Home Page  Food Looking Your Food in the Face
|
Looking Your Food in the Face |
|
|
|
Written by Jackie Gorman
|
|
Tuesday, 30 November 2004 |
Recent experience of selling organic meat at various farmers markets has caused
me to really think about how meat is perceived by most consumers. I have become
acutely aware of how the world of meat-eaters is divided into two very distinct
camps - those who love to know where it is coming from and want to know lots about
its provenance (and thus have no qualms about their carnivore-ness decision).
Then there are those who squirm if you make any reference to the fact that the
lovely sausages they are buying came from a pig. I thought that people would like
to know we keep happy free-range pigs which are in contact with the sun, the earth
and the gaze of a farmer who enjoys their antics.
The squeamish reaction of those buying meat at the mention of the live animal
is really starting to bug me as it indicates how distant people have become from
food production. We buy cartoon shaped chicken or fluorescent pink sausages in
the supermarket and never think that it came from a real live animal. We are divorced
from our meat, no longer recognizing it as food in its original form; we pay others
to kill for us so that we can retain the luxury of detachment. Pigs, cows and
sheep are now pork, beef and mutton, words that no longer signify the living animal,
but familiar, neatly portioned slabs of food in clean styro-foam packages.
We have successfully forgotten on a polite cultural level that these foods were
ever attached to living animals. Accepting and acknowledging that you take life
when you eat meat is, I believe, healthier and more ethical than trying to hide
your head in the sand and live in denial of the consequences of your dietary habits.
Making an informed choice about meat involves a moral honesty in a very relativist
world.
However, using animals to produce meat doesn’t mean treating the animals
as mere products in the making. For example, Pigs are very smart creatures (remember
"Animal Farm") and it’s hard not to be entertained by their antics.
I do resist sentimentality though when I see them on the farm (my partner takes
this to its extreme by admiring in fond tones the development of their hams).
I take the view that good husbandry need not exclude the possibility of playtime.
On one of those fiery hot days last May, we hosed them down and they loved it,
jumping among the jets of water like they were moshing at a rock concert. They
then rolled around in the mud in a fashion that would make any hard-core outdoor
concert goer proud. I guess some might take the view that it is easier to be responsible
for ending the life of an animal if it is a dull, confined and miserable one,
than if it is a fulfilled, free and natural one. I don’t think so.
Several years ago, the English Philosopher John Berger wrote a wonderful 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 honour and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty
much broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away and continue to eat
meat reluctantly or become vegetarians.
Ideally, you should eat meat with a clear conscience or become a vegetarian (or
vegan, who to their credit see that the dairy industry is the meat industry or
at least the beef industry). If you do choose to eat meat, it should be in a meaningful,
responsible and aware fashion. At its best meat eating can be a responsible, tasty
and informed choice. Meat eating can be at its worst: a shameful expression of
greed, indifference and heartlessness. Do you really want the ?3.99 Chicken that
seems such great value in the supermarket, when the Chicken has lived a dark,
short, miserable life ? Or do you really want the ?5.00 Pork Steak that’s
on offer this week, when the pig has been living in a small enclosed space with
all of its natural instincts denied ?
We should as consumers be concerned about how animals have been treated, how they
lived and what they were fed. The best meat comes from animals which were cared
for by someone who respects them and enjoys contact with them. The best way to
ensure this is to buy directly from the farmer who produces it, either at farmers
markets, farm gate sales or box schemes. Cut out the middle-man – he has
no purpose but to keep you ill-informed.
I'm tempted to think that we need a new dietary category, to go with the vegan
and lacto vegetarian and piscatorian categories. I don't have a catchy name for
it yet (humano-carnivore?), but this is the only sort of meat eating I feel comfortable
with these days. I've become the sort of shopper who looks, who likes to know
where it all comes from and who asks kinky-sounding questions about how the animals
are killed and how long the meat was hung for.
People see very different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a chicken
or a heifer -- a being without a soul, an animal entitled to rights, a link in
a food chain, a tasty lunch. But figuring out what we do think, and what we can
eat, might begin with the looking. If you accept that there is any moral content
at all in the way we treat animals, then you must accept that there is a moral
dimension in your dealings with meat. Please think about it, don’t evade
it.
|
|
|
| The local planet |
Fivealley
Birr
Co. Offaly
Ireland
Email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Tel. 057 9133119/ 9133985 / 9133962 Fax: 057 9133985 | | |
|
MA in Ecology & Religion |
|
Part-Time Ma Programme in Ecology and Religion
- Science & Religion with John Feehan
- Ecology & Economics with Richard Douthwaite
- The Ecological State of Our Planet and Country with Sean McDonagh
- Ecology and The Bible with Sean Freyne
Further information from: The MA Admissions Office, IMU Institute, Dalgan Park, Navan, Co. Meath. Tel. 046 9021525 (ext. 332)
Email
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
|
|
