The Food Movement's “omnivore’s contradiction": “ethical butchers”

A few months ago, the New Yorker featured this awesome cartoon:

A punchline that would have anybody laugh and think.  Perhaps laugh first, and then think for a long while.

I was reminded of that cartoon, even as I started reading this essay in The American Scholar.  That cartoon is a wonderful example of a picture being worth a thousand words.

Anyway, the essay notes that the food movement (yes, think of the likes of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters) simply refuses to even acknowledge a basic question:

How do you ethically justify both respecting and killing a sentient animal?

It is one thing for the foodies to rail against the agro-industrial complex.  And there is a lot of merit to it.  But,

The Food Movement’s popularity is built upon this idea: that animals raised in factory farms have qualities that make them worthy of our moral consideration. Animals are not objects, and their welfare matters to the extent that they should not suffer the abusive confines of factory farms. They deserve the time, space, and freedom to exist as the creatures they were born to be. These concerns assume that farm animals—given their ability to experience suffering in industrialized settings—have authentic emotional lives and intrinsic worth. Our belief that they should not suffer abuse in confinement recognizes their fundamental moral status as sentient beings. They can suffer, and as a direct result, we should, whenever possible, avoid inflicting suffering upon them. If animals didn’t matter to us in a moral sense, then the harm systematically inflicted upon them in industrial operations would pose no ethical concerns whatsoever. We’d be indifferent to their abuse.
If the Food Movement’s stance on animals raised in factory farms is clear, it grows murky when applied to nonindustrial, more humane, farms. Indeed, that’s where the omnivore’s contradiction comes into sharp focus. The Food Movement’s premises about farm animals are (we will assume for now) adequately met on most small, sustainable, humane farms. Still, there’s no denying that even on the most impressive of these farms—no matter how much their owners talk about a respectful death—animals are raised for the ultimate purpose of being killed and turned into commodities. The Food Movement habitually minimizes this reality, but the fact remains: just as on factory farms, animals on humane farms are, on slaughter day, transformed through raw violence into objects, after which they are commodified, consumed, and replaced with all the efficiency of car parts.

Why is the killing of animals justified when a Michael Pollan kills one?  BTW, I wonder if Pollan has ever killed a cow. Maybe he did, eh!

Thus, the hypocrisy of it all:

the elevation of how animals are raised as a moral consideration (poorly in factory farms; well on humane farms) above why we are raising them (to kill and eat them in both cases). It is at this crucial moment in a farm animal’s life—the human choice to slaughter the beast against its will—that the moral consideration so effectively deployed to condemn the factory farming of animals loses its punch and its plausibility.

So, if the foodies are really, really upset at the atrocious treatment of animals in the industrial process--and there any number of undercover videos one can watch till the point of puking is reached--then why don't they call for an end to killing animals, whether in the food factories or on the organic farms?

But they are not prepared to take that stand. This decision—this curious dodge—is bound to rot the movement from within. It’s a typical sleight of hand of which Pollan is a master. To wit, he explained to Oprah Winfrey in 2011 that after deliberating about the legitimacy of eating meat, “I came out thinking I could eat meat in this very limited way, from farmers who were growing it in a way that I could feel good about how the animals lived.”
How is it possible to ethically raise, love, and then kill an animal “in this very limited way”? If Pollan really does want to “feel good” about an animal’s quality of life—much in the way he would, say, his pet dog’s—then what’s the exact justification for cutting that life short (by something like 75 percent) for a menu choice? Wouldn’t it be better to spare the pseudo-philosophizing and just admit (as Comis did, until he announced on his blog in February that he had become a vegetarian) that he likes meat too much to stop consuming it? And if that’s the competing consideration—loving meat—then all humanitarian ballyhooing over animals in factory farms becomes meaningless, as do the arguments over animal suffering in general.

The likes of Michael Pollan have found a neat niche for themselves: they peddle a story that makes their faithful feel great about how they are being righteous about the whole damn thing.  That is all.  It pisses me off when they are all high and mighty about how they are a gazillion times better than those getting the "regular" meat.  Of course, there are plenty of those preachy types right here in Oregon, which is also why Portlandia did that awesome episode about the chicken order in the restaurant.

Owning animals for the purposes of slaughter and consumption means that ethical corners will be cut to enhance the bottom line. As competition for privileged consumers increases, this corner cutting can only be expected to intensify.
A short list of routine and sometimes unavoidable problems prevalent on nonindustrial animal farms, all noted by farmers themselves, includes the following: excessive rates of pastured animals being killed by wild and domestic animals, mutilation of pig snouts to prevent detrimental rooting, castration without anesthesia, botched slaughters, preventive (and illicit) antibiotic use, outbreaks of salmonella and trichinosis, acute pasture damage, overuse of pesticides and animal vaccines, and routine separation of mothers and calves. Animals granted a little more space, in other words, still suffer the negative consequences of being owned for exploitation. Given that they are destined to be commodities, not companions, this should not come as a surprise. Hence the ultimate cost of failing to address the omnivore’s contradiction: the ongoing suffering of the animals that farmers and foodies say they care so much about.

Yep, the foodies "say" they "care" about the suffering that the animals go through.

I have blogged enough here (like this one) about trying to make peace with killing animals for food. It is an ongoing issue for this atheist.  When everything fails, I turn to the New Yorker: