crates and beak-clipping would disappear overnight, and
the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end. For who could
stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat less of it, too,
but maybe when we did eat animals, we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony and
respect they deserve.
Correction: December 15, 2002, Sunday An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights
referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats
and endangered giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing of goats by
environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not exist; both the island and the events are
hypothetical figments from a book (also mentioned in the article), ''Beginning Again,'' by
David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating habits of
goats.
Photo: (William Wegman)
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16 New England Journal of Public Policy
Volume 8
Issue 1 Special Issue on Homelessness: New England
and Beyond
Article 7
3-23-1992
On Dumpster Diving
Lars Eighner
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Part of the Nonfiction Commons, Public Policy Commons, and the Social Policy Commons
Recommended Citation
Eighner, Lars (1992) "On Dumpster Diving," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 8: Iss. 1, Article 7.
Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol8/iss1/7
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On Dumpster
Diving
Lars Eighner
Long before
I began Dumpster diving I was impressed with Dumpsters, enough
wrote the Merriam-Webster research service to discover what I could
about the word "Dumpster." I learned from them that "Dumpster" is a proprietary
word belonging to the Dempsey Dumpster company.
so that
I
have dutifully capitalized the word although
was lowercased in
word
is too apt. I have never heard these things called anything but Dumpsters. I do not
know anyone who knows the generic name for these objects. From time to time,
however, I hear a wino or hobo give some corrupted credit to the original and call
them Dipsy Dumpsters.
I began Dumpster diving about a year before I became homeless.
I prefer the term "scavenging" and use the word "scrounging" when I mean to be
obscure. I have heard people, evidently meaning to be polite, use the word "foraging," but I prefer to reserve that word for gathering nuts and berries and such which
I do also according to the season and the opportunity. "Dumpster diving" seems
to me to be a little too cute and, in my case, inaccurate because I lack the athletic
ability to lower myself into the Dumpsters as the true divers do, much to their
Since then
almost
all
I
it
of the citations Merriam-Webster photocopied for me. Dempsey's
increased profit.
word "scavenging," which I can hardly think of without
on an aquarium wall. I live from the refuse of others. I am
a scavenger. I think it a sound and honorable niche, although if I could I would naturally prefer to live the comfortable consumer life, perhaps
and only perhaps
as
a slightly less wasteful consumer owing to what I have learned as a scavenger.
While my dog Lizbeth and I were still living in the house on Avenue B in Austin,
as my savings ran out, I put almost all my sporadic income into rent. The necessities
of daily life I began to extract from Dumpsters. Yes, we ate from Dumpsters. Except
for jeans, all my clothes came from Dumpsters. Boom boxes, candles, bedding, toilet
paper, medicine, books, a typewriter, a virgin male love doll, change sometimes
amounting to many dollars: I acquired many things from the Dumpsters.
I
like the
frankness of the
picturing a big black snail
—
—
after leaving a job he had held for ten years as an attendant at a state
a small apartment in Austin and continues to scavenge. This article was
originally published in the Fall 1990 issue of The Threepenny Review. Reprinted with permission.
Lars Eighner became homeless
hospital in Austin, Texas.
He
in
1988
lives in
87
New England Journal of Public Policy
I
have learned
down
much
as a scavenger.
I
mean
here, beginning with the practical art of
to put some of what I have learned
Dumpster diving and proceeding to
the abstract.
What is
safe to eat?
the finding of objects is becoming something of an urban art. Even respectemployed people will sometimes find something tempting sticking out of a Dumpster or standing beside one. Quite a number of people, not all of them of the bohemian
type, are willing to brag that they found this or that piece in the trash. But eating from
Dumpsters is the thing that separates the dilettanti from the professionals.
Eating safely from the Dumpsters involves three principles: using the senses and
common sense to evaluate the condition of the found materials, knowing the Dumpsters of a given area and checking them regularly, and seeking always to answer the
question "Why was this discarded?"
Perhaps everyone who has a kitchen and a regular supply of groceries has, at one
time or another, made a sandwich and eaten half of it before discovering mold on
the bread or got a mouthful of milk before realizing the milk had turned. Nothing of
the sort is likely to happen to a Dumpster diver because he is constantly reminded
that most food is discarded for a reason. Yet a lot of perfectly good food can be
found in Dumpsters.
Canned goods, for example, turn up fairly often in the Dumpsters I frequent. All
except the most phobic people would be willing to eat from a can even if it came from
a Dumpster. Canned goods are among the safest of foods to be found in Dumpsters,
After
all,
able
but are not utterly foolproof.
Although very rare with modern canning methods, botulism
is a possibility. Most
harm to a healthy person. But
botulism is almost certainly fatal and often the first symptom is death. Except for
carbonated beverages, all canned goods should contain a slight vacuum and suck air
when first punctured. Bulging, rusty, dented cans and cans that spew when punctured should be avoided, especially when the contents are not very acidic or syrupy.
Heat can break down the botulin, but this requires much more cooking than most
other forms of food poisoning seldom do lasting
people do to canned goods. To the extent that botulism occurs at all, of course, it can
occur in cans on pantry shelves as well as in cans from Dumpsters. Need I say that
home-canned goods found in Dumpsters are simply too risky to be recommended.
From time to time one of my companions, aware of the source of my provisions,
will ask, "Do you think these crackers are really safe to eat?" For some reason it is
most often the crackers they ask about.
This question always makes me angry. Of course I would not offer my companion
anything I had doubts about. But more than that I wonder why he cannot evaluate the
condition of the crackers for himself. I have no special knowledge and I have been
wrong before. Since he knows where the food comes from, it seems to me he ought
to assume some of the responsibility for deciding what he will put in his mouth.
For myself I have few qualms about dry foods such as crackers, cookies, cereal,
chips, and pasta if they are free of visible contaminates and still dry and crisp. Most
often such things are found in the original packaging, which
sign as
it is
is
not so
much
a positive
the absence of a negative one.
Raw fruits and vegetables with intact skins seem perfectly safe to me, excluding of
Many are discarded for minor imperfections which can
course the obviously rotten.
be pared away. Leafy vegetables, grapes, cauliflower, broccoli, and similar things
may be contaminated by liquids and may be impractical to wash.
Candy, especially hard candy, is usually safe if it has not drawn ants. Chocolate is
often discarded only because it has become discolored as the cocoa butter de-emulsified. Candying after all is one method of food preservation because pathogens do
not like very sugary substances.
All of these foods might be found in any
some confidence
largely
on the
Dumpster and can be evaluated with
Beyond these are foods which
basis of appearance.
cannot be correctly evaluated without additional information.
I
began scavenging by pulling pizzas out of the Dumpster behind a pizza delivery
shop. In general prepared food requires caution, but in this case
I
knew when
the
shop closed and went to the Dumpster as soon as the last of the help left.
Such shops often get prank orders, called "bogus." Because help seldom stays
long at these places pizzas are often made with the wrong topping, refused on delivery for being cold, or baked incorrectly. The products to be discarded are boxed up
because inventory is kept by counting boxes: a boxed pizza can be written off; an
unboxed pizza does not exist.
I never placed a bogus order to increase the supply of pizzas and I believe no one
else was scavenging in this Dumpster. But the people in the shop became suspicious
and began to retain their garbage in the shop overnight.
While it lasted I had a steady supply of fresh, sometimes warm pizza. Because I
knew the Dumpster I knew the source of the pizza, and because I visited the Dumpster regularly I knew what was fresh and what was yesterday's.
The area I frequent is inhabited by many affluent college students. I am not here by
chance; the Dumpsters in this area are very rich. Students throw out many good things,
including food. In particular they tend to throw everything out
when they move
at the
end of a semester, before and after breaks, and around midterm when many of them
despair of college. So I find it advantageous to keep an eye on the academic calendar.
The students throw food away around the breaks because they do not know
whether it has spoiled or will spoil before they return. A typical discard is a half jar
of peanut butter. In fact nonorganic peanut butter does not require refrigeration
and is unlikely to spoil in any reasonable time. The student does not know that, and
since it is Daddy's money, the student decides not to take a chance.
Opened containers require caution and some attention to the question "Why was
this discarded?" But in the case of discards from student apartments, the answer
may be that the item was discarded through carelessness, ignorance, or wastefulness.
This can sometimes be deduced when the item is found with many others, including
some
that are obviously perfectly good.
Some
students, and others, approach defrosting a freezer by chucking out the
whole lot. Not only do the circumstances of such a find tell the story, but also the
mass of frozen goods stays cold for a long time and items may be found still frozen
or freshly thawed.
Yogurt, cheese, and sour cream are items that are often thrown out while they are
good. Occasionally I find a cheese with a spot of mold, which of course I just pare
and because it is obvious why such a cheese was discarded, I treat it with less suspicion than an apparently perfect cheese found in similar circumstances. Yogurt is
often discarded, still sealed, only because the expiration date on the carton had
passed. This is one of my favorite finds because yogurt will keep for several days,
still
off,
even
in
warm weather.
89
New England Journal of Public Policy
Students throw out canned goods and staples at the end of semesters and
they give up college at midterm. Drugs, pornography,
when parents
discarded
are expected
spirits,
and the
— Dad's day, for example. And
when
like are often
spirits also
up after big party weekends, presumably discarded by the newly reformed.
Wine and spirits, of course, keep perfectly well even once opened.
turn
My test for carbonated soft drinks is whether they still fizz vigorously. Many juices
or other beverages are too acid or too syrupy to cause
much concern provided
are not visibly contaminated. Liquids, however, require
One
some
they
care.
I found a large jug of Pat O'Brian's Hurricane mix. The jug had been
was still ice cold. I drank three large glasses before it became apparent to me that someone had added the rum to the mix, and not a little rum. I never
tasted the rum and by the time I began to feel the effects I had already ingested a
very large quantity of the beverage. Some divers would have considered this is a
boon, but being suddenly and thoroughly intoxicated in a public place in the early
afternoon is not my idea of a good time.
I have heard of people maliciously contaminating discarded food and even handouts, but mostly I have heard of this from people with vivid imaginations who have
had no experience with the Dumpsters themselves. Just before the pizza shop stopped
discarding its garbage at night, jalapenos began showing up on most of the discarded
pizzas. If indeed this was meant to discourage me it was a wasted effort because I
hot day
opened, but
it
am native Texan.
For myself, I avoid game, poultry, pork, and egg-based foods whether I find them
raw or cooked. I seldom have the means to cook what I find, but when I do I avail
myself of plentiful supplies of beef which is often in very good condition. I suppose
fish becomes disagreeable before it becomes dangerous. The dog is happy to have
any such thing that is past its prime and, in fact, does not recognize fish as food until
it is
quite strong.
Home leftovers,
as
Evidently, especially
carefully
opposed to surpluses from restaurants, are very often bad.
among
students, there
is
a
common type of personality that
wraps up even the smallest leftover and shoves
it
into the
back of the
months or so before discarding it. Characteristic of this type are
the reused jars and margarine tubs which house the remains.
I avoid ethnic foods I am unfamiliar with. If I do not know what it is supposed to
look like when it is good, I cannot be certain I will be able to tell if it is bad.
refrigerator for six
No matter how careful I am I still get dysentery at least once a month, oftener in
warm weather. I do not want to paint too romantic a picture. Dumpster diving has
serious drawbacks as a
I
way of life.
learned to scavenge gradually, on
my own.
Since then
panions into the trade. I have learned that there
person goes through in learning to scavenge.
At
first
the
is
I
have
initiated several
com-
a predictable series of stages a
new scavenger is filled with disgust and self-loathing. He is ashamed of
may lurk around, trying to duck behind things, or he may try to dive
being seen and
at night.
(In fact,
most people
instinctively
look away from a scavenger. By skulking around,
the novice calls attention to himself and arouses suspicion. Diving at night
tive
and needlessly messy.)
90
is
ineffec-
Every grain of rice seems to be a maggot. Everything seems to
stink.
He
can wipe
the egg yolk off the found can, but he cannot erase the stigma of eating garbage out
of his mind.
That stage passes with experience. The scavenger finds a pair of running shoes
fit and look and smell brand new. He finds a pocket calculator in perfect working order. He finds pristine ice cream, still frozen, more than he can eat or keep. He
begins to understand: people do throw away perfectly good stuff, a lot of perfectly
that
good stuff.
At this stage, Dumpster shyness begins to dissipate. The diver, after all, has the
last laugh. He is finding all manner of good things which are his for the taking.
Those who disparage his profession are the fools, not he.
He may begin to hang onto some perfectly good things for which he has neither
Then he begins
a
which are not perfectly
good but are nearly so. He mates a Walkman with broken earphones and one that is
missing a battery cover. He picks up things which he can repair.
At this stage he may become lost and never recover. Dumpsters are full of things
of some potential value to someone and also of things which never have much
intrinsic value but are interesting. All the Dumpster divers I have known come to
use nor a market.
to take note of the things
the point of trying to acquire everything they touch.
since
This
is,
Why not take
it,
they reason,
free.
it is all
of course, hopeless.
Most
divers
come
themselves to items of relatively immediate
cannot control himself.
I
to realize that they
utility.
But
some
in
must
have met several of these pack-rat types. Their ideas of the
values of various pieces of junk verge on the psychotic. Every bit of glass
diamond, they think, and
I
tend to gain weight
more
bles.
restrict
cases the diver simply
all
may be
a
that glisters, gold.
when I am
scavenging. Partly this
is
because
I
always find far
pizza and doughnuts than water-packed tuna, nonfat yogurt, and fresh vegeta-
Also
have not developed much
I
source, although
idea where
and so
I
it
faith in the reliability of
me many times.
Dumpsters
as a food
have no
But mostly I just hate to see food go to waste
should. Something like this drives the obsession to
has been proven to
I
tend to eat as
if I
my next meal is coming from.
eat
much more than
I
collect junk.
As
for collecting objects,
I
usually restrict myself to collecting
one kind of small
object at a time, such as pocket calculators, sunglasses, or campaign buttons. To live
must anticipate my needs to a certain extent: I must pick up and save
I find in August because it will not be found in Dumpsters in November. But even if I had a home with extensive storage space I could not save everything that might be valuable in some contingency.
I have proprietary feelings about my Dumpsters. As I have suggested, it is no accident that I scavenge from Dumpsters where good finds are common. But my limited
experience with Dumpsters in other areas suggests to me that it is the population of
competitors rather than the affluence of the dumpers that most affects the feasibility
of survival by scavenging. The large number of competitors is what puts me off the
idea of trying to scavenge in places like Los Angeles.
Curiously, I do not mind my direct competition, other scavengers, so much as I
on the
street
I
warm bedding
hate the can scroungers.
People scrounge cans because they have to have a little cash. I have tried scroungAfoot a can scrounger simply cannot make
ing cans with an able-bodied companion.
91
New England Journal of Public Policy
more than a few
Dumpsters
dollars a day.
One
can extract the necessities of
directly with far less effort than
would be required
life
from the
to accumulate the
equivalent value in cans.
Can
scroungers, then, are people
Spirits
and drugs do,
like all
who must have
small amounts of cash. These are
because the amounts of cash are so small.
other commodities, turn up in Dumpsters and the
drug addicts and winos, mostly the
latter
scavenger will from time to time have a half bottle of a rather good wine with his
wino cannot survive on these occasional finds; he must have his daily
dose to stave off the DTs. All the cans he can carry will buy about three bottles of
dinner. But the
Wild Irish Rose.
I do not begrudge them the cans, but can scroungers tend to tear up the Dumpsters, mixing the contents and littering the area. They become so specialized that
they can see only cans. They earn my contempt by passing up change, canned goods,
and readily hockable items.
There are precious few courtesies among scavengers. But it is a common practice
to set aside_ surplus items: pairs of shoes, clothing, canned goods, and such. A true
scavenger hates to see good stuff go to waste and what he cannot use he leaves in
good condition in plain sight.
Can scoungers lay waste to everything in their path and will stir one of a pair of
good shoes to the bottom of a Dumpster, to be lost or ruined in the muck. Can
scoungers will even go through individual garbage cans, something I have never seen
a scavenger do.
Individual garbage cans are set out
on the public easement only on garbage days.
a dwelling. Going
On other days going through them requires trespassing close to
through individual garbage cans without scattering litter is almost impossible. Litter
is likely to reduce the public's tolerance of scavenging. Individual garbage cans are
simply not as productive as Dumpsters; people in houses and duplexes do not
move
and for some reason do not tend to discard as much useful material. Moreover, the time required to go through one garbage can that serves one household is
not much less than the time required to go through a Dumpster that contains the
as often
refuse of twenty apartments.
But my strongest reservation about going through individual garbage cans is that
seems to me a very personal kind of invasion to which I would object if I were a
householder. Although many things in Dumpsters are obviously meant never to
this
come
I
to light, a
Dumpster
is
somehow less
personal.
who dump in the Dumpsters I
although I know many people will
avoid trying to draw conclusions about the people
frequent.
I
think
it would be unethical
to
do
so,
find the idea of scavenger ethics too funny for words.
Dumpsters contain bank statements, bills, correspondence, and other documents,
just as anyone might expect. But there are also less obvious sources of information.
Pill bottles, for
the
example. The labels of pill bottles contain the
name
of the patient,
name of the drug. AIDS
name but two groups, are specific and are seldom prescribed for any
disorders. The plastic compacts for birth control pills usually have complete
name
drugs and antipsychotic
of the doctor, and the
medicines, to
other
label information.
Despite
object to
have had only one apartment resident
going through the Dumpster. In that case it turned out the resident was
all
my
of this sensitive information,
I
92
a university athlete
wager
who was
taking bets and
who was
afraid
I
would turn up
his
slips.
Occasionally a find tells a story. I once found a small paper bag containing some
unused condoms, several partial tubes of flavored sexual lubricant, a partially used
compact of birth control pills, and the torn pieces of a picture of a young man.
Clearly she was through with him and planning to give up sex altogether.
abandoned teddy bears, shredded wedding
Dumpster things are often sad
books, despaired-of sales kits. I find many pets lying in state in Dumpsters. Although
I hope to get off the streets so that Lizbeth can have a long and comfortable old age,
I know this hope is not very realistic. So I suppose when her time comes she too will
go into a Dumpster. I will have no better place for her. And after all, for most of her
life her livelihood has come from the Dumpster. When she finds something I think is
safe that has been spilled from the Dumpster I let her have it. She already knows the
route around the best Dumpsters. I like to think that if she survives me she will have
a chance of evading the dogcatcher and of finding her sustenance on the route.
Silly vanities also come to rest in the Dumpsters. I am a rather accomplished
needleworker. I get a lot of materials from the Dumpsters. Evidently sorority girls,
hoping to impress someone, perhaps themselves, with their mastery of a womanly
art, buy a lot of embroider-by-number kits, work a few stitches horribly, and eventually discard the whole mess. I pull out their stitches, turn the canvas over, and work
an original design. Do not think I refrain from chuckling as I make original gifts
from these kits.
I find diaries and journals. I have often thought of compiling a book of literary
found objects. And perhaps I will one day. But what I find is hopelessly commonplace and bad without being, even unconsciously, camp. College students also discard their papers. I am horrified to discover the kind of paper which now merits an
A in an undergraduate course. I am grateful, however, for the number of good
books and magazines the students throw out.
In the area I know best I have never discovered vermin in the Dumpsters, but
there are two kinds of kitty surprise. One is alley cats which I meet as they leap,
claws first, out of Dumpsters. This is especially thrilling when I have Lizbeth in tow.
The other kind of kitty surprise is a plastic garbage bag filled with some ponderous,
amorphous mass. This always proves to be used cat litter.
City bees harvest doughnut glaze and this makes the Dumpster at the doughnut
shop more interesting. My faith in the instinctive wisdom of animals is always shaken
whenever I see Lizbeth attempt to catch a bee in her mouth, which she does whenever bees are present. Evidently some birds find Dumpsters profitable, for birdie
—
surprise in almost as
game
common
as kitty surprise of the first kind. In hunting season all
up in Dumpsters, some of it, sadly, not entirely dead. Curiously, summer and winter, maggots are uncommon.
The worst of the living and near-living hazards of the Dumpsters are the fire ants.
The food that they claim is not much of a loss, but they are vicious and aggressive. It
is very easy to brush against some surface of the Dumpster and pick up half a dozen
or more fire ants, usually in some sensitive area such as the underarm. One advantage of bringing Lizbeth along as I make Dumpster rounds is that, for obvious rea-
kinds of small
sons, she
is
turn
very alert to ground-based
fire ants.
When Lizbeth recognizes the
of fire ant infestation around our feet she does the
have learned not to ignore
this
Dance of the
warning from Lizbeth, whether
93
I
signs
Zillion Fire Ants.
I
perceive the tiny ants
New England Journal of Public Policy
or not, but to remove ourselves at Lizbeth's
because the ants are the worst
first
months
pas de bourree. All the more so
wear
flip-flops, if I have them.
misunderstand the above. Lizbeth does the Dance of the
Zillion Fire Ants when she recognizes more fire ants than she cares to eat, not when
she is being bitten. Since I have learned to react promptly, she does not get bitten at
(Perhaps someone
in the
will
the isolated patrol of fire ants that
all. It is
Lizbeth finds them quite
By far
the best
way
I
to
falls in
Lizbeth's range that deserves pity.
tasty.)
go through a Dumpster
is
to lower yourself into
the good stuff tends to settle at the bottom because
rubbish.
it is
it.
Most of
usually weightier than the
My more athletic companions have often demonstrated to me that they can
much good
material from a Dumpster I have already been over.
To those psychologically or physically unprepared to enter a Dumpster, I recommend a stout stick, preferably with some barb or hook at one end. The hook can be
used to grab plastic garbage bags. When I find canned goods or other objects loose
at the bottom of a Dumpster I usually can roll them into a small bag that I can then
hoist up. Much Dumpster diving is a matter of experience for which nothing will do
extract
except practice.
Dumpster
diving
is
outdoor work, often surprisingly pleasant. It is not entirely
up every day and some days there are finds of
predictable; things of interest turn
am
when I can turn up exactly the thing I most
element of chance, scavenging more than most
other pursuits tends to yield returns in some proportion to the effort and intelligence brought to bear. It is very sweet to turn up a few dollars in change from a
Dumpster that has just been gone over by a wino.
The land is now covered with cities. The cities are full of Dumpsters. I think of
scavenging as a modern form of self-reliance. In any event, after ten years of government service, where everything is geared to the lowest common denominator, I find
work that rewards initiative and effort refreshing. Certainly I would be happy to
have a sinecure again, but I am not heartbroken not to have one anymore.
I find from the experience of scavenging two rather deep lessons. The first is to
take what I can use and let the rest go by. I have come to think that there is no value
in the abstract. A thing I cannot use or make useful, perhaps by trading, has no value
however fine or rare it may be. I mean useful in a broad sense
so, for example,
some art I would think useful and valuable, but other art might be otherwise for me.
great value.
wanted
I
always very pleased
to find. Yet in spite of the
—
to realize that some things are not worth acquiring, but now I think it
Some material things are white elephants that eat up the possessor's substance.
The second lesson is of the transience of material being. This has not quite converted me to a dualist, but it has made some headway in that direction. I do not supI
was shocked
is so.
pose that ideas are immortal, but certainly mental things are longer-lived than other
material things.
I was the sort of person who invests material objects with sentimental value.
no longer have those things, but I have the sentiments yet.
Many times in my travels I have lost everything but the clothes I was wearing and
Lizbeth. The things I find in Dumpsters, the love letters and ragdolls of so many
lives, remind me of this lesson. Now I hardly pick up a thing without envisioning the
time I will cast it away. This I think is a healthy state of mind. Almost everything I
have now has already been cast out at least once, proving that what I own is valueless to someone.
Once
Now
I
94
find my desire to grab for the gaudy bauble has been largely sated. I
we both know there is plenty
an attitude I share with the very wealthy
more where what we have came from. Between us are the rat-race millions who have
confounded their selves with the objects they grasp and who nightly scavenge the
Anyway,
think this
I
—
is
cable channels looking for they
I
am sorry for them.
know not what.
&*-
95
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JJ GOODE
SINGLE­HANDED COOKING
ORGINALLY PUBLISHED JULY 2009
Everyone faces obstacles in the kitchen, but having just one arm does tend to
complicate matters. If only draining a pot of spaghetti were as easy as playing baseball.
y back aches. My eyes burn. I’ve been peeling and chopping for an hour, but I’m still being
taunted by a pile of untouched vegetables. My problem is not the quantity. It’s that the task of
steadying each item falls to an almost useless appendage: the short, goofy arm, inexplicably bent
into an L­shape and graced by just three fingers, that dangles from my right shoulder.
RELATED LINKS
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Read more by JJ Goode on gourmet.com
No one knows why I was born like this. My mom wasn’t exposed to any radiation while she was pregnant,
nor did she, say, have one too many sips of wine. Yet I do occasionally wonder whether my dad’s Ph.D.
dissertation subject—a pre­PETA endeavor for which he plucked the legs from frogs and studied their
regeneration—sparked some sort of cosmic payback.
Whatever the reason, I occupy a sort of upper middle class of the handicapped. Sure, there’s plenty to
complain about, but all in all, things aren’t so bad. While the wheelchair­bound struggle to reach their
stoves, it feels a bit “Princess and the Pea” of me to grumble that peeling potatoes is as grueling as making
mole. (“Vegetables are distressingly round,” said a commiserating friend.) Or to lament that day last winter
when my girlfriend took a trip to Philadelphia, leaving me at home in Brooklyn with a dozen oysters and
not enough hands to shuck them with. Disability is relative: I’d rather be incapable of prying open shellfish
than allergic to them. Still, I see jimmying an oyster, which otters manage without much difficulty, as an
ability that’s not too much to ask for.
I happily live without most of the things I can’t do. The kitchen, however, is where what I love butts up
against what can be so discouragingly difficult. Forget shucking an oyster; even a mundane task such as
draining a pot of pasta can be death­defying. After swathing my right arm in towels to prevent it from
searing (the last thing I need is for it to be less useful), I lodge it beneath the pot’s handle with the same
care that I imagine a window washer uses to secure his harness to a skyscraper. Then I inch toward the
sink, the whole time bracing for scalding disaster and indulging in an equally scalding torrent of self­pity.
Some people say the kitchen is where they clear their heads; for me, it’s where I face my demons.
Every meal is a proving ground, and I suffer mistakes as though they were failures, even when they have
nothing to do with my arm. “It’s really good,” friends insist, as I sulk over hanger steak that doesn’t have a
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perfectly rosy center or a gratin whose top has barely browned, forever fighting the feeling that somehow
it all would have gone right had I been born a little more symmetrical. I can even find fault with the
faultless because what I’m truly after is unreachable: two normal arms. When I first started to cook, I
developed a crush on any ingredient that leveled the playing field. I adored canned anchovies, since the
fillets simply melted in hot oil. I loved beets because after I roasted them in foil, their skins would slip
right off. But soon my attraction to convenience gave way to a relishing of the arduous. Having previously
avoided anything that required peeling, I now dove into recipes that called for celery root and butternut
squash. I embraced Thai stir­fries, which had me meticulously slicing raw pork into matching strips so
they’d all finish cooking at the same time. I can’t count the times friends have watched me tackle an overly
complicated prep job—always girding themselves for a bloodbath—and anxiously urged me to try using a
food processor. I refuse for the same reason I insist on balancing a pan on my raised right knee when I
sauce tableside instead of asking anyone for help. (It’s the same reason I refused to sit out in baseball when
it came time for me to bat.) I appreciate the thought, I sniff, but I can handle it.
This masochistic streak is why I’m still chopping. I’m having some friends over for dinner and I’m
making braised chicken, a dish that’s a breeze for most cooks but presents, for me, just the right level of
hardship for a dinner party. The only way to get what I casually call my right arm to act like one is to
hunch awkwardly over my cutting board, so it can reach the food that needs to be stabilized. For an hour,
that was celery, onions, and carrots. A rough chop would surely suffice, but I’m attempting to dice,
chasing the satisfaction of seeing perfect cubes conjured by a blur of hand and knife.
My back is bent again. This time, I’m close enough to a chicken to kiss it—unfortunate no matter how
comfortable you are with raw poultry. As I try to detach a leg, it slips from my right hand’s feeble grasp,
spattering my cheek with cold chicken liquid. I seethe but rinse off and continue. I could, of course, have
bought chicken parts. But a whole chicken is always cheaper by the pound, and why shouldn’t I have
access? I like to think of the price discrepancy as a one­arm tax.
Half an hour later, I’ve successfully dismantled the thing and begun the rewarding task of browning it,
savoring the knowledge that any cook would, at this point in the process, be upright at the stove and
wielding tongs in exactly the same manner as I am. After setting the chicken aside and spooning some of
the golden fat from the pot, I take a seat, sweep the vegetables from my cutting board into a big bowl
supported by my knees, and ferry the bowl to the stove. The vegetables sizzle when I dump them in. Now,
to add the wine.
The wine! I forgot I’d have to open a bottle, a potential catastrophe. I should turn off the burner, just in
case I take as long to open this bottle as I did the last one. Instead, I bet my hard­won diced vegetables that
I won’t scorch them. Springing into action, I wedge the bottle between my thighs, wrap my right arm
around the neck (its effect is almost purely symbolic), and struggle to work the screw through the cork. I
already detect a faint acridity wafting from the pot, a whiff of defeat. I quickly adjust my technique,
somehow wrenching the cork out in one piece, and rush back to the stove. The vegetables have more color
than I wanted, but they’re fine. In goes some wine, a few sprigs of thyme, and the chicken. I cover the pot
and shove it into the oven.
I know there are more compelling examples of fortitude than me braising chicken. Like a paraplegic racing
uphill in a tricked­out wheelchair on marathon day, or my late grandfather, who at 90 walked down and up
20­odd flights in the pitch darkness of New York City’s 2003 blackout to get groceries for his wife. But
turn a spotlight on any accomplishment, however minor, and it seems like a triumph. Away from that
glare, though, there’s only the struggle.
My right arm swathed again, my back contorted, I stoop down and heave the pot out of the oven without
incident (once I dipped so low to retrieve a casserole dish perched on the bottom rack that I singed my
forehead on the top one). I call in my friends, and we sit down to a dinner that, I have to admit, is pretty
good. Someone even admires my fastidious touch, the precise little cubes of carrots and celery scattered
beneath the burnished chicken. “Thanks,” I say. “It was nothing.”
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Utopian Dream: A New Farm Bill | Dissent Magazine
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Utopian Dream: A New Farm Bill
Marion Nestle
Winter 2016
In the fall of 2011, I taught a graduate food studies course at New York University
devoted to the farm bill, a massive and massively opaque piece of legislation passed
most recently in 2008 and up for renewal in 2012. The farm bill supports farmers, of
course, but also specifies how the United States deals with such matters as
conservation, forestry, energy policy, organic food production, international food aid,
and domestic food assistance. My students came from programs in nutrition, food
studies, public health, public policy, and law, all united in the belief that a smaller
scale, more regionalized, and more sustainable food system would be healthier for
people and the planet.
In the first class meeting, I asked students to suggest what an ideal farm bill should
do. Their answers covered the territory: ensure enough food for the population at an
affordable price; produce a surplus for international trade and aid; provide farmers
with a sufficient income; protect farmers against the vagaries of weather and volatile
markets; promote regional, seasonal, organic, and sustainable food production;
conserve soil, land, and forest; protect water and air quality, natural resources, and
wildlife; raise farm animals humanely; and provide farm workers with a living wage
and decent working conditions. Overall, they advocated aligning agricultural policy
with nutrition, health, and environmental policy—a tall order by any standard, but
especially so given current political and economic realities.
What’s Wrong with the Current Farm Bill?
Plenty. Beyond providing an abundance of inexpensive food, the current farm bill
addresses practically none of the other goals. It favors Big Agriculture over small;
pesticides, fertilizers, and genetically modified crops over those raised organically
and sustainably; and some regions of the country—notably the South and Midwest—
over others. It supports commodity crops grown for animal feed but considers fruits
and vegetables to be “specialty” crops deserving only token support. It provides
incentives leading to crop overproduction, with enormous consequences for health.
The bill does not require farmers to engage in conservation or safety practices (farms
are exempt from having to comply with environmental or employment standards). It
encourages production of feed crops for ethanol. In part because Congress insisted
that gasoline must contain ethanol, 40 percent of U.S. feed corn was grown for that
purpose in 2011, a well-documented cause of higher world food prices. Because the
bill subsidizes production, it gets the United States in trouble with international
trading partners, and hurts farmers in developing countries by undercutting their
prices. Taken as a whole, the farm bill is profoundly undemocratic. It is so big and so
complex that nobody in Congress or anywhere else can grasp its entirety, making it
especially vulnerable to influence by lobbyists for special interests.
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Although the farm bill started out in the Great Depression of the 1930s as a collection
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of emergency measures to protect the income of farmers—all small landholders by
today’s standards—recipients soon grew dependent on support programs and began
to view them as entitlements. Perceived entitlements became incentives for making
farms larger; increasingly dependent on pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer “inputs”;
and exploitative of natural and human resources. Big farms drove out small, while
technological advances increased production. These trends were institutionalized by
cozy relationships among large agricultural producers, farm-state members of
congressional agricultural committees, and a Department of Agriculture (USDA)
explicitly committed to promoting commodity production.
These players were not, however, sitting around conference tables to create
agricultural policies to further national goals. Instead, they used the bill as a way to
obtain earmarks—programs that would benefit specific interest groups. It is now a
663-page piece of legislation with a table of contents that alone takes up 14 pages.
As the chief vehicle of agricultural policy in the United States, it reflects no overriding
goals or philosophy. It is simply a collection of hundreds of largely disconnected
programs dispensing public benefits to one group or another, each with its own
dedicated constituency and lobbyists. The most controversial farm bill programs
benefit only a few basic food commodities—corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton,
sugar, and dairy. But lesser-known provisions help much smaller industries such as
asparagus, honey, or Hass avocados, although at tiny fractions of the size of
commodity payments.
The bill organizes its programs into fifteen “titles” dealing with its various purposes. I
once tried to list every program included in each title, but soon gave up. The bill’s
size, scope, and level of detail are mind-numbing. It can only be understood one
program at a time. Hence, lobbyists.
The elephant in the farm bill—its biggest program by far and accounting for nearly 85
percent of the funding—is SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(formerly known as food stamps). In 2011, as a result of the declining economy and
high unemployment, SNAP benefits grew to cover forty-six million Americans at a
cost of $72 billion. In contrast, commodity subsidies cost “only” $8 billion; crop
insurance $4.5 billion, and conservation about $5 billion. The amounts expended on
the hundreds of other programs covered by the bill are trivial in comparison, millions,
not billions—mere rounding errors.
What is SNAP doing in the farm bill? Politics makes strange bedfellows, and SNAP
exemplifies logrolling politics in action. By the late 1970s, consolidation of farms had
reduced the political power of agricultural states. To continue farm subsidies,
representatives from agricultural states needed votes from legislators representing
states with large, low-income urban populations. And those legislators needed votes
from agricultural states to pass food assistance bills. They traded votes in an unholy
alliance that pleased Big Agriculture as well as advocates for the poor. Neither group
wants the system changed.
Health Implications
The consequences of obesity—higher risks for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, certain
cancers, and other chronic conditions—are the most important health problems
facing Americans today. To maintain weight or to prevent excessive gain, federal
dietary guidelines advise consumption of diets rich in vegetables and fruits. The 2008
farm bill introduced a horticulture and organic title, but aside from a farmers’ market
promotion program and some smaller marketing programs, does little to encourage
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vegetable and fruit production or to subsidize their costs to consumers. If anything,
the farm bill encourages weight gain by subsidizing commodity crops that constitute
the basic cheap caloric ingredients used in processed foods—soy oil and corn
sweeteners, for example—and by explicitly forbidding crop producers from growing
fruits and vegetables.
Neither human nature nor genetics have changed in the last thirty years, meaning
that widespread obesity must be understood as collateral damage resulting from
changes in agricultural, economic, and regulatory policy in the 1970s and early 1980s.
These created today’s “eat more” food environment, one in which it has become
socially acceptable for food to be ubiquitous, eaten frequently, and in large portions.
For more than seventy years, from the early 1900s to the early 1980s, daily calorie
availability remained relatively constant at about 3,200 per person. By the year 2000,
however, available calories had increased to 3,900 per person per day, roughly twice
average need. People were not necessarily eating 700 more daily calories, as many
were undoubtedly wasted. But the food containing those extra calories needed to be
sold, thereby creating a marketing challenge for the food industry.
Why more calories became available after 1980 is a matter of some conjecture, but I
believe the evidence points to three seemingly remote events that occurred at about
that time: agriculture policies favoring overproduction, the onset of the shareholder
value movement, and the deregulatory policies of the Reagan era.
In 1973 and 1977, Congress passed laws reversing long-standing farm policies aimed
at protecting prices by limiting production. Subsidies increased in proportion to
amounts grown, encouraging creation of larger and more productive farms. Indeed,
production increased, and so did calories in the food supply and competition in the
food industry. Companies were forced to find innovative ways to sell food products in
an overabundant food economy.
Further increasing competition was the advent of the shareholder value movement to
force corporations to produce more immediate and higher returns on investment.
The start of the movement is often attributed to a 1981 speech given by Jack Welch,
then head of General Electric, in which he insisted that corporations owed
shareholders the benefits of faster growth and higher profit margins. The movement
caught on quickly, and Wall Street soon began to press companies to report growth
in profits every quarter. Food companies, already selling products in an overabundant
marketplace, now also had to grow their profits—and constantly.
Companies got some help when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 on a
platform of corporate deregulation. Reagan-era deregulatory policies removed limits
on television marketing of food products to children and on health claims on food
packages. Companies now had much more flexibility in advertising their products.
Together, these factors led food companies to consolidate, become larger, seek new
markets, and find creative ways to expand sales in existing markets. The collateral
result was a changed society. Today, in contrast to the early 1980s, it is socially
acceptable to eat in places never before meant as restaurants, at any time of day, and
in increasingly large amounts—all factors that encourage greater calorie intake. Food
is now available in places never seen before: bookstores, libraries, and stores
primarily selling drugs and cosmetics, gasoline, office supplies, furniture, and
clothing.
AS A result of the increased supply of food, prices dropped. It became relatively
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inexpensive to eat outside the home, especially at fast-food restaurants, and such
places proliferated. Food prepared outside the home tends to be higher in calories,
fast food especially so. It’s not that people necessarily began to eat worse diets. They
were just eating more food in general and, therefore, gaining weight. This happened
with children, too. National food consumption surveys indicate that children get more
of their daily calories from fast-food outlets than they do from schools, and that fast
food is the largest contributor to the calories they consume outside the home.
To increase sales, companies promoted snacking. The low cost of basic food
commodities allowed them to produce new snack products—twenty thousand or so a
year, nearly half candies, gum, chips, and sodas. It became normal for children to
regularly consume fast foods, snacks, and sodas. An astonishing 40 percent of the
calories in the diets of children and adolescents now derive from such foods. In adults
and children, the habitual consumption of sodas and snacks is associated with
increases in calorie intake and body weight.
Food quantity is the critical issue in weight gain. Once foods became relatively
inexpensive in comparison to the cost of rent or labor, companies could offer foods
and beverages in larger sizes at favorable prices as a means to attract bargainconscious customers. Larger portions have more calories. But they also encourage
people to eat more and to underestimate the number of calories consumed. The welldocumented increase in portion sizes since 1980 is by itself sufficient to explain rising
levels of obesity.
Food prices are also a major factor in food choice. It is difficult to argue against low
prices and I won’t—except to note that the current industrialized food system aims at
producing food as cheaply as possible, externalizing the real costs to the environment
and to human health. Prices, too, are a matter of policy. In the United States, the
indexed price of sodas and snack foods has declined since 1980, but that of fruits and
vegetables has increased by as much as 40 percent. The farm bill subsidizes animal
feed and the ingredients in sodas and snack foods; it does not subsidize fruits and
vegetables. How changes in food prices brought on by growth of crops for biofuels
will affect health is as yet unknown but unlikely to be beneficial.
The deregulation of marketing also contributes to current obesity levels. Food
companies spend billions of dollars a year to encourage people to buy their products,
but foods marketed as “healthy”—whether or not they are—particularly encourage
greater consumption. Federal agencies attempting to regulate food marketing,
especially to children, have been blocked at every turn by food industries dependent
on highly profitable “junk” foods for sales. Although food companies argue that body
weight is a matter of personal choice, the power of today’s overabundant, ubiquitous,
and aggressively marketed food environment to promote greater calorie intake is
enough to overcome biological controls over eating behavior. Even educated and
relatively wealthy consumers have trouble dealing with this “eat more” environment.
Fixing the Farm Bill
What could agriculture policies do to improve health now and in the future? Also
plenty. When I first started teaching nutrition in the mid-1970s, my classes already
included readings on the need to reform agricultural policy. Since then, one
administration after another has tried to eliminate the most egregious subsidies (like
those to landowners who don’t farm) but failed when confronted with early primaries
in Iowa. Defenders of the farm bill argue that the present system works well to ensure
productivity, global competitiveness, and food security. Tinkering with the bill, they
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claim, will make little difference and could do harm. I disagree. The farm bill needs
more than tinkering. It needs a major overhaul. My vision for the farm bill would
restructure it to go beyond feeding people at the lowest possible cost to achieve
several utopian goals:
Support farmers: The American Enterprise Institute and other conservative groups
argue that farming is a business like any other and deserves no special protections.
My NYU class thought otherwise. Food is essential for life, and government’s role
must be to ensure adequate food for people at an affordable price. Farmers deserve
some help dealing with financial and climate risks, and some need it more than
others. The farm bill should especially support more sustainable smaller-scale
farming methods. And such programs should be available to farmers of fruits and
vegetables and designed to encourage beginning farmers to grow specialty crops.
Support the environment: The farm bill should require recipients of benefits to
engage in environmentally sound production and conservation practices. Production
agriculture accounts for a significant fraction—10 percent to 20 percent—of
greenhouse gas emissions. Sustainable farming methods have been shown to reduce
emissions, return valuable nutrients to soil, and reduce the need for polluting
pesticides and fertilizers, with only marginal losses in productivity.
Support human health: The United States does not currently grow enough fruits and
vegetables to meet minimal dietary recommendations. The 2008 farm bill explicitly
prohibits farms receiving support payments from growing fruits and vegetables.
Instead, the bill should provide incentives for growing specialty crops. Support
payments should be linked to requirements for farm-based safety procedures that
prevent contamination with pathogens and pesticides.
Support farm workers: This one is obvious. Any farm receiving support benefits must
pay its workers a living wage and adhere to all laws regarding housing and safety—in
spirit as well as in letter.
Link nutrition policy to agricultural policy: If we must have SNAP in the farm bill, let’s
take advantage of that connection. Suppose SNAP benefits had to be spent mostly on
real rather than processed foods, and were worth more when spent at farmers’
markets. Pilot projects along these lines have been shown to work brilliantly. Consider
what something like this might do for the income of small farmers as well as for the
health of food assistance recipients. Policies that enable low-income families to
access healthy foods wherever they shop are beyond the scope of the farm bill, but
must also be part of any utopian agenda.
Apply health and conservation standards to animal agriculture: The livestock title of
the farm bill should require animals to be raised and slaughtered humanely. It should
require strict adherence to environmental and safety standards for conservation and
protection of soil, water, and air quality.
Utopian? Absolutely. In the current political climate, the best anyone can hope for is a
crumb or two thrown in these directions. The secret process for developing the 2012
farm bill contained a few such crumbs—more money for farmers’ markets and for
programs to take SNAP benefits further when spent on fruits and vegetables.
Whether that bill would have been better or worse than the one we eventually end up
with remains to be seen. But the failure of that process provides an opportunity to
work toward a healthier food system by restructuring farm bill programs to focus
them on health, safety, and environmental goals and social justice. These goals are
well worth advocating now and in the future.
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The one bright ray of hope about the farm bill comes from the burgeoning food
movement. Grassroots groups working to promote local and regional foods, farmers’
markets, urban farming, farm-to-school programs, animal welfare, and farm workers’
rights join a long and honorable history of social movements such as those aimed at
civil rights, women’s rights, and environmentalism. Changing the food system is
equally radical. But food has one particular advantage for advocacy. Food is universal.
Everyone eats. Food is an easy entry point into conversations about social inequities.
Even the least political person can understand injustices in the food system and be
challenged to work to redress them.
Occupy Big Food is an integral part of Occupy Wall Street; it should not be viewed as
a special interest. The issues that drive both are the same: corporate control of
government and society. The food movement—in all of its forms—seeks better health
for people and the planet, goals that benefit everyone. It deserves the support of
everyone advocating for democratic rights.
Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public
Health at New York University. She is the author of Food Politics: How the Food
Industry Influences Nutrition and Health and, with Malden Nesheim, Why Calories
Count: From Science to Politics. She blogs at www.foodpolitics.com and tweets
@marionnestle.
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