Me Eat Meat, by John Ostrander
So there I was, in my car, tooling along, headed towards my eye doctor appointment, listening to my public radio station, WNYC, and one of their talk shows – the Brian Leherer Show. The segment was referred to as “Can Meat Be Ethical?” The guests were Joan Gussow, professor emeritus of Nutrition and Education at Teachers College Columbia University, and Gidon Eshel, Bard Center Fellow and a geophysicist at Simon’s Rock College.
I could already tell we weren’t going to be on the same wavelength for this segment.
Here are my basic ethics about meat: if it hasn’t eaten me, I can eat it.
Professor Gussow seemed relatively reasonable. She said grass fed cows are eminently preferable to grain fed and that one should shop locally for everything – meats, grains, fruits, vegetables – as that reduces the amount of fossil fuel for transport. And that we should reduce the amount of meat that we consume and treat it more like a flavoring or a condiment as many cultures do around the world. That would be healthier.
Professor Eshel would have none of it. I should probably try to separate his snide, patronizing tone from his message. The tone probably comes with his turf; Simon’s Rock, up in the Berskshires in Maine, is – according to its website – “a small, selective, supportive, intensive college of the liberal arts and sciences” whose “400 students come to us after 10th or 11th grade in high school.” The few, the proud, the elite.
Professor Eshel maintained that grass fed beef is worse than grain fed beef. Why? Because, as bad as cow shit and cow farts may be for the environment, cow belching is worse not only in volume but in kinds of gases being released into the atmosphere.
Maybe the solution is to introduce Beano or Gas-X to what the cows eat. Actually, I’m not kidding. You can read about the whole problem here. Among other things, it says that: “Higher-protein fodder or feed as Soya can reduce the gastric fermentation that produces these gases, and fecal waste can be put in a closed silo that traps the methane, which can then be burned as a biofuel.” Wait. That means they’re not grass fed and Professor Gussow won’t be happy. Professor Eshel won’t be happy in any case. In his stated view, there is no ethical meat meal. I’m guessing that the Professor is a vegan. Proudly so. Really proudly so. Annoyingly proudly so. Sorry, folks, this cow fart reduction concept is not an ethical solution, either – just a practical one.
So maybe I should give up red meat and just eat chickens. No, wait, Chickens also are treated barbarically and contribute to pollution. Same for pork. Well, maybe fish. No, wait, that’s not ethical or healthy or environmentally sound, either. The oceans are over-fished, farm-raised fish aren’t PC, and there’s too much mercury in fish anyway. Well, maybe I can get my protein from peanut butter. No, wait. Dr. Hugh Sampson of Mount Sinai School of Medicine said on another WNYC talk show that peanut butter can cause peanut allergies. Well, he admitted that he didn’t have any data for proof but the fact that the three countries that have the highest consumption of peanut butter also have the highest incident of peanut allergies was “suggestive.” Well, case closed!
The fact that higher consumption of peanut butter may simply mean that more allergic people come intocontact with PB or the possibility that we simply report it more is undoubtedly coincidental! And pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
So – the solution to this is to stop eating meat? If we stopped eating cow tomorrow, what would become of the herds? What would be the ethically responsible thing to do? Let them live out their lives as they continue to eat and shit and fart and belch? Or should we withdraw all food and drink until they drop dead? My suggested solution is to eat more meat and do it faster than they can breed. You laugh, you sneer, but it seems as reasonable as the other solutions.
And seriously – do we want to live in a world where Mike Gold cannot get barbeque beef brisket? I tell you emphatically, sir and/or madam – we do not! Do we want to live in a world where I replace meat with beans? I tell you emphatically, sir and/or madam – we do not. I’d fart more than any ten cows. The atmosphere for a half block around me would become like that of the planet Venus.
Despite how I try to paint myself, I’m not entirely insensitive to the issue. I do try to buy locally when possible. I try to buy cage-free eggs, organic chicken, even free range beef when I can find it and when I can afford it. (What they don’t often mention is that it costs more – sometimes significantly more – to eat this way. A half gallon of organic milk can cost as much as a full gallon of plain old milk.)
There are some vegan restaurants I actually like although, again, the one I like best costs a bit and involves a drive which, of course, expends fossil fuel, which is another no-no. Most vegetarian restaurants, in my experience, are simply not very tasty. The texture of the food is often a character-building experience. The entrees often taste like someone grilled up the soles of their Birkenstock sandals. I suspect many of the bakery goods use sawdust in place of flour.
I’m also very aware that slaughterhouses are inhumane. Upton Sinclair revealed that 102 years ago in his novel, The Jungle, which in turn led to the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both of which the current Administration has eviscerated like… well, cattle at a slaughterhouse. The recent horrific video of slaughterhouse conditions may reflect that the number of meat inspectors are fewer because of budgeting cuts in the agency by the current Administration. The Bush Administration is “business friendly” and government oversight simply creates problems and cuts down on profits. A few corners need to be cut – right? It’s all a matter of priorities.
Can conditions be improved? Absolutely. Are they ever going to be “humane?” It’s an abattoir, folks. It’s designed for a ruthless efficiency. It’s never going to be a nice place. Slaughtering a dead animal is messy work; ask any hunter who slaughters their own deer. It’s part of the price paid to eat meat and if that really bothers you, you may need to look at being a vegetarian. I don’t have that problem; it’s one of the dirty jobs I pay other people to do.
If someone wants to be a vegetarian or a vegan, fine. That’s their choice. It’s the Veginatics that I have problems with. (I won’t use the term that some do – veggie-nazis. I know what Nazis are and were and I prefer not to diminish the loathing I have for them by applying the terms to those who simply prefer to eat nuts and grains.) It’s the “moral superiority” that some Veginatics have that bugs me. Some seem convinced that they are a better, more evolved, persons than we carnivores.
Professor Eshel struck me as one of these. There is no compromise with a Veginatic. Meat is murder. They have a gleam of truth in their eyes that I see in every fanatical True Believer. What they believe is of less importance that the intensity in which they believe. Choose a position: Meat is murder. The only way to heaven is through Jesus. Death to all infidels. Han Solo shot first. (Well, okay – that last one is True and Death to those who do not agree!) It’s not enough that they have found the truth for themselves. No, brothers and sisters – they have The Truth – whichever version it is that they got – and they have their dogma and you better accept it. They’ll stuff it down your throat for your own good.
It happened back in the Twenties. Alcohol – Demon Rum – was E-Vil and the fanatics in this country forced a Prohibition on its production and sale and consumption. They knew the Truth and they were going to impose it on the nation. The nation said, “hooey” and started getting their booze wherever they could. Crime became Organized, run on the corporate model. The net result was a lot worse than letting people drink some hootch. I think the Veginatics are capable of doing the same thing as their Prohibitionist predecessors. I’m hoping they learn from that example and don’t go that route.
I can learn, too. We eat mostly chicken in our household these days, more pork than beef, and rarely fish. Changing my approach might not be a bad idea; I need to change some of my eating habits anyway. The concept of making meat more as a flavoring in a dish than the center sounds intriguing and would probably benefit our household both economically and health-wise.
But cut out meat entirely? Not in the cards, kiddies. I love the taste, the aroma, the textures. This time of year nothing beats a good pot roast or beef stew. What’s summer without a hamburger right from the grill? No way you can make tofu taste like a really good gyros. I smell bacon and I drool like Homer Simpson. And don’t even get me started on the glories of barbeque or the delight of different regions’ approaches on the subject.
I’m not the only one. For example, the Chinese get 65% of their protein from pork and they’re having a serious pig shortage that had led to swine-napping. I’m not making this up; you can read it here. It’s so serious that the Chinese government is dipping into their Strategic Pork Reserve. (I wish I could make stuff up as good as this!) They fear a general uprising if the people are denied their pork – it might get as ugly as keeping Gold from bbq beef brisket.
Bottom line. For those of you who might not have heard, you’re going to die. Absolutely guaranteed. Something will kill you. It could be old age, it could be the flu, it could be a small blood vessel popping in your brain, it could be a natural disaster or an elected one like our current President. If your best hope is that you get to pick your own poison, why not make it a tasty one? For all their smug assurances, the experts don’t all agree and, despite what they tell you, are not always right.
Me, I’m going to go ahead and have me a bbq beef sammich and if that means somewhere a cow farts, then so be it. Just so long as they don’t fart next to me while I’m eating.
I’m gassy enough on my own.
John Ostrander writes GrimJack: The Manx Cat, new installments of which appear every Tuesday here on ComicMix, and much of Munden’s Bar, new installments of which will reappear anon here on ComicMix. Both for free. His new Suicide Squadmini-series is out there from DC Comics, and his Star Wars: Legacy is out there from Dark Horse, both at finer comics shops across the galaxy.
The vegans I know are not so evangelical about it. They eat what they eat because it makes them feel better. As for me, I don't eat much red meat (I refuse to say I won't eat it, because then I would want it all the time), and it makes me feel better. Maybe I won't live forever, but I'll be happier while I'm here.
Interesting thing about the "eat locally-produced foods" bit – saw an article (on "Huffington Post", maybe?) a while back in which a guy actually looked into the costs associated with that concept and discovered that, on average, buying the evil global conglomerate products was actually less expensive in terms of production and environmental effects…
Good point. A lot of the "solutions" advocated by the Health Police are more expensive — sometimes far more expensive — than the common offerings and the common diet. That's fine if you can afford it and you want to go that way, but these overseers of humanity have got to get it through their heads that a whole lotta people aren't as well off as they are.This elitist attitude is what bothers me about the about the Food Nazis. Just because some people choose to make different decisions doesn't mean they are stupid; even the Food Nazis make decisions that are contrary to their "best" interests.And before I get a shitload of comments, no, I'm not saying all Vegans or all vegetarians are Food Nazis. Just those elitist bastards who look down their nose at those of us who, as Glenn Hauman, Frank McLaughlin, Linda Gold and I will do tonight, choose to have us some awesomely slow-cooked home made barbecue brisket.Hey, it was John's idea!
I eat roadkill. I expect Grell does too. It's got to be fresh! We are not barbarians.
There use to be a cookbook of how you could cook your meat on he carbarator of your car or some such. Had to wrap it up in lots of aluminum foil and you had to have a long trip to make sure everything got cooked. Still, fresh roadkill cooked on the carbarator? I bet you there's some good eating there, Mike. And fresh!
My dream T-shirt is "Anything stupider than me is food".My rule is simple. If a member of a species can tell me in a language I can clearly understand that they don't want to be eaten, I won't. I'll accept one animal speaking for the race so unlike Sean McKeever, I won't eat babies merely because they can't speak to voice their disagreement.There's a lot of meat I won't eat, either because of cultural dictates (dog leaps to mind) or just because there ain't enough meat on them to make it worth it (rabbit, squirrel, etc). Far as I'm concerned, Lobster is the ultimate act of a carnivore. You walk into a restaurant and actually CHOOSE the animal to be killed and cooked for you at your whim. And unlike a steak where there's no real visual connection to the cow that it came from, they bring you the whole lobster, and you rip it open and eat it. Yeah. Mastery over the Earth indeed.
Ever see Peter Davison in the television version (the one worth watching) of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
Pretty much why I use that criteria. I would be there so fast…before PETA came along and said it was bad to eat the poor thing.IMHO, I found the TV version of HHG (while still superior to the film, alas) to be very slow and plodding. A lot of uncomfortable silences in between lines for no reason. A far cry from the rapid patter of the radio show. It's almost as if the TV show had to be a bit longer but they were loath to add any new material, so they just stretched to script out a bit.And Johnathan (The other one) – Seek out a copy of the Arrogant Worms' song "Carrot Juice Is Murder".The House of Sinanju condenses the entire lesson into one phrase – "Death feeds life". It explains both the food chain and why the Master of Sinanju must sell his services as the greatest assassin in the world to feed his humble fishing village.
The connections between meat consumption and obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer are well-documented. Also, Drs. Barnard, Ornish, and Esselstyn, via peer-reviewed research, have successfully reversed diabetes AND the biggest killer of Americans of all: heart disease, through a low-fat vegan diet.Even the National Cancer Institute, no bastion of vegans, recognizes that red meat consumption is related to many cancers (go to their website).But, let's not get science involved in what is a personal decision, right?Which is more expensive, eating organic or local plant-based foods or health care? Which is more radical, cutting open a person's chest for a bypass or avoiding meat?Bon appetite!
You make the choice black and white, i.e. if you eat meat, you will have a bypass. if that were true, Wal-Mart would be offering cut-rate bypasses with every half a cow you buy.
Meat is murder – and right tasty murder, at that!Hey, I've raised my own beef and pork, raised and slaughtered my own rabbits and chickens (and discovered that skinning the chicken during slaughter is a *much* more efficient method of getting the feathers off than the traditional, bad-smelling "boiling" method) – I readily admit that I like meat, and that something has to die in order for me to eat it.And the same is true of vegetables! Are plants not living beings? Are we supposed to ignore their innate right to existence, simply because they can't walk away? Thousands of heads of lettuce are ripped mercilessly from their roots every day, to satisfy the barbaric appetites of the vegetarians for their plant-death salads. (Some brands of lettuce even brag that their product is still alive! You don't even kill it before eating it!)I grew up in a heavily-forested region. One of the early lessons I learned by observing it is that all life exists at the expense of other life. Little songbirds eat insects. Cats eat mice and songbirds. Even baby trees grow best when rooted in the fallen corpses of their predecessors (euphemistically called "nurse trees"). Why should I feel guilty because I prefer motile non-sentients to sessile?
Back in the days when millions of bison roamed free, millions of wildebeest and the great caribou herds frolicked, when elephants were in large numbers or even further back with the woolly mastodons, mammoths, rhino and all those other big sized herd mammals….there had to be a lot of farting going on. How is it that cows are going to be the demise of us all with their methane output when there were more bigger grass eaters back then and in huge mind boggling numbers? numbers before the invention of repeating rifle. I think cows are getting a bad rap, I think someone’s trying to frame them! I think it’s like people who eat beans and then blame the dog for the stink . I lived on a cattle farm too and I’m the first to admit that the smell a flatulent cow can make your nose hairs fall right out of your head…..but it isn’t as scary as the smells that comes out of Gary Illinois and Newark NJ. ….who started and got paid money for doing this cow fart study?
Ahhh… if we could only harness that force for good!
oops, meant Gary Indiana!
I think the cattle farts and belches are just the thing that gets the blame instead of the real argument, which is that millions of acres of forest and jungle have been lost in order to make grazing land for cattle.And who is to say that the dinosaurs DIDN'T become extinct because of gaseous emissions?
My problem with eating meat (pork, chicken, goat, mutton, beef, turkey), dairy and eggs is the environmental pressures placed on having to feed the livestock. Meat is ecologically wasteful, as livestock such as cows only retain 3% of the energy they acquire from food (the rest of the energy is excreted). It makes much more sense to eat insects (as many people do throughout the world), small-scale aquatic life (i.e. dried anchovies/sardines, oyesters, shrimp etc.) and peanuts as sources of protein. The smaller an organism is, the more energy efficient it is (insects retain 20-30% of the energy they acquire from food). Grasshoppers I heard taste like shrimp, mopane worms have three times the protein value as beef per unit weight and sago grubs I heard taste like pork fat.Now, once the supermarkets start selling grasshoppers, then I will start eating insects.
You "heard" that them bugs tastes like those goodies, huh? Come back when you've put 'em in your own mouth, grubwrangler.
I've had sauteed grasshoppers and some kind of grubs. Plus chocolate-covered ants. They were all good. The key, I think, for people who haven't had them before, is to cook them in some kind of fat.
I grew up in the Ring of Fire and the first time I saw plates with slabs of meat on them, I couldn't figure out why people would like that.John, I have three cookbooks to recommend. None of them are vegetarian, but they all rely more on grains and veggies than meat: The Spice Is Right – Easy Indian Cooking for Today, Extending the Table (World Community Cookbook), and Bean, Pea & Lentil Cookbook. That last appears to be out of print.
Man, it boggles the mind to think that the mass extinction of about (maybe, I'm not googling it, ya bastards) 65 million years ago could have been not the result of a meteor strike, but an excess of dino-flatulence.Me, I'm a card-carrying member of P.E.T.A. (People Eating Tasty Animals). In fact, just reading this op/ed piece is giving me the steak cravings.Thanks to my wife, we do try to shop for local, organic beef (as opposed to all the inorganic stuff out there), but I'm pretty sure that Jack In The Box doesn't do that, and there's just no way in the Nine Worlds that I'm giving up my Ultimate Cheeseburger for the sake of the planet Earth. Sorry, guys.
Oh pooh. None of those links worked. I'll give them here:http://www.amazon.com/Spice-Right-Indian-Cooking-…http://www.amazon.com/Extending-Table-World-Commu…http://www.amazon.com/Bean-Pea-Lentil-Cookbook/dp…
I L I K E B A C O N!
The first thing my Dad taught me to cook (at 10 yrs old) was that most wonderful of the breakfast meats, bacon. I treat myself to a bacon and peanut butter sandwich on toasted wheat bread (make sure to butter the toast!) whenever I want a childhood delicacy. Nitrates be damned. To echo Michael: I L I K E B A C O N!
Yes, me too, but even when I could cook, I got burned too often, so I usually had it out.
Johhny, A meat-eatin' man after my own heart–or is that my lower intestine? I'm on my way out to Khan Barbeque on Devon–a Pakistani charred meat palace, and I ain't orderin' the spinach. I do use meat "as a flavoring" a lot at home–a little goes a long way to flavor a sauce–but mostly I do it because I'm an artist and perpetually poor. If I won the lottery I'd fly to Hong Kong tommorrow and live on Peking Duck and spicy beef. But I do worry about the flesh-eating rivers of pork run-off…
1) I recently heard somewhere (and no, I don't feel like googling either) that (I believe it was Greenpeace) was recommending that Australia kill off almost all of the herds of kangaroos that are bouncing around the outback in order to reduce the amount of greeenhouse gases (and why are they called greenhouse gases anyways? Any greenhouse I've ever been in didn't have them inside) from their burping and farting. As of when I heard this story there had been no comment from PETA (not Stephen's, the opther one)…2) I always found it interesting that we had all those herds of buffalo provided by God here in America, a much healthier source of red meat than cattle, and yet man, in our infinite wisdom and superiority, replaced them with cattle. Food for thought, so to speak.
Ted Turner's opened up a chain of somewhat-overpriced restaurants that features buffalo meat. I've been wanting to check it out, but the ones I've seen always seem to be around the corner from my favorite cattle joint, Weber Grill — owned by Weber grill and grilled on same.
My favorite shirt of all time had the following written on it: Meat is Murder. Tasty, Tasty, Murder.