all the food that's fit to print The Education Issue - Slow Food

Letters
The snail | Spring 2008
4
Animal, Vegetable; Right and Wrong
It’s an interesting spread in the Winter Snail: Joel Salatin
and his sustainably-raised pigs in verso; Peter Singer
and Jim Mason with their bioethical conundrums
in recto. I wasn’t sure, though, what this particular
argument was doing in the American Food Traditions
issue of the magazine, since Singer and Mason’s
vegetarian fundamentalism is a challenge to all
American food traditions and a celebration of none.
They ask, “Does eating only humanely raised
animals allow an impregnable defense of one’s diet?”
This is a profoundly inappropriate question for a
number of reasons, but principally because it makes
the category error of treating evolutionary biology as
a moral issue. It is one thing to question the ethics of
Smithfield’s cruel, toxic and unsustainable practices—it
is quite another to extend those questions to the
six million-year history of the omnivorous diet of
hominids. Vegetarianism is like celibacy—it may be
attractive to some, and even healthy for some, but you
can’t make the case that it’s morally inevitable.
Singer and Mason also ask why Michael Pollan’s
evident objections to killing don’t apply to animals.
I’d ask why they don’t apply to broccoli. The standard
answer is that vegetables are not sentient, but the fact
is that all life forms express their preference for life and
do whatever they can to avoid death, so if we base our
diets on the preferences of the life forms we eat, we’re
going to be hungry. The real difference between animals
and vegetables is that animals, especially mammals,
express their preferences in ways that remind us of
us—we look in their eyes and see ourselves there.
That’s anthropomorphism, not ethics; it’s an aesthetic
preference and doesn’t belong in a serious discussion of
food policy.
I personally have no interest in eating dog or
horse—dogs and horses are my friends and allies, not
my dinner—but I recognize that this isn’t a matter of
ethics, it’s a matter of culture. I also have no appetite
for chimp, or whale; I’m not eating an animal with
whom I could have a conversation, and the very idea is
so disturbing to me that I’m tempted to do violence to
prevent others from eating them. But I forbear, because
once again I understand that my worldview is different
from that of the Inuit who depend on the whale, or the
Congolese who appreciate bush meat.
Here of course we run into an interesting confluence
of problems: chimpanzees are endangered, and the hunt
for bush meat is threatening their survival as a species,
just as the Japanese whale hunt threatens the humpback.
These practices should be stopped, but they should be
stopped because they are unsustainable and threaten the
planet’s biodiversity, not because they are distasteful to
Westerners. This is an important distinction that we in
the food movement need to understand and respect.
The point here is that the Slow Food agenda,
which includes the quality of the food produced,
the sustainability of the practices used, and the fair
compensation of all involved, is a solid foundation on
which to build a dietary ethic; evangelical vegetarianism
is not. The former is a big tent; it has room for the
wide world of diets and cultures and foodways, and
its pragmatic sense of right and wrong distinguishes
quite reasonably between what Joel Salatin is doing
on Polyface Farm and the horror being wrought by
Smithfield. The latter is a narrow, aesthetic view that
presumes to judge the entire history of human eating
as morally deficient. Vegetarianism as a lifestyle choice
is just fine, but if what we want is to build a worldwide,
sustainable and reliable food system, moralistic
vegetarianism is a dog that won’t hunt.
David Berman
Slow Food NYC
Your selection of the Peter Singer/Jim Mason excerpt
leaves this reader and new member bemused,
confounded, disappointed, and wondering if I should
ask for a refund of my membership dollars. Your
magazine missed an incredible opportunity to use
the Producer/Co-producer juxtaposition to strengthen
bonds between local artisanal farmers and informed
patrons. Instead, we’re presented with a very weak
attempt at some type of point/counterpoint that pits
the so-called “co-producer” against the producer and
leaves us with the distinct impression that Slow Food
thinks we should seriously consider veganism as an
alternative diet. Given that Singer himself uses the
political tactic of bifurcation to draw an enthusiastic
following, it’s no wonder that one of his apparent
followers has selected the approach here—including a
faith-bashing, ad-hominem (“speciesist”) attack on a
man who’s given his life to redemption of the soil.
The disinformation regarding the protein production
capacity of land with animals versus crops is also
disappointing (comparing industrial crop production
yields to extensive ranging!). Please become informed
of modern grass-based husbandry methods, including
management intensive grazing (MiG) and ultra-high
stocking density (UHSD), their analog in wild herd