Back to veggie

After a year and a half of thinking about meat, I’ve made my decision. Starting when I get home from Ecuador, I’m going back to being a vegetarian.

When I first went vegetarian, I was in third grade. I was motivated by moral absolutism and fervent idealism. I believed that animals should not be killed to feed humans when we were clearly capable of living without taking life. Over the years, my reasons shifted to a general protest of factory farming. I read Fast Food Nation sometime in middle school and was so grateful that I was largely absolved of responsibility for the horrors described by Eric Schlosser as he toured slaughterhouses and food chemistry labs. I didn’t want to be complicit in the torture of animals, the exploitation of a largely undocumented Latino workforce, the carbon emissions that come from beef, the overflowing waste lagoons that border CAFOs.

Now, I’m returning to the same label, but with a vastly different underlying ideology. I’m fully cognizant of the horrors of agriculture. I know soy is an environmental nightmare that’s clear-cutting Amazonian rainforest and supporting the Cargill-Monsanto empire. I know that the prairies of the American West have been destroyed to feed the world, that a field of wheat is ecologically no different from a barren, eroding hillside that was once home to an old-growth forest. I understand that animals are necessary for sustainable food production, because the only way we’re going to be able to keep feeding the world is with permaculture, designing systems based on natural processes. And I know that while Americans eat more meat than is healthy for them, humans were designed to eat flesh at least occasionally.

But I also know that the world isn’t black and white. I know that I can hold contradictory beliefs, that solutions aren’t as simple as they seem, that an action can be good, bad or somewhere in between depending on timing and context. And in the food system we have right now, I believe that eating meat does more harm than good for the world as a whole. Most animals, even happy local ones, are fed crops that are grown in the same problematic ways that cause so many environmental problems around the world. Unless they’re managed very specifically to avoid this, cows and other livestock have a dramatically larger carbon footprint than plant-based foods. And because I have the means, knowledge and physiology to be a healthy vegetarian, I’m going to do it.

I’m switching back fully aware of another uncomfortable truth—my individual choice to be a vegetarian will never end factory farming. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it until the left demonstrates an ability to think beyond personal choices as a venue for activism. But I don’t believe that the impotency of our individual actions as tools for change absolves us completely from personal responsibility. I own a cell phone which contains coltane, a mineral that’s found mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has been ravaged by war and conflict for years, largely because of desires to control the country’s lucrative mineral resources. Would choosing to not buy a cell phone end the rape and murder that shapes the lives of so many people in the DRC? No. Does that mean that there is no blood on my hands? Absolutely not.

The modern world is rife with stories like this one, and the modern consumer is often painfully aware of the horrors they’re supporting. The socially conscious youth of my generation have been bombarded with guilt-inducing facts about sweatshops, toxic manufacturing processes, the horrors of resource extraction, climate change and social justice. We know that most things we buy are killing the planet, and we also know that trying to avoid buying anything problematic ever is nearly impossible without making a full time job of it. Most of us aren’t willing to invest the time and energy to be perfect—something I don’t believe is the mortal sin many would make it out to be—so we pick our battles, choose the few we really care about, and promise ourselves that we’ll work to build a better world to make up for it.

For me, factory farming is one of those battles. When I was eight, I didn’t want to be complicit in this system. Now, at twenty, I understand that even as a vegetarian, I’m still guilty. Even if I choose to go without meat, I’ve never done anything to challenge the industrial meat infrastructure, whether it’s liberating animals from a slaughterhouse or writing a letter to Congress asking them to make changes to the Farm Bill. Which isn’t to say that factory farming is our fault, collectively—the road to hell has been paved by a very specific set of people with very specific goals, and most of us weren’t among the lucky few. But as long as our society continues to say that these institutions and systems are acceptable, anyone who doesn’t exhaust every available effort and resource to stop them bears some of the burden for their existence. Plus, we (almost) all eat industrial agriculture. Even if you remove the burden of meat, I’m still complicit in pesticides and horrible labor conditions and absurd farm subsidies and the existence of Monsanto.

What this all boils down to is a vegetarianism based on premises of moral conflict rather than moral clarity. Last time I made this choice, I was saving the world. Now I know I’m not, but I’m still unable to close my eyes at the sight of a feedlot, unable to turn away and pretend I don’t know what I know when I eat. Part of me is humble, knowing my actions won’t make a dent in the problem. Part of me still craves the moral superiority of knowing that no animals are directly tortured to provide my food. Part of me wants to lecture and evangelize. Part of me is afraid to go back after tasting and loving my first steak (age 18), my first chicken breast (age 20) and my first bacon in over a decade. Part of me still can’t decide if fish are going to count, if I’m willing to give up my absolute favorite food (sushi) just to make a statement that almost no one will hear. I’ve spent hour after hour of my life thinking about these things. Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while have seen me write the equivalent of a full-length novel about the ethics and politics behind meat production and vegetarianism. At the end of the day, though, my choice is simple. I think about cows lined up for slaughter, waiting to have a bolt driven through their brains before they’re hoisted up by one leg to have their throat slit, and something deep inside me just screams no. It’s not the most well thought out argument in the world. But for me, it’s enough.

Personal purity isn't political activism

In high school, I participated in a service-learning program called Global Visionaries. Along with a group of about twenty US high schoolers, I spent the school year doing local service work and attending workshops on social justice and anti-oppression. The program culminated with a two-and-a-half week trip to Guatemala, where we did more service, had Spanish lessons, and learned about the US-backed 1954 coup which toppled democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz, largely because his land reform policies threatened the interests of the United Fruit Company (now called Chiquita). The coup kicked off a thirty-year civil war, during which the US-funded army basically attempted a genocide of the Mayan indigenous people and used rape as a weapon of war. After watching a movie about the war, we gathered as a group to discuss the events that had shaped the past half-century in Guatemala. We talked about the horrors and heartbreak that the country had been made to endure, largely at the hands of powerful US interests. After we had been talking for a while, Chris Fontana, our program director shook his head sadly and said to the group, “And all this so we could have cheaper bananas…”

At the time, that statement angered me unspeakably, though I couldn’t quite articulate why. Learning about Guatemala’s violent history (which I’d been previously completely unaware of), I had been furious. This was back when I was a fervent idealist, before I understood just how many coups and wars the US has staged all over the world. I was angry at the way the United Fruit Company had political connections which allowed them to basically request a coup from the State Department. I was angry at the lack of democratic process inherent in military operations. I was angry at the collusion between corporations and the state. I wanted transparency, accountability, authentic political participation. Chris’s statement seemed to ignore all of these concerns. He reduced the issue down to one of individual choice, of conscious consumerism. His message seemed to be that if US consumers had been paying enough attention, they could have successfully boycotted Chiquita and demanded that the price of bananas reflect their actual cost, which would have magically prevented the coup. We all know that when the interests of power and capital come up against a group of law-abiding citizens making respectful demands, the people always win. Every single time.

Sarcasm aside, I should thank Chris for this lesson, which it took me years to realize the full implications of. Liberals sadly have a long history of equating personal purity and change with political action, something I believe has been extremely detrimental to the achievement of leftist political goals. I talked about this during my last post about veganism and the animal rights crowd, and the idea extends to almost every social or environmental issue I can think of. Anti-sweatshop activists try to convince people to buy fair trade or Made in USA items, while largely ignoring the economic reality that for many children working in sweatshops, the alternative is prostitution or slow, painful death by starvation. Pro-sweatshop people (yes, they do exist) have pointed out that when sweatshops close because of pressure by activists, many children wind up on the street, starving, or as sex slaves because they don’t have any other way to survive. And yet we persist with the myth that the solution to this problem isn’t critiquing and attacking the neoliberal trade agreements or economic systems that make sweatshops a virtual necessity, it’s encouraging people to buy fair trade. Not even to buy less (not like consumerism is feeding the rise of low-wage factories or anything), but just to buy differently. This is how liberals are going to save the world.

This framework appears in so many other places. Worried about global warming? Change to fluorescent lightbulbs in your house! If you’re serious, maybe buy a Prius. If you’re really serious, install a solar panel and generate all of your own power. Don’t bother protesting the opening of a new coal plant or putting your body in front of the bulldozers that will soon be clearing the ground for the Keystone pipeline. That might be confrontational, might get you arrested. It’s probably better to take shorter showers.

I have this conversation all the time with liberal friends, and I’m often met with a lot of resistance. People defend their individual choices, cling to the meaning in them. I’m absolutely not saying that people shouldn't try to live their lives in an ethical way, whatever that means to them. Personal choices are often catalysts to larger political action. Being vegetarian is what made me aware of factory farming, and by extension, most of the problems with our food system. But then again, I was a vegetarian for almost twelve years, and factory farming is still going strong. Why wouldn't it be? Slaughterhouses operate at capacity, twenty-four hours a day, which means that the meat industry is largely supply-driven. The world population is still growing and getting less poor in absolute terms, which means more Chinese and Indian people are demanding meat in their diets. My one choice, even if it’s magnified by the impact it has on my friends and family, is not going to bring down the Tyson-ConAgra-IBP-Cargill empire.

I do believe that positive choices matter much more than negative ones. Boycotting Coca-Cola because of their appalling human rights and environmental record won’t to a single damn thing to change their business practices, even if you write them a strongly worded letter about it. But supporting a local co-op which is just starting out and trying to do things right will help them stay in business, which is important. Still, while consuming differently (or better yet, just consuming less) is a noble and worthy thing to do, it shouldn’t be confused with legitimate political action. You can be as pure as you want, living on your organic farming commune with a mini-hydro system on a nearby river supplying all your power. You can hand wash all your clothes and make your own cheese from scratch and knit your own clothes until the cows come home, and the planet will keep right on getting warmer. Large corporations will continue to dispossess people of their land in the name of resource extraction. If you want is to withdraw from the system instead of trying to change it, that’s your right. But saying that your choice to opt-out amounts to some kind of radical political action is disingenuous.

This might be a depressing notion for liberals who are used to thinking in terms of the personal. But as I’ve gotten used to the idea that my personal choices are not an effective political tool, I’ve found it incredibly freeing in two ways. The first is that it lifts a lot of the guilt that’s a daily part of life as a well-meaning leftist. I remember this past spring, I was driving to a food justice conference with some fellow Whitman students. As we stopped for lunch at Whole Foods, we were talking about driving. I mentioned loving road trips. Another girl on the trip concurred, but then quickly shifted into guilt mode. “I should try to drive less.” she said. “I try when I’m at home, but it’s hard sometimes. I know I should be better...” I interrupted her, having heard one too many conversations go this way in recent weeks. I told her unfortunately, it’s virtually impossible to live your life in modern America without driving, and that that system wasn’t her fault; she didn’t create car culture. I told her that the worst, most self-serving thing that those in power have ever done is convince us that our individual choices are the most powerful weapon for change that we have. I told her that instead of feeling guilty all the time, she should keep trying to drive less when it was feasible, not worry about it when it wasn’t, and direct her attention at constructing a reality where driving isn’t a necessity. I stopped ranting, concerned that I may have offended someone I was trying to befriend, someone I still had three more hours in an enclosed car with. Instead, she smiled at me and said, “Wow, that was actually really inspiring.” And that’s basically what I’ve found. It is kind of inspiring, albeit in a terrifying way, to know that your use of a disposable cup this one time is not going to cause the apocalypse. It’s so freeing to re-channel the energy you’ve been spending feeling awful into thinking about how to go about building a better world.

The second benefit of moving beyond individual choice is that it makes it so much easier to not be a self-righteous asshole about the way other people are choosing to live their lives. I spent a good portion of last spring working out my feelings about whether vegetarianism was environmentally a good idea, and if so, under what conditions. I’d basically decided that all things considered, eating meat did more harm than good for the planet. I had a pretty well thought-out set of arguments, so I set about trying to convince my friend Henry, who had started eating meat again about when I did, after we both The Vegetarian Myth. I explained to him about the agriculture and water required to sustain cattle (even grass-fed ones), the reality of trying to feed a growing world population, the global warming contribution of cows. He listened to me and said I had made some good points which he mostly agreed with, but that he was going to keep eating meat. I tried again a few days later, after he’d gone out and gotten a beef burrito for lunch. I said that in a situation like that, why wouldn’t you just order vegetarian? I said it’s so, so easy not to eat any meat, especially if you’re used to it because you’ve done it for years. I said that yes, our choices weren’t going to stop anything, but knowing the way animals suffer in slaughterhouses, why wouldn’t you just do that one little thing for them? I said again and again how it’s the easiest thing in the world to be vegetarian, knowing that he’d done it for almost as long as I had. He listened to me patiently, and then said, “I feel better and healthier when I eat meat. Being vegetarian is the easiest thing in the world for you. For me, it isn’t. For me, it’s the easiest thing in the world to not have a cell phone or a laptop. So when you’re willing to give up your cell phone and your laptop, then we can talk.” I was absolutely stunned. I had nothing to say, except, “Shit, you’re totally right.”

We all have things we’re personally capable of doing. We all have forms of opting out that are easy for us, and things that we’ll never be willing to do. Some people are vegan. Some people bike everywhere. Some people live off-grid. You do what you can. But once you recognize that political action is far more important than individual choice, you can stop monitoring and judging the actions of fellow liberals. You can understand that systematic factors shape people’s “choices” and that most people lack the means to be able to install solar panels or even go vegetarian (meat is cheap, calorie-dense and relatively quick/easy to prepare, all of which are hugely important if you’re busy, overworked and poor). You can encourage people to make good choices and try to educate your friends without coming off like a pompous asshole, because you know that the future survival of the planet doesn’t hinge on your success. And once again, you can put the energy you formerly devoted to judging people into thinking about how to meaningfully change the world so that people actually have options in their lives.

Rejecting the framework of individual choice is the most important political decision I’ve ever made. Don’t get me wrong, I love my local raw milk as much as any other foodie, and I absolutely make conscious choices to live my life a certain way. But knowing that those choices won’t even make a dent in global problems has let me get much more creative in my thinking. I’m opposed to global warming (what sane person isn’t?), but now I can focus on doing whatever needs to be done to make sure the Keystone pipeline isn’t built instead of trying to change all my lightbulbs. I recognize that having the time and energy to engage in activism is, in itself, a form of privilege. Many, many people don’t have the time, energy or inclination to do anything beyond make a few lifestyle changes, and I’m not going to attack anyone for that. It’s a daunting task trying to engage in bottom-up political change. I’ve been thinking about it for most of my life, and I’m still not quite sure where to start. But at least now, I know the answer doesn’t come in the form of a veggie burger.

Veganism and the myth of individual choice

I just came across this video via GOOD magazine. It’s a Mercy for Animals tape of pigs inside a factory farm, and though it’s incredibly hard to watch, it’s also really important.



I’m cynical and jaded. It’s hard for me to get truly angry or upset about the abuses of industry and the destruction of the natural world, because it’s so ubiquitous. But this video had me in tears. Climate change is distant and species extinction is abstract, but pigs screaming in terror and pain is awfully, disturbingly real.

I went to the Mercy for Animals website and clicked on their “Get Active” page, which made me even angrier. Here are their suggestions for getting involved in this issue, in the order they’re listed on the site.

1) Go vegetarian, or better yet, vegan.
2) Educate others about the horrors of factory farming and the benefits of vegetarianism and veganism.
3/4/5)Join Mercy for Animals by sending them money, volunteer for them and attend their events.
6) Spread the word about vegetarianism via Facebook, Twitter and your email signature.
7) Hand out leaflets about vegetarianism.
8) Organize a video screening.
9) Veganize local restaurants and cafeterias.
10) Write people in power about these issues.

Look, I get that individual actions are important. Feeling personally invested in an issue is an important thing, and many people get into broader forms of activism because they started out being vegetarians and then choose to look into food production more (oh hey there). So by all means, go veggie or vegan if you want to and spread the word to interested parties. But we all know that individual vegans are never going to end factory farming, and as a movement, we do a disservice to ourselves by pretending otherwise.

Most people will never be vegan. Selling people on reducing meat consumption is feasible—it’s probably healthier for them anyway. Selling people on vegetarianism is challenging, but doable. Selling people on veganism is really hard. Veganism, as far as I’ve seen, has a popular perception as a movement of ascetics who are interested in self-deprivation and having moral high ground. This isn’t completely accurate, obviously (I have vegans friends, I swear), but like most stereotypes, it contains grains of truth. Being vegan isn’t easy, and it isn’t practical or realistic for many people, especially people who are low-income.

I don’t believe we can sell the world on veganism, but I think we can sell them on not torturing animals. Pretty much any decent human would be saddened, angered or shocked by watching that video, or one of the many others documenting similar practices in the industry. I believe we do a disservice to those who will never be vegan when we list that as the first action step a concerned person can take. Individual choices can be powerful and empowering, but they won’t change the status quo. Framing the solution to factory farming as veganism disempowers people who aren’t willing or in a position to make that choice. It frames people unwilling to give up animal products as part of the problem. It emphasizes personal choice over political action, even though the latter can produce results on a much larger scale.

Existing power structures will not change or give up power without a fight. No one has ever stopped clear cutting because a bunch of people from the Sierra Club asked nicely. They stopped because radical Earth First and ELF people were busy chaining themselves to trees and monkeywrenching machinery, and suddenly a compromise with the Sierra Club seemed like a perfectly reasonable middle ground. And existing power structures have made factory farming a necessity for feeding the world, especially poor Americans.

Ending factory farming requires radicals and compromisers. It requires activists willing to break into slaughterhouses and film conditions inside of them. It requires people to build and support alternative meat suppliers, and policies which allow equality of access to those alternatives. It requires people who want to lobby Congress to pass more stringent regulations on factory farms, and it requires vegan anarchists who want to liberate pigs from their prisons. There’s no reason you should have to be a vegan to care about animal suffering or to be an anti-factory farm activist. We need as many committed people as we can get to fight back, and pretending that our individual choices are the most important tool we have won’t get us very far.

The meat question (an update)

After stumbling across this story last week, I realized I’ve been skirting the meat issue a bit on this blog, so I thought I’d take some time to address where I currently stand.

I’ve read a ton of articles arguing for or against meat. My final podcast from Semester in the West touched on the fact that the label “grass-fed” alone doesn’t say much about the impact meat has, just as “organic”, “free range” and “natural” can mean next to nothing. Even when you look behind that label, sides aren’t always clear. I’ve heard people argue that cows contribute more to climate change than the entire transportation industry. I’ve heard people say that cows can sequester carbon and have a net positive impact on climate when raised properly. Killing animals is wrong, but monoculture agriculture kills animals (and people) too. Ranches destroy habitat. Ranches save land from being bulldozed and developed. And with China and India’s rising middle class, the decision that a handful of largely privileged Americans make to go without meat isn’t going to tip the scale, change the world or end factory farming.

I think everything I’ve read, all the arguments I’ve had with my strongly vegan friends and my militantly pro-meat environmentalist friends, can best be summed up by this article’s title: Reasonable People Disagree About Eating Meat.

After flip-flopping for a while on meat’s environmental impacts on Semester in the West, I basically came to the conclusion that eating animals does more harm than good for the planet and the food systems I want to see. Major exceptions to this generalization would be game animals (shooting a deer sucks for the deer, but doesn’t do much harm to the planet since the deer was wild and would have existed independent of your desire to eat it) and animals raised at home (me having goats in my backyard and feeding them food scraps seems unlikely to destroy the planet). Given that I don’t own a gun or know how to hunt, and the fact that Whitman College has a policy banning pets which can’t survive being submerged under water for at least ten minutes, neither of these options seems to be feasible in the near future. On the flip side, I’m well aware that factory farmed meat is an ecological nightmare for literally dozens of reasons. So when I refer to eating meat, I mean meat produced by someone else in a grass-fed, contentious way (think Thundering Hooves or Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm).

My reasoning behind this came largely from the energy, water and oil needed to grow hay and other feed crops for cows (even grass-fed ones), the global warming issue and the fact that grass-fed cows don’t seem to be scalable to the extent required to feed growing world demand. Yet even after concluding this, I kept eating meat. Not much (1-2 times per month), only local beef, and never anything factory farmed. But still: I wasn’t a pescatarian/vegetarian anymore.

Where do I stand now? Basically, in a number of somewhat contradictory places:


-I believe that eating meat on average does more harm than good for the planet as a whole.

-I don’t believe that raising animals specifically for the purpose of killing them for food is wrong. I do object to not treating those animals like living beings who can feel pain while they’re alive. I believe we have a responsibility to be decent to each other (humans and non-humans alike), and that that responsibility is all the more true for a living being you’re intending to eat. I also believe we have a responsibility to ensure the continued survival of the communities of any living things we’re eating (whether they’re plants or animals)—traditional salmon fishing tribes in the Pacific Northwest made damn sure salmon didn’t go extinct from overfishing.

-Animals are an essential component of sustainable agriculture; without them, you don’t have fertilizer (except the kind made from fossil fuels). So some animal involvement in food production is necessary, but eating those animals doesn’t necessarily follow, and even if it did, those animals wouldn’t come close to satisfying global demand for meat.

-While I didn’t grow up eating meat and don’t “need” it, there are occasionally times in my life when eating a small piece of dead cow satisfies me in a way no other food would at that moment. Beyond feeling full, I feel nourished, which means I’m much less likely to binge on chips and cookies later.

-Dairy production is almost as environmentally destructive as meat production, and it seems like avoiding the issue to examine meat in this much detail without critically examining industrial dairy production as well.

-Given that my individual choices won’t change anything, I’m fine being 100% non-vegetarian while traveling, for the sake of cultural immersion (you can’t sample traditional Ghanaian cuisine very extensively as a vegetarian), sensitivity to hosts (if a Ghanaian/Ecuadorian/insertothercountryhere-ian has graciously prepared food for me out of an income which is several orders of magnitude below mine, the last thing on earth I want to do is refuse said food because of reasons that have more to do with American industrial agriculture than anything else) and practicality (with language and cultural barriers and the lack of familiar foods available in Ghana, finding something that’s safe to eat, filling and enjoyable is hard enough without excluding meat from the list). That said, I still get vegetarian food whenever possible, mostly because after 12ish years of eating that way, a lot of meat just weirds me out.

-While my individual choices won’t matter, there are ripple effects to any behavior. The increasing use of the label “vegetarian” has caused a whole lot of people to re-think their meat consumption who otherwise might not have. And as a vocal person who thinks, talks and blogs about food, I feel responsible to set some kind of good example about what I eat. So even if I’m ultra-conscientious about when I do eat meat, my visible choice to eat it at all lends support to the idea that eating meat is ok, which is not true 99% of the time given our current food system. While the screening processes and limits I have are clear to me, they’re often not to outside observers. I got home from Semester in the West and had various relatives, who had read all my blog entries about meat/food, offering to take me to steak dinners. When I explained that I wouldn’t be able to eat anything there, I got responses like, “But you eat meat now!” The fact that yes, technically I did, but only beef and only from one ranch in Eastern Washington took about five minutes of explanation.

Given all this, I’m not sure what to do when I’m back in the US. The fact that my one sustainable ranch, Thundering Hooves, has closed, adds to the quandary. Since I won’t really be home for more than a month until January, I’m not going to worry too much about choosing a “side” or finding an acceptable middle ground. I do know that I want to look much more critically at dairy and egg production, which will probably provoke another dozen blog entries. But until then, I’ll keep eating my way through the menu at Koforidua’s famous Linda Dor restaurant—meat included.

Choosing not to eat meat

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: with Bill deBuys, Northern New Mexico

I read activists and revolutionaries who are determined to overthrow the system. I see what they see—the scale of our destruction, the countless human and non-human casualties—but I can’t imagine a better world wrought through revolution. Maybe it’s history or my conviction that people are neither wholly evil nor predisposed to do no harm. Maybe it’s the lack of a blueprint or roadmap to that better world, or the rhetoric that seems so hostile towards humanity telling me I should want to go there. I’m reluctant to deny personal responsibility, although I know my choices won’t end sweatshops or factory farming. It’s easier to blame the system and say I have no choice. But “the system” is made of people too. At what point am I affirming my own powerlessness by participating and at what point am I simply perpetuating injustices? If eating factory farmed meat is ok because I didn’t build the infrastructure that tacitly endorses torture, is it ok to work in a slaughterhouse? To manage the kill floor? To oversee inspections for the USDA? To be a PR rep for Tyson? What about board member, stockholder or CEO? The intricacies of industry make determining the least destructive option difficult, to be sure. But once you have, it becomes difficult to maintain the moral high ground that nothing I do matters.

I draw that line at agency, I suppose. It’s so clearly wrong to systematically torture animals and so easy not to participate. Crops kill animals and so do dams, but crops are needed to make meat, and nothing systematically tortures animals quite like a factory farm. Saying I don’t want to eat that isn’t enough—it won’t stop those farms from existing and it won’t meaningfully change anything. But I still believe it matters. I’m not absolved of guilt or responsibility. I eat things that are still killing the planet, if a bit more slowly. I can’t articulate exactly why I feel so strongly about this, but I know absolutely that I do. Some things matter, and how I choose to live my life is one of them. I can’t change the world with that I eat for dinner, but I can help clarify my own vision and start painting a path to the world I want to live in.

Grazing: learning to see

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Escalante, Utah

context: During this week, we were working with Mary O’Brien, an ecologist with the Grand Canyon Trust. Mary was one of several ecologists we met who believed that cattle grazing on Western public lands was an environmental nightmare and is working to reduce the amount of land that’s grazed. Today, we went out on an actual grazing allotment to count cows and see what the land looked like.

I think today, I get it. I’ve seen Suzanne cry and Mary rant about riparian habitat and grazing. I’ve seen cows and incised channels. But today, wandering across a few miles of moonscape covered in hoof marks and cowpies, I saw a bit of what they see. The fence, built perhaps to keep cows away from part of the stream and the juniper bushes, was in decent shape, but the cows had access to the stream on both sides because they’d managed to erode a path down into the gully. The water was muddy and trampled to death.

I’m still having trouble being angry about it. Maybe because it’s hard to pinpoint a source. I don’t fault the individual rancher trying to make a living, though I have no sympathy for absentee billionaires or giant corporations who run cattle. Cows are far too docile and placid to be the objects of anger. And the political and bureaucratic clusterfuck seems difficult to pin on any particular person, law or agency. It’s a beast of its own, independent of individual human desires, although a product of them.

But I know it needs to change. I’m not as strident as Mary, though I feel the truth in her statement that some jobs or lifestyles cannot be justified because the cost to the earth is too high. I know absolutely that a rancher should be able to graze fewer cattle than an allotment allows for and should be able to sell it for conservations purposes if both parties are willing. But beyond that, it’s so hard to untangle. I worry about imperialism and outsourcing of negative consequences. If we eliminate the 2-3% of beef grazed on public lands here (and 2-3% of American beef is still a ton of cows), demand won’t follow the drop in supply. So we’ll import from Argentina or Brazil and eat cows with a huge carbon footprint grazed on pasture that used to be Amazonian rainforest before it was clearcut. We’ll have our land back and some smug satisfaction or feeling of grand victory, but I worry we’ll just be outsourcing the problem. So what, ethically, should I be eating? If I add a no-public-grazing clause to my vegetarian meat-eating ethics, I might as well just go back to no meat at all. I want to be healthy, which means no more tofu if I can help it, and I’m not the kind of girl who can live off of lentils. I love dairy, but that’s a curtain I’ve barely started to pull back, and I know I won’t like what I find. Someday, I want a house in Seattle with a backyard big enough for chickens and a goat. But until then, I still think I’m doing better eating cheese, raw milk and Thundering Hooves beef.

Seeing cows

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon

Today, I went running without my glasses on. I saw the same landscapes I‘ve been seeing all week, but without the sharp focus I’m so used to. Somehow, I think that blur makes it easier to see. Sight becomes a matter of color and pattern, general characteristics spread out across the entire skyline. The specific details tend to fade. A black dot on the horizon moves closer and closer, until suddenly you realize it’s a cow ten feet from you. And then you feel vulnerable, realizing that the cows of the world, organized into reasonably sized herds, could wrest control of everything from people if they put their minds to it. A single cow could trample me to death, leaving my body bleeding in the road until someone noticed I hadn’t come back from mg run. Yet they eat so placidly, wander our public lands and follow each other calmly to slaughter in an industrial warehouse. Tick. Slit the carteroid artery. Tock. Dripping blood. Tick. A resigned moo. Tock. The line keeps moving.

Cows seem almost to belong in this system. They’re thoroughly domesticated, stubborn perhaps in insignificant matters, but complacent as cogs in the wheel of industry. I don’t know this for certain; I’ve never spent time with a cow, birthed a calf or played my part in the slaughter. But looking into a cow’s eyes, I don’t see the wild. They’ve had it tamed out of them.

Can there be honor in a kill like this? Can the predator kill its pretty without the delicate dance between the two that has existed since time immemorial? I don’t think our slaughterhouses and pastures honor that dynamic, but perhaps they honor what the animal is, in itself. This seems like a better medium, though we’ve raised them to be that way. I’ve never killed a cow. I’ve never killed any mammal at all. In fact, I believe the most highly evolved murder I can be held responsible for was boiling a moonsnail and eating it whole on a breach trip freshman year of high school. And yet, I eat meat, after eleven years of refusing. I eat it happily, relishing the taste of flesh, overenthusiastic after so many years of trying to live what I believed was a better way. I eat is uneasily, feeling insincere in my excitement because I’ve never proved to myself that I know what it is to nourish myself with the flesh of another living being. I eat it hoping of a better world, where food is transparent and I won’t have to worry that the labels I’ve decided to screen my food by don’t actually mean anything about the health of my body, the animal, the ecosystem, the planet. I eat it, and I feel nourished. This feeling is what I go back to when I have nothing else to make it ok.