The Pleasures of Eating, Veganism, and Industrial Meat and Diary

 

Animal cruelty. Both in the capitalist food industry and in general, to dogs and cats and many other creatures. That is one of those things that is too horrible for me to think about. If I were king of the world and could stop it, I would.  But horrors that only send me into deep depression and revulsion over my species, I have to block to function. Horrors I can't change at all. Or horrors I could opt out of but can't bring myself to without depression. Actually, there is a big difference between the two. "I cannot bear to contemplate this constantly; therefore, I continue to participate in it" – the conclusion does not follow from the premise. Simone Weil calls this the  limits of attention, Raimond Gaita the inability to remain fully present to every instance of suffering, and I am guilty of it. If I buy factory-farmed dairy, my individual abstention changes almost nothing, true. Yet it is still true that I am participating in the practice. I have long thought and made many arguments for doing what is right even when our action has almost no measurable effect. 

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Still, it is complex.  Centuries and centuries of dietary habits and culture, natural to our species in the sense that animals and diary were essential parts of people's diet. True, tradition by itself is not justification. The obvious analogy is slavery, for centuries slavery was woven into ordinary life, which in no way justifies it of course. The point I want to make is different. Human beings evolved within mixed agricultural cultures where relationships with domesticated animals formed part of ordinary life. Human beings did not merely consume animal products for millennia; they developed forms of life in which husbandry, dairying, cooking, feasting, and the pleasures of eating became woven into family life, hospitality, celebration, memory, and culture. These are not merely biological habits but elements of human flourishing. To relinquish them is therefore not like changing brands of toothpaste. It can feel like relinquishing part of one's way of inhabiting the world. I could go on and on about the meaning of food in my life and how it connected and connects to my great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, whole family, local culture. It gives roots. It is a part of who I am, who we are.

     You can live biologically without diary, say, just as you can live without physical love just fine or only engage in it to procreate. But the pleasure of eating is a part of Lebensfreude (joy of life) for most people (as the pleasure of physical love is for others, apart from its biological function). I just made the point that this pleasure can go deep, that such people are not pure selfish hedonists, that the pleasure is bound up with meaning and flows into the love of life and the world. Giving up those pleasures can therefore depress people, which is also not a justification of them, strictly speaking. There are people that get nothing from sex and so celibacy takes nothing away from life. I almost want to say some people know no such pleasure in food as I have described, are celibate with respect to food, so to speak.  Such people could condemn without knowing exactly what they were condemning. They could condemn out of resentment even. Which again, doesn’t entail their veganism is wrong.

     Some vegans no doubt act against meat-eating from deeper moral sources, the love of animals, the hatred of cruelty, the love of the world and even humanist. They may move us sinner to have a guilty conscience, as did the Abolitionists those who tolerated slavery. Some advocates communicate in ways that express moral superiority, and that often provokes resistance rather than reflection; their self-righteousness makes most sinners hate them, seeing it as an “I am better than you” thing. Regardless, there is a deeply moral and theological issue there. (Of course, there are also self-righteous Christians, environmentalists, conservatives, and progressives. That is not peculiar to veganism. That is just human-all-too-human.)

  I am saying that the human pleasure of eating is a complex personal and cultural good. That is compatible with saying that sometimes genuine goods should nevertheless be sacrificed. But again, it is not like changing toothpastes. Sharing meals, cooking, the wonders of taste, celebration, memories, and more – this belongs to human flourishing. But why should pleasure outweigh animal suffering? I do not claim that it does.  The tragedy is that industrial agriculture has placed these two goods of the care for animals and the genuine pleasures of eating  in conflict. Eating cheese in itself is not what troubles me. What troubles me is that the cheese available today is often produced within a system that is, objectively, morally compromised.

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      Gluttony – love of food superseding love of higher things – is a sin. I’ll spend a million years with the Gluttons in Purgatory, no doubt – and I don’t intend that to be flippant. I am guilty of gluttony to some extent and that does detract from, alienate me to an extent from, my life with food, my culture of food.

     Moving the world toward organic farming and much less meat and diary is a reasonable goal for me. I cannot see that “meat is murder.” I think of Cora Diamond’s thought of the horror at seeing chickens in cages on a truck transport, but then the qualitatively different horror of seeing a human toddler in one of those cages. It is simply not intelligible for me to confess before a priest to the murder of a chicken after eating chicken soup for a cold, or be tried by a jury and sentenced to prison. It is intelligible to confess for participating in what I witnessed of a factory slaughterhouse for chickens when I was eleven years old. That was a desecration. Despite seeing with my own eyes those horrors, I still eat chicken soup, often not with organic chicken because I cannot afford it and yet am not willing or able to live without it.

     I think, if things go well, in 100 years or so people will recoil in horror from our treatment of animals as we recoil from the medieval practice of torture. Think of how we now regard public executions, slavery, child labor, bear-baiting, or certain medical experiments. I suspect they will judge factory farming in the same way.

      To me this is really about two competing intuitions. One is almost Platonic or Christian: namely, love should widen until it includes vulnerable creatures. The other is that we are also creatures of this world, creatures of the flesh, who need to love life and the world to flourish. And bodily pleasure, subjected to cultural restraints, to moral restraints, to community and ecological restraints, bind us to the earth and to life. Hard for us alienated folk dominated by capitalism to grasp that.

   In me there is a tension between two extremes, moral purity and moral complacency. I believe that there is real guilt, real tragedy, and real human weakness in these matters, and that we must try our best to live honestly in the lives we were thrown into to, so to speak. A critic may conclude that this honesty does not excuse continued participation in factory farming. But I do not think they could accuse me or people like me of indifference. This is moral disagreement and not rationalization.

    Again I think of  Wendell Berry. Berry criticizes industrial animal agriculture like few others but he would resist reducing eating to nutrient intake. A meal belongs to an ecology of home, land, friendship, gratitude, and memory. I also think of Aristotle, who does not think the pleasures accompanying good activities are embarrassing additions to life. Rather, the right pleasures complete the activity. The pleasure of a shared meal, like the pleasure of friendship or music, is part of the flourishing life. That does not settle the ethical question, but it explains why asking someone to give it up is asking for a genuine sacrifice, not merely a dietary adjustment.

 

There is also an important distinction between asceticism from puritanism. The Christian tradition has always valued fasting and renunciation. But the purpose is not that food is bad. Quite the opposite. Food is good enough that voluntarily giving it up can become a spiritual discipline. If cheese were morally equivalent to poison, abstaining from it would have little significance. The sacrifice presupposes the goodness of the thing sacrificed. I am saying that delight in food belongs to gratitude for creation. The danger is not delight itself but what the Christian tradition calls gluttony, that is, allowing the love of food to displace the love of higher goods. The deepest tension is that industrial dairying/meat involves suffering that corrupt precisely those goods of gratitude and delight. One might therefore say that the problem is not cheese but the conditions under which much modern cheese is produced. The answer is not necessarily never to eat cheese again, but to recover forms of agriculture in which our delight in food is no longer purchased at the cost of hidden cruelty. Whether that recovery is practically possible on a large scale is another question, but philosophically it is a coherent aspiration.

   Finally, I think of the Christian concept of repentance, which does not necessarily require immediate perfection but for starters refusing to lie to oneself about the good.