Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  Most confounding of all, in the vegan revision, are the chapters addressing the future. If farm animals have civil rights, what aspect of their bondage to humans shall they overcome? Most wouldn't last two days without it. Recently while I was cooking eggs, my kids sat at the kitchen table entertaining me with readings from a magazine profile of a famous, rather young vegan movie star. Her dream was to create a safe-haven ranch where the cows and chickens could live free, happy lives and die natural deaths. "Wait till those cows start bawling to be milked," I warned. Having nursed and weaned my own young, I can tell you there is no pain to compare with an overfilled udder. We wondered what the starlet might do for those bursting Jerseys, not to mention the eggs the chickens would keep dropping everywhere. What a life's work for that poor gal: traipsing about the farm in her strappy heels, weaving among the cow flops, bending gracefully to pick up eggs and stick them in an incubator where they would maddeningly hatch, and grow up bent on laying more eggs. It's dirty work, trying to save an endless chain of uneaten lives. Realistically, my kids observed, she'd hire somebody.

  Forgive us. We know she meant well, and as fantasies of the super-rich go, it's more inspired than most. It's just the high-mindedness that rankles; when moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke. The farm-liberation fantasy simply reflects a modern cultural confusion about farm animals. They're human property, not just legally but biologically. Over the millennia of our clever history, we created from wild progenitors whole new classes of beasts whose sole purpose was to feed us. If turned loose in the wild, they would haplessly starve, succumb to predation, and destroy the habitats and lives of most or all natural things. If housed at the public expense they would pose a more immense civic burden than our public schools and prisons combined. No thoughtful person really wants those things to happen. But living at a remove from the actual workings of a farm, most humans no longer learn appropriate modes of thinking about animal harvest. Knowing that our family raises meat animals, many friends have told us--not judgmentally, just confessionally--"I don't think I could kill an animal myself." I find myself explaining: It's not what you think. It's nothing like putting down your dog.

  Most nonfarmers are intimate with animal life in only three categories: people; pets (i.e., junior people); and wildlife (as seen on nature shows, presumed beautiful and rare). Purposely beheading any of the above is unthinkable, for obvious reasons. No other categories present themselves at close range for consideration. So I understand why it's hard to think about harvest, a categorical act that includes cutting the heads off living lettuces, extended to crops that blink their beady eyes. On our farm we don't especially enjoy processing our animals, but we do value it, as an important ritual for ourselves and any friends adventurous enough to come and help, because of what we learn from it. We reconnect with the purpose for which these animals were bred. We dispense with all delusions about who put the live in livestock, and who must take it away.

  A friend from whom we buy pasture-grazed lamb and poultry has concurred with us on this point. Kirsty Zahnke grew up in the U.K., and observes that American attitudes toward life and death probably add to the misgivings. "People in this country do everything to cheat death, it seems. Instead of being happy with each moment, they worry so much about what comes next. I think this gets transposed to animals--the preoccupation with 'taking a life.' My animals have all had a good life, with death as its natural end. It's not without thought and gratitude that I slaughter my animals, it is a hard thing to do. It's taken me time to be able to eat my own lambs that I had played with. But I always think of Kahlil Gibran's words:

  "'When you kill a beast, say to him in your heart:

  By the same power that slays you, I too am slain, and I too shall be consumed.

  For the law that delivers you into my hand shall deliver me into a mightier hand.

  Your blood and my blood is naught but the sap that feeds the tree of heaven.'"

  Kirsty works with a local environmental organization and frequently hosts its out-of-town volunteers, who camp at her farm while working in the area. Many of these activists had not eaten meat for many years before arriving on the Zahnkes' meat farm--a formula not for disaster, she notes, but for education. "If one gets to know the mantras of the farm owners, it can change one's viewpoint. I would venture to say that seventy-five percent of the vegans and vegetarians who stayed at least a week here began to eat our meat or animal products, simply because they see what I am doing as right--for the animals, for the environment, for humans."

  I respect every diner who makes morally motivated choices about consumption. And I stand with nonviolence, as one of those extremist moms who doesn't let kids at her house pretend to shoot each other, ever, or make any game out of human murder. But I've come to different conclusions about livestock. The ve-vangelical pamphlets showing jam-packed chickens and sick downer-cows usually declare, as their first principle, that all meat is factory-farmed. That is false, and an affront to those of us who work to raise animals humanely, or who support such practices with our buying power. I don't want to cause any creature misery, so I won't knowingly eat anything that has stood belly deep in its own poop wishing it was dead until bam, one day it was. (In restaurants I go for the fish, or the vegetarian option.)

  But meat, poultry, and eggs from animals raised on open pasture are the traditional winter fare of my grandparents, and they serve us well here in the months when it would cost a lot of fossil fuels to keep us in tofu. Should I overlook the suffering of victims of hurricanes, famines, and wars brought on this world by profligate fuel consumption? Bananas that cost a rain forest, refrigerator-trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world's load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is another. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.

  To breed fewer meat animals in the future is possible; phasing out those types destined for confinement lots is a plan I'm assisting myself, by raising heirloom breeds. Most humans could well consume more vegetable foods, and less meat. But globally speaking, the vegetarian option is a luxury. The oft-cited energetic argument for vegetarianism, that it takes ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain, only applies to the kind of land where rain falls abundantly on rich topsoil. Many of the world's poor live in marginal lands that can't support plant-based agriculture. Those not blessed with the fruited plain and amber waves of grain must make do with woody tree pods, tough-leaved shrubs, or sparse grasses. Camels, reindeer, sheep, goats, cattle, and other ruminants are uniquely adapted to transform all those types of indigestible cellulose into edible milk and meat. The fringes of desert, tundra, and marginal grasslands on every continent--coastal Peru, the southwestern United States, the Kalahari, the Gobi, the Australian outback, northern Scandinavia--are inhabited by herders. The Navajo, Mongols, Lapps, Masai, and countless other resourceful tribes would starve without their animals.

  Domestic herds can also carry problems into these habitats. Overgrazing has damaged plenty of the world's landscapes, as has clearing rain forests to make way for cattle ranches. But well-managed grazing can actually benefit natural habitats where native grazers exist or formerly existed. Environmental research in North and South American deserts has shown that careful introduction of cattle, sheep, or goats into some grasslands helps return the balance of their native vegetation, especially mesquite trees and their kin, which coevolved for millennia with large grazing mammals (mastodons and camels) that are now extinct. Mesquite seeds germinate best after passing through the stomach of a ruminant. Then the habitat also needs the return of fire, and prairie dog predation on the mesquite seedlings--granted, it's complicated. But grazers do belong.


  In northwestern Peru, in the extremely arid, deforested region of Piura, an innovative project is using a four-legged tool for widespread reforestation: goats. This grassless place lost most of its native mesquite forests to human refugees who were pushed out of greener places, settled here, and cut down most of the trees for firewood. Goats can subsist on the seedpods of the remaining mesquites (without damaging the thorny trees) and spread the seeds, depositing them across the land inside neat fertilizer pellets. The goats also provide their keepers with meat and milk, in a place where rainfall is so scarce (zero, in some years), it's impossible to subsist on vegetable crops. The herds forage freely when mesquite beans are in season, and live the rest of the year on pods stored in cement-block granaries. These low-maintenance animals also reproduce themselves free of charge, so the project broadens its reforesting and hunger-relief capacities throughout the region, year by year.

  We cranky environmentalists tend to nurture a hunch that humans and our food systems are always dangerous to the earth. But when I visited Piura to study the mesquite-goat project, I could not name any measure by which the project was anything but successful. The "before" scenario involved malnourished families in a desiccated brown landscape. Within a few years after receiving goats, the families still lived in simple mud-and-lath homes, but their villages were shaded by green oases of fast-growing native vegetation. They milked the goats, made cheese, burned mesquite pods for cooking fuel, and looked forward to eating meat several times each month. Small, irrigated gardens of beans and leafy greens provided supplementary nutrition, but in this climate it's animal products that can offer the prospect of ending malnutrition. Each goat-owning family makes an agreement with the donor organizations (Heifer International and the local group ACBIODESA) to give the first female offspring to another family, thus moving their own status from "poor" to "benefactor"--a powerfully important distinction in terms of local decision-making and further stewardship of the land. For the same money, a shipment of donated wheat, rice, or corn would only have maintained the region's widespread poverty through another few months, and deepened its environmental crisis. Between vegetable or animal solutions to that region's problems, my vote goes to the goats.

  The mountainous part of the United States where I live, though neither destitute nor desiccated, has its own challenges. The farms here are small and steep. Using diesel tractors to turn the earth every spring (where that's even possible) sends our topsoil downhill into the creeks with every rain, creating many problems at once. One of the region's best options for feeding ourselves and our city neighbors may be pasture-based hoof stock and poultry. Cattle, goats, sheep, turkeys, and chickens all have their own efficient ways of turning steep, grass-covered hillsides into food, while fertilizing the land discreetly with their manure. They do it without drinking a drop of gasoline.

  Managed grazing is healthier for most landscapes, in fact, than annual tilling and planting, and far more fuel-efficient. Grass is a solar-powered, infinitely renewable resource. As consumers discover the health benefits of grass-based meat, more farmers may stop plowing land and let animals go to work on it instead. A crucial part of this enterprise involves recovering the heritage cattle, poultry, and other livestock that can fatten on pasture grass. It's news to most people that chickens, turkeys, and pigs can eat foliage at all, since we're used to seeing them captive and fed. Even cattle are doing less and less grass-eating, since twentieth-century breeding programs gave us animals that tolerate (barely) a grain-based diet for weight gain during their final eight months in confinement. For decades, the public has demanded no meat animals but these.

  More lately, though, conditions inside CAFOs have been exposed by voices as diverse as talk-show host Oprah Winfrey and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser. In an essay titled "Food with a Face," journalist Michael Pollan wrote: "More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what Capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here, in these places, life itself is redefined--as protein production--and with it, suffering. That venerable word becomes 'stress,' an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution.... The industrialization--and dehumanization--of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do." U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of the resulting product: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance.

  It's that last one that finally ended it for me. Yes, I am a person who raises some animals for the purpose of whacking them into cuts of meat to feed my family. But this work has made me more sympathetic, not less, toward the poor wretches that have to live shoulder-to-shoulder with their brethren waiting for the next meal of stomach-corroding porridge. In '97, when our family gave up meat from CAFOs, that choice was synonymous with becoming a vegetarian. No real alternatives existed. Now they do. Pasture-based chicken and turkey are available in whole food stores and many mainstream supermarkets. Farmers' markets are a likely source for free-range eggs, poultry, beef, lamb, and pork. Farmers who raise animals on pasture have to charge more, of course, than factories that cut every corner on animal soundness. Some consumers will feel they have to buy the cheaper product. Others will eat meat less often and pay the higher price. As demand rises, and more farmers can opt out of the industrial system, the cost structure will shift.

  After many meatless years it felt strange to us to break the taboo, but over time our family has come back to carnivory. I like listening to a roasting bird in the oven on a Sunday afternoon, following Julia Child's advice to "regulate the chicken so it makes quiet cooking noises" as its schmaltzy aroma fills the house. When a friend began raising beef cattle entirely on pasture (rather than sending them to a CAFO as six-month-olds, as most cattle farmers do), we were born again to the idea of hamburger. We can go visit his animals if we need to be reassured of the merciful cowness of their lives.

  As meat farmers ourselves we are learning as we go, raising heritage breeds: the thrifty antiques that know how to stand in the sunshine, gaze upon a meadow, and munch. (Even mate without help!) We're grateful these old breeds weren't consigned to extinction during the past century, though it nearly did happen. Were it not for these animals that can thrive outdoors, and the healthy farms that maintain them, I would have stuck with tofu-burgers indefinitely. That wasn't a bad life, but we're also enjoying this one.

  Believing in the righteousness of a piece of work, alas, is not what gets it done. On harvest day we pulled on our stained shoes, sharpened our knives, lit a fire under the big kettle, and set ourselves to the whole show: mud, blood, and lots of little feathers. There are some things about a chicken harvest that are irrepressibly funny, and one of them is the feathers: in your hair, on the backs of your hands, dangling behind your left shoe the way toilet paper does in slapstick movies. Feathery little white tags end up stuck all over the chopping block and the butchering table like Post-it notes from the chicken hereafter. Sometimes we get through the awful parts on the strength of black comedy, joking about the feathers or our barn's death row and the "dead roosters walking."

  But today was not one of those times. Some friends had come over to help us, including a family that had recently lost their teenage son in a drowning accident. Their surviving younger children, Abby and Eli, were among Lily's closest friends. The kids were understandably solemn and the adults measured all our words under the immense weight of grief as we set to work. Lily and Abby went to get the first rooster from the barn while I laid out the knives and spread plastic sheets over our butchering table on the back patio. The guys stoked a fire under our fifty-gallon kettle, an antique brass instrument Steven and I scored
at a farm auction.

  Really, We're Not Mad

  * * *

  Cows must have some friends in high places. If a shipment of ground beef somehow gets contaminated with pathogens, our federal government does not have authority to recall the beef, only to request that the company issue a recall. When the voluntary recall is initiated, the federal government does not release information on where the contaminated beef is being sold, considering that information proprietary. Apparently it is more important to protect the cows than the people eating them. Now I need to be careful where I go next, because (for their own protection) there are laws in thirteen states that make it illegal to say anything bad about cows.

  One serious disease related to our friends the cows has emerged in the past twenty years: bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or so-called mad cow disease. Mad cow, and its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, are invariably fatal for both cows and humans. Unfortunately, tracking mad cow is complicated by the fact that it frequently incubates for years in the victim. The disease became infamous during the 1980s outbreak in England, where more than 150 humans died from eating BSE beef, and thousands of cattle were destroyed. A tiny malformed protein called a prion is the BSE culprit. The prions cause other proteins in the victim to rearrange into their unusual shape, and destroy tissue. Prions confine their activities to the nervous system, where they cause death. How do cows contract prions? Apparently from eating other cows. What? Yes, dead cow meat gets mixed into their feed, imposing cannibalism onto their lifestyle. It's a way to get a little more mileage from the byproducts of the slaughterhouse.