On Eating Animals (Part 2)
“It’s a classic dilemma: How much do I value creating a socially comfortable situation and how much do I value acting socially responsible” –Jonathan Safran Foer
Warning: This post contains graphic descriptions of the killing of animals for food. However, if you eat meat I strongly urge you to find the strength to read on.
If you missed “Part 1”, you can find it here, including a somber statistic from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals: “Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed.”
As I’ve been re-entering the world both socially and professionally after shuttering my butchery, the biggest question I’m personally trying to answer is this: Is it possible for me to use my experiences and expertise to support the struggling small food economy and the farmers who are raising meat with ethics and consideration for the land and our future without simply promoting the eating of animals?
I re-wrote “Part 2” three times, considering this question and why it matters to me, before settling on the words you’ll find below. I am openly reminding myself that an intention of this newsletter is for it to be an ongoing conversation, that imperfection is acceptable, and that my thoughts don’t all have to be captured or completely processed before hitting “publish”.
Thank you for reading and for just being here.
XX, Heather
One Spring day, way back in 2004, I was walking through McCarren Park in Brooklyn when someone handed me a flier encouraging me to sign up for a CSA1. I was twenty-four years old, living with my boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband Brad, learning how to make a living on my own, trying to create a home, and cooking my heart out to feed the two of us on a tight grocery budget. I remember calculating that it would be a squeeze to scrape up the cash to pay for the season in advance, but joining the CSA promised us many meals worth of produce, fresh from the farm, for less than $30/week. I signed up because it was a good deal.
Over the coming months, the CSA gave us a reason to visit the farmers’ market for our pickup each week. We would return home with an abundance of fruit and vegetables, some of which I have never tasted, let alone cooked before (hello kohlrabi!). It encouraged me to find new recipes and build a repertoire of cooking and preservation techniques. As summer turned to Fall, our way of eating fell into tune with the seasons, and it would never turn back. I began to purchase more of our food directly from farmers, not just produce, meat and dairy too, learning as I went from the people who dedicated their lives to growing and producing the ingredients I was cooking. There was value in spending a few more dollars on food that had meaning to me.
I would cook my first locally-raised turkey for my friends that Thanksgiving, and over the years to come I would join more CSAs, continue to be a regular at the farmers’ market, become a member of my neighborhood food co-op, and build a relationship with my local food community. One of my favorite farmers, Ray, was a chef who had retired into growing vegetables, and he also raised a small group of heritage pigs in the woods each year. Brad and I traded him graphic design services for food. We set up an email newsletter and website, and I created things like labels for his pickles and preserves in exchange for credit at his farm stand. It was through Ray that I would learn just how broken and unsupportive our food supply chain is for small livestock farmers trying to sell directly to their customers (of which I was now a dedicated one).
Small meat processors have become close to irrelevant in our industrial food economy, where the majority of livestock is raised and processed in massive corporate-owned factories. Independent slaughterhouses and butchers that provide these services have dwindled to be few and far between, with just a handful in most states. Those that remain are overbooked and unable to custom-cut for the small farmer who manages to schedule a coveted spot to harvest a group of animals for the freezer once or twice a year. So when Ray’s pigs grew quickly and were way too fat by their harvest date, or when the same handful of pork cuts that no customers wanted were left in the freezer with each group, there were no options to change the schedule or switch up the butchery. There just wasn’t the capacity to do so.
I tell this origin story to help you to understand how personal food sourcing became to me, and why in my early thirties, I had an epiphany: I needed to become a butcher. By this time I knew more about the evils of industrial food production (have you seen Food Inc.?) and saw first-hand how the American food system largely fails to support small farmers whose livelihood depends on the customer who will go the extra mile to find them and pay the extra dollar for what they sell. I didn’t decide I wanted to learn the craft of whole animal butchery because I loved meat. In fact, my diet at the time was primarily vegetarian with local eggs and just one or two-meals per week featuring a piece of pasture-raised pork or beef I had splurged on. I wanted to have a more direct hand in supporting and promoting regenerative farming practices and I believed I could be a restorative link in a broken chain.
Making a career shift into an industry where you have no professional experience, and there are no schools to gain the necessary experience, is hard. I sent many unanswered requests to train in exchange for my labor (and would receive just as many from aspiring butchers years later). In the winter of 2012, I paid a not insignificant sum of money to spend a week at a butcher shop in upstate New York, during which I stood in the rain and watched a pig be shot with a rifle, bled, scalded, and eviscerated on a nearby farm. Over several days I had the opportunity to take a knife to flesh, opening my eyes to just how much craft there was to learn, but also recognizing in myself that yes, I could do this. I returned home realizing I needed to understand the role farmers played in raising the animals that laid before me on the butcher block.
Soon after, I found myself walking through the woods with a young farmer named Brooks in Central Pennsylvania, talking about what brought me there as we hauled fence posts out the back of his pickup truck. I wanted to learn how to raise animals right and develop the skills to turn them into nourishing food. Like him, I wanted to help leave the land better than we found it. And if that meant learning how to build fences, I wanted to do that too. That Spring, I said goodbye to my home and my graphic design business in Brooklyn, both of which I shared with my husband, and committed to an eight month season as a livestock farm apprentice in pursuit of these goals. I had been promised food and lodging in exchange for my work, and lived in an old trailer with two other male interns, a compost toilet, and no shower, which was permanently parked in the corner of a pasture where beef, sheep, and chickens alternately moved through for grazing.
North Mountain Pastures has a meat CSA, and raises all species of animals on pasture using rotational grazing methods2 (and a whole lot of sweat and muscle) to improve the farm’s land. This practice rebuilds depleted topsoil while providing the animals room to roam and graze until they are grown enough to be harvested. As I trained through the daily chores of livestock management, starting with feeding and watering the chicks that would become broilers and then rotating the broiler chickens themselves on pasture, I quickly learned the gruesome truths of mortality in farming. Even when the animals are raised ethically, even without slaughter and butchery, there is death. Once, when the propane for the brooder heater accidentally ran out, the chicks smothered each other to death seeking warmth overnight. Rats, hawks, and foxes were all predators we battled, as was mother nature herself. Later that summer, we spent a somber morning walking the hill, picking carcasses up off the pasture where turkeys had drowned to death in an unrelenting overnight storm.
The grief over these losses pained me more than the task of rounding up a group of pigs from the woods to send to the butcher, or the weekly ritual of harvesting the broilers. When it was my turn in the rotation as chicken killer, I would be up before dawn, quietly preparing to take the lives of the animals we would turn into food for our customers and ourselves. I was determined to maintain a respectable pace killing, scalding, and plucking to keep up with the rest of the farm butcher team as they worked their way through eviscerating, chilling, packaging, weighing, and labeling hundreds of bird carcasses by mid-day if all went well. I would do my best to pause, take a breath, and honor each bird before slitting its throat. Sometimes we would eat chicken for lunch or dinner that day if there were birds that for one reason or another seemed compromised for our paying customers due to a broken bone or some badly torn skin. Nothing was wasted. But this was perhaps the only occasion where I might not have an appetite for chicken, because the smell of death still lingered in my nostrils.
It wasn’t all so intense. There was joy in the daily animal husbandry too. My favorite part of the farm was a sizable area of cleared woodlot under the trees, just a quick stroll from the trailer en route to the main farm house, so I was always passing by. This is where the sows (aka mama pigs) lived3 with whatever current litters of piglets were on the farm. Here the baby pigs would spend the first part of their lives sleeping, drinking mother’s milk, and playing as we waited a few months for them to get big and strong enough to be weaned4 so they could join the herd that we moved through the woods. I loved building relationships with the sows, getting the massive animals to know and trust me, always being mindful of who was on edge and guarding a fresh, or soon to arrive, litter to give that sow the space and sense of safety she needed. I prided myself on being a calm presence to this group of hard-working mothers that were the lifeblood of the farm, producing the pigs we would raise to feed so many people.
When my parents traveled from New Jersey to the farm for a visit that summer, I gave them a tour of my new home. After we left “the nursery” where I introduced them to the sows, my mom observed how much I cared for these animals, and said she didn’t understand how I could raise pigs just to kill them. How did I do it? I told her it was the intended plan for them from birth. Our goal was to raise happy healthy animals for nutritious food, and this was all just part of the process. I was committed to supporting regenerative agriculture, where the health of the land and the animals are inseparable, and I had come to accept the circle of life for livestock.
The following Winter I relocated my life again, this time including Brad, our pets, and pretty much all of our earthly belongings, to pursue the next opportunity in my evolution. As an apprentice butcher at The Local Butcher Shop in Berkeley, California, it was my respect for the animals that impeded the pace of my training. After that season on the farm, I had too personal a vision of where the meat had come from–the efforts of the farmers and the lives of the animals that resulted in this sacrifice before me. I lacked the unchecked confidence of the other (male) butchers in the shop who could take a knife to the meat without worrying that a missed cut might cause waste, ruin the roast or the steaks, and sacrifice the cut to ground meat therefore lessening its value and ultimately putting the sustainability of the whole low-margin operation at risk. Slow and steady was my pace.
While I would eventually catch up to the butchers around me with speed, and surpass many of them with the precision, smooth muscle memory, and attention to detail that my time as a dancer and a graphic designer afforded me, for months I was frustrated. My mentor Bill would take me into the walk-in cooler and encourage me to take a pass at cutting down a side of beef off the rail before one of the guys came in to do it. “Just treat it like it’s a rental car and go for it”5 he would say, but I would hesitate. I would continue to hesitate as I progressed from apprentice to butcher, until I was the manager of a small butcher shop within a restaurant and had the singular responsibility of butchering a cooler full of whole animal carcasses fast enough to sell them before they spoiled and would be wasted. That lit a fire under my ass.
I kept learning, practiced to the level of “master” butcher, and eventually founded my own butchery business, supporting local, pasture-based farmers in Philadelphia. My butcher shops were welcoming, beautiful places where you could support sustainable agriculture by buying pasture-raised meat. In the years that followed I convinced my overwhelmed self that I only have so much time and energy in this life to learn and share, and so I chose to focus on the positive, to support the alternative. I was a soldier in the local food movement, championing sustainability. I knew the industrial evils were out there, but I didn’t think I needed to paint vivid pictures of depressed sows confined in farrowing cages or of steers being skinned alive to defend my “why”.
I didn’t strike up difficult conversations about the realities of industrial meat production over the butcher counter, or at the dinner table. I provided an ethical alternative for my family, my friends, and my customers. I fed and nourished them, while making it easy for us to all look away from the feedlots and factory “farms” that hold 99% of the meat market share, growing and thriving while the other 1% struggles to the point of failure. Was I really an evangelist? Was I a change maker? Or was I just a masochistic doer, a generous manifester? I saved others from the work of having to really think about the fact that eating meat is eating animals, or the need to always question where they’re coming from. They didn’t have to, because I provided access and separated the ugly and the beautiful in the process.
More than a decade after my farming season, I sat around the table with my family serving them grilled pork spare ribs coated in sticky sweet BBQ sauce. They asked me how I cooked them, what was my secret to making them delicious, and could I expand on the difference between spare ribs and baby backs? But no one asked me about where the meat came from, or to explain what inputs from the farming and raising of the animal produces the best meat. When I had stood in the kitchen earlier that day, unwrapping and seasoning the sides of ribs on the cutting board, I imagined the animals. I could see the ribs as part of the whole carcass, noting that my family would be consuming two pigs worth of spare ribs that day. I have never stopped thinking of the animals.
Why didn’t I make the people around me answer the hard questions I asked myself when I took up this work? Why did I accept the fact that most people eat meat, drink milk, cook with eggs, and enjoy cheese without concern for the animals they come from? Instead of openly questioning or fighting this unethical sub-standard, I tried to save the animals and the land by providing, cooking, and serving a sustainable alternative. But now that I live in a world without Primal Supply Meats, where most grocery stores and restaurants offer options to support the 99%, meat from animals raised in CAFOs6 surrounds me. I fear a dystopian future where 100% of our meat supply comes from factories. Should this happen, I will mourn the loss of family-owned farms and rich green pastures, not the loss of eating steaks or cheeseburgers, as I join the ranks of ethical vegans.
Without a business behind me, doing the work of upholding a sustainable supply chain for my city, how I spend my own dollars and what I choose to individually purchase and eat is the only power I have. And while I can personally take a stance and opt out of consuming industrial meat, I’m still struggling with being the person who brings this stance to the dinner table. My hesitation stems from concern that I’ll make someone else uncomfortable while breaking bread together, in a moment when the goal is to be comfortable and to share. And what am I supposed to do in the face of generosity? When someone serves you food that was paid for by the lives of animals, people, the planet, and our future, do you accept it? Because let me tell you, doing so can easily ruin my meal.
Why do I hold the guilt for negatively impacting someone else’s experience because I eat with ethics and don’t want to support the factory farming system through consumption? If I had these conversations more often, would it successfully filter my dining companions so that soon I won’t have to prepare a preface in order to ask that we order from a restaurant menu like vegetarians? Would we all just share the same values, at least while we’re together? Does my next phase of impact start with standing my ground and asking my companions to consider the food on their plates, one meal at a time? If everyone imagined the animals, taking count of the number of chickens who spent their lives suffering in confinement to make that cheap basket of wings, would they still be hungry for so much meat?
Before you eat your next meal with meat at the center of your plate, I’ll ask you to do this: Imagine the lives of the animals you’re about to consume. If you can’t (or don’t want to), it’s probably time to face your food and learn more about where your meat comes from.
***
Did you read all this way hoping I’d have answers? I’m sorry, I don’t. I didn’t solve any of the systemic problems facing sustainable farmers or small meat processors, and after nearly a two-decade journey I’ve arrived at more questions and frustrations. But perhaps I’ve managed to influence you to reconsider your habits around meat. To eat less7, to spend more, and maybe go out of your way to find a new source that offers truly pasture-raised and ethical options. To support the 1%.
If you’re willing to treat meat like the precious commodity that it is, start by finding a direct line to a farmer who raises meat right. At the farmers’ market you can ask questions. If you don’t have a farmers market near you (Are you sure? Have you done a google search?), order online directly from a small farmer with sustainable and transparent practices. The shipping will cost you a few extra bucks, but in the post-pandemic world there are more real options for this than ever.
And take note: With the help of infinite ad budgets and lobbying dollars, the factory farming industry is going to keep trying to convince you that they’re raising meat right. That they care about animals, the planet, and you. It’s a lie. They don’t. Unfortunately this makes navigating grocery stores and labels daunting. For more ideas and info about how to buy good meat, check out this link–the Good Meat Project is an excellent resource.
Once you have ethical meat in your kitchen, I’ll ask you again to imagine the animal. Think about all of the resources that went into the food in your hands, cook it with care and ever don’t waste it. It will nourish your body and your soul.
In my next newsletter I’ll share my favorite recipe for spreading joy while stretching meat to feed a crowd. It starts with grass-fed ground beef–one of the cheapest cuts that helps any farmer or butcher avoid waste by utilizing all the bits and pieces of the animals that aren’t suitable as steaks or roasts.
What I’m Currently Consuming
I am a huge fan of Lisa Held whose writing for Civil Eats is deeply researched and enlightening. I was captivated by her recent article, “Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape”.
I adored the latest newsletter from
, “Food and Friends”, about Simone “Simca” Beck’s memoir by the same title, and especially Simca’s reflections from celebrating her first American Thanksgiving with Paul and Julia Child (btw, I can’t wait to dig into season two of Julia on MAX).Speaking of Julia, I recently had the honor of interviewing Lidia Bastianich (it was a joy and you can watch it on youtube). In my research I found my way to Julia Child’s “Cooking With Master Chefs” series. Brad and I have since been watching our way through all of them and I cannot recommend this activity enthusiastically enough. As a house of bread, our jaws were on the floor watching a young Nancy Silverton taste her way through various stages of her homemade sourdough starter.
Our most recent watch of Jaque and Julia preparing a lobster souffle together was so endearing, and yet the graphic demonstration of processing the lobsters had me cringing and thinking again about the essay by David Foster Wallace, “Consider The Lobster” (originally published in Gourmet Magazine while it was helmed by the one and only
in 2004).
CSA stands for “Community Supported Agriculture”. This is direct marketing and sales strategy for small farms in which a group of members subscribe and pay up front at the start of a season to receive a weekly share of the harvest. The farm is supported by the upfront cash, allowing them to invest in seeds, infrastructure, and other operation expenses for growing food. The members also support the farm by sharing the risk, equally receiving the bounty and accepting the inevitable losses based on the whims of nature throughout the growing season. If it is a banner year for tomatoes, you’ll find yourself swimming in them, and yet if a late frost damages tree fruit flowers, or a flood drowns a crop, you might receive little or no stone fruit or peppers that year.
“Rotational grazing is the practice of containing and moving animals through pasture to improve soil, plant, and animal health. Only one portion of pasture is grazed at a time while the remainder of the pasture “rests.” To accomplish this, pastures are subdivided into smaller areas, referred to as paddocks, and livestock are moved from one paddock to another. Resting grazed paddocks allows forage plants to recover and deepen their root systems.”–this definition is courtesy of the Rodale Institute's website where you’ll also find an explanation of why it matters. I have watched farmers hold earth in their hands, marveling at new, nutrient-dense topsoil that is the byproduct of animals rotationally grazing on their land.
“80 percent of pregnant pigs in America, like the 1.2 million owned by Smithfield, are confined in individual steel-and-concrete cages so small that the sows cannot turn around.” –Foer, Eating Animals
“Left alone, piglets tend to wean at around fifteen weeks, but on factory farms they will typically be weaned at fifteen days… At these young ages, the piglets are unable to digest food, so additional pharmaceuticals are fed to prevent diarrhea. The weaned pigs will then be forced into thick wire cages – nurseries. These cages are stacked on top of the other, and feces and urine fall from higher cages onto the animals below. Growers will keep piglets in these cages as long as possible before moving them to their final destinations: cramped pens.” –Foer, Eating Animals
A classic “Bill-ism”. Aaron, the owner, and I had a whole list of these we loved to recount to each other.
CAFO stands for “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations”. This is the industrial agriculture practice where meat, dairy, or egg producing animals are kept and raised in confinement facilities. Instead of grazing or eating from pastures or open land, animals are given manufactured feed. Aside from the inhumanity of this practice on the animals and people involved, significant and detrimental impact on the environment (which is why beef has been labeled as the number one climate change offender) is caused by the animals, feed, waste, and production operations all being confined to a small area of land.
If you’ll allow me a soapbox moment, the American obsession with meat at the center of every plate, at almost every meal (and the idea that meat should be the primary source for the absurd amount of protein we’ve been led to believe our bodies need) is bullshit (no pun, just animosity intended). That level of consumption, and the production it requires, is unsustainable.
Your passion, integrity, and sacrifice give me hope. I find it frustrating that some folks broadly dismiss any pursuit of ethical standards in meat production on the grounds that it's all a cynical attempt to assuage the conscience of certain consumers. They claim there is no way to produce animal products humanely, and those of us who make the effort to find them are kidding ourselves. Sometimes I worry that they're right, but what you've written here shows me that there are humane suppliers out there who are sincere. The skeptics who deem humane standards unattainable often create a false equivalency, justifying the consumption of cheap and convenient options. In my view, they are the ones engaging in rationalization.
I purchased meat from Primal Supply a few times, but ultimately switched to White Oak Pastures due to its 5+ rating from the Global Animal Partnership. While Primal Supply mentioned humane treatment on its site, there was no evident certification or standardization. If I had the benefit of these columns you've written explaining your experience and position, I would have switched to Primal Supply. I understand it's costly and challenging to have third-party certification in place, and it's not like I trust the GAP as gospel; it's just the closest I seem to be able to get.
So, I think reliable information is the main challenge for those of us looking to consume humanely. If we just blindly believe any verbiage about 'free-range', 'humanely-raised', 'happy cows' or whatever, then perhaps we are as naive as the skeptics claim. But maybe the requirement of a 5+ rating from the GAP is too rigid, and in any case, it's very hard to find. I realize that my practice of buying from White Oak Pastures is not ideal, as it's not local, and I can only get meat products from them. I can't seem to find any third-party standards for non-meat animal products like milk, butter and cheese.
I'm local to the the Philly area, so would love any information you have about local suppliers you'd recommend. And more broadly, how do you think a conscious consumer can find reliable information without being overly restrictive?