by Adam Gopnik
One of the better arguments I have come across for ethical meat-eating comes, of all places—or perhaps, given his gifts, not so surprisingly—in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno, that odd and beautiful amalgam of fantasy, sentiment, and somber Victorian moralism. Carroll’s argument derives from the argument over vivisection. Carroll’s German professor, clearly speaking for the author, submits that while we have absolute mastery over nature, and therefore the right to eat or experiment on animals, the right brings with it an equally absolute responsibility to refrain from giving them pain: the exquisite ethical dilemma, as with most of them, is to exercise the right while honoring the responsibility, which is always, and in every ethical case, much harder than it looks. (Carroll, good Christian clergyman, took it for granted that that “mastery” was a gift from God; even if we imagine it only to be a long-term accident of history, the case still holds.)
The very strongest argument I have found for animal-eating is based on what always comes back to haunt us in every dilemma in life, and cooking, and that is the nature of mortality. All animals die. The choice for a pig is not between painful death and perpetual life, but between one death and some other. If we ate only animals that died naturally, then could there be any rational objection to our eating them—to eating their flesh in celebration of their life rather than burying it to rot or merely burning it? Could we rationally object if, after we died, presumably at the end of as long and rich life as we could have, people ate us? (Surely not. Indeed, some of us are “eaten,” consumed, in the form of eye and liver transplants and so on, and many regard this as a great good.
So if we could engineer a pig to die naturally at, say, prime eating age—would it be wrong to eat him then? What difference would there be between the first case, the pig scavenged, and that of the pig killed kindly—or perhaps in this thought experiment, by the action of his own genes—after a happy life? (Obviously, we would want him to die painlessly, which nature does not assure at all.) All animals die, and mostly quite young. What’s the morally relevant distinction between “road kill” and animals slaughtered humanely? The length of time they have been given to live? Well, by “old age” we surely don’t mean a number—it varies too much—but a general condition. When we say that someone has died of old age we mean as painlessly and peacefully as possible after a productive life. Natural death, after all, is a complicated concept: we could easily imagine that pig designed to die at a moment of maximum succulence by the action of its own genes. The two cases seem indistinguishable—and so we realize that our real complaint is not against inevitable death, but against avoidable pain. (Curiously, if you think about it, what this proposes as a kind of moral ideal is not slaughter but scavenging. We see the carrion-eaters gathered around the dead zebra with a revulsion so deep, pit-deep, that we use the very names—vultures and jackals—in ways that we rarely use those of other predators. We find it far worse to be a vulture or jackal than a lion or tiger; there are few stuffed vultures in children’s cribs. But on this view their carnivorism is more moral than the other kind, and the closer we replicate it, the better we are.)
The point isn’t that we should breed animals in this way (though perhaps we could) or that we should wait for lambs to die in motorcycle accidents before we eat them. It is that once we accept the principle of animal scavenging, it becomes plain that the real issue isn’t eating animals but the way in which animals live and die—it becomes plain that “animal welfare” isn’t some secondary, ameliorative concern, but actually the big one. In this case, animal welfare and animal rights collapse into one another: if we can create a condition in which animals live peacefully and die painlessly and then are eaten it is hard to see how anyone can object, any more than we object to the consumed carcass of the road-killed deer or to our own decomposition. It is then incumbent on us to see that animals die as naturally as possible—I will not put scare quotes on “naturally” here, since we have to accept that, in the case of animals-to-be-eaten, that which is natural is that which already has been intricately wrought, and by us—and as painlessly as possible. But if we do, then the difference between the animal dead of old age and the animal dead of induced old age is so minimal as to be meaningless, and we can eat them with joy and respect. (This position, or one like it, is Fergus’s intuitive case.) Joy in the mourning, one might say. This argument for animal-eating rests on a recognition of our common mortality, just as the argument against cruelty rests on our common capacity to suffer. The recognition that all animals die leads us to the recognition that it is not wrong to eat them when they do, and so the question turns to how and why and in what way they die. We have thus won ourselves the right to eat meat if we respect the responsibility to be kind.
What would the rational vegetarian say to this? I think she would answer that no one actually dies of old age by being stunned and slaughtered; the old-age analogy is the truly abstract one. And then, at a deeper level, that the very act of making subjects with feelings into objects to eat is degrading for the eater and the eaten alike. Foer, for instance, is particularly repelled—I share his repulsion, merely reading it—when he, bravely and correctly, visits a slaughterhouse and sees a pig’s face casually split in two: it seems worse than the death itself, since it shows such contempt for the intelligence of the animal, so evident in its eyes and mouth and brain. It is turning a living thing into a commodity that is the real offense of the abattoir. Raising a living thing as an object to be mutilated is the moral wrong, and engaging in an elaborate pretense of “natural scavenging” can’t alter it.
Like most of us, I suppose, I find myself swinging back and forth among these various cases while still eating steak. There are moments when I am fairly sure that “veal chop” will sound to our descendants as brutal and as barbarian a phrase as “public hanging” does to us. That we can live so easily in the presence of calf-slaughter will be as baffling to them as it is to us that Adam Smith and David Hume and Dr. Johnson could live so easily a few hundred yards away from the gallows at Tyburn, where teenage boys were hanged for petty theft.
There are other moments when the space between my appetite for meat and the arguments against it seems to be in itself an argument for eating it: an appetite this strong, this old, and this natural cannot be immoral, or, if it is, then existence itself must be in some sense immoral. Whoever made us, or whatever historical process produced us, meat-eating was part of it. (Then I think again of the vampires in Twilight and hear them argue that, after all, they were made to drink human blood.)
In any case, and for the time being, at least we can see this: that the new enthusiasm for “whole-beast” eating, with its various tributaries in Spanish pigs, blood sausage, face bacon, and so on, is, effectively, an attempt to argue for carnivorism by making it the opposite of “pink-in-plastic.” It is a new form of Hemingway’s argument for hunting: killing is honorable so long as hunting is hard. Eating meat is good so long as it is urgent. Fergus Henderson’s cuisine, in a kind of weird, conceptual way, involves a form of animal-eating so demanding that it is on the edge of becoming a paradoxical variant of vegetarianism. Fergus believes that if we are to ask of animals (who are raised to be slaughtered, and will die in any case) that they give up their lives for our food, then we must not treat their gift lightly, or with the indifference we give to mere commodities. To eat another animal is a high calling, and we need to honor its sacrifice by eating it all—eyes and tails, brains and spleen, calves’ feet and squirrel liver. Only in that way can we recognize the enormity of the act, and turn it into something—half folk sacred; half Damien Hirst occult—that honors our own shared animalness. Embrace your carcass. If you aren’t prepared to eat hearts and hooves, then you aren’t fit to be a carnivore. One might even argue that the man who eats the whole beast, and the man who eats no beasts, are engaged in the same kind of ethical inquiry. But one would probably not argue this way if one were a pig.
Another question rises to the mind and mouth of a greedy man or wo
man: can a plate of vegetables really be enough to support a whole high style of fancy food? Like all classically trained French chefs, Passard has the sensitive, quick-turning eyes of one who learned at an early age, and from tough masters, that the world is not always easily at your service. (Passard apprenticed as a chef when he was fourteen, and subsequently worked for Gaston Boyer in Reims and, most important, for Alain Senderens at the old L’Archestrate, whose premises L’Arpège now occupies.) He therefore takes his preeminence as a chef seriously, but almost egolessly: that he has something special to contribute to French cooking is a fact independent of his desires, not so much an accomplishment as a grace. “It is the good fortune of vegetables to have at last found a great chef at the height of his powers to explore them,” he says. He isn’t being immodest, just truthful.
A typical cuisine végétale menu at his restaurant these days might include a tomato gazpacho with mustard ice cream (Passard makes the mustard himself); a gratin of white Cévennes onions with black pepper and baby lettuce; a langoustine bisque with a speck-scented cream; a consommé of cucumber with ravioli stuffed with lemongrass; a light soup of mussels with yellow flowers, ginger, and coriander (“The cuisine of flowers has hardly been touched, even by me,” he said later); and a plate of summer root vegetables—carrots and new potatoes and small golden beets—dusted with couscous. For dessert, he offers a chocolate-and-avocado soufflé, the dark chocolate swirled into the rich and slightly eggy avocado, and a simple black-currant sorbet, made from black currants that were just in season in Sarthe.
In his new style, Passard has achieved a level of cooking that surpasses even his earlier excellence, a fact that can be acknowledged even by those who think it prudent to eat an entire côte de boeuf the night before having lunch at his place. If some people will never quite get his cooking, his stature in France is indisputable, and with good reason. Cooking is both an expression of the essence of the ingredient and an attempt to turn it into something else; it’s both melodic and harmonic. The old French cooking was all harmony, with the chicken breast or the sole treated as the bass note, and everything coming from what went on top. The new cooking, which has spread from America and Australia out into the world, is almost purely melodic: the unadorned perfect thing, singing the song of itself. Passard is among the few to cook both ways at once; one is intensely aware of the thing on the plate, and intensely aware of the mind of the chef that gets it there. The very best of what Passard is doing—say, the cucumber broth with herb ravioli—is as straightforward as a vegetable garden and as complex as the system that makes it run. (And not cheap, either, of course. Lunch costs a couple hundred dollars per person—not surprising, given that the beet on your plate took the TGV to Paris that morning.)
He sharply distinguishes his cuisine végétale from vegetarian cooking. He is not a fan of raw vegetables, or of a health-conscious cuisine. “The real malady and unhappiness of vegetables has always been the vegetarian restaurant,” he says. He sees cooking vegetables as an aesthetic challenge before anything else. “The white of chicken, or even a filet of fish, cooking these things can be taught. But sautéing white onions, or a pan of turnips—that calls on every bit of the wisdom and knowledge and skill that a chef has accumulated in his training. Everyone in the kitchen has to pay attention in a new way. My team is alert and awake now in a way that it could never be before.”
Passard’s sense of purpose is undiluted by irony; if the objects of his cooking are beets and roots and tomatoes, the subject of his cooking is France. It is the French cooking tradition, the great tradition that began after the French Revolution, that he embodies. When, at L’Arpège, the single beet comes out of its crust of salt, or the cauliflower emerges from under a silver bell, where once there had been a rack of lamb, there is no conscious parody, but there is certainly an element of play, of a quiet joke—not at the expense of the old grand style but about the wit required to continue it by other means.
Cooking, we are told, ought to be a sensible craft, a peacemaking practice, a human act of reconciliation and repetition, like gardening or popular song, rather than a place for experiment and extravagant imagination. Yet there is another kind of cooking, whose point is to press borders, turn corners, suggest extremes—extremes not merely of possible palates we might possess but of possible positions we might yet take. It is in these extremes, Carême’s edifice-building or Escoffier’s encyclopedism, that cooking touches the edge of something more. Both Henderson and Passard speak in conversation the language of realism: of the sensible, the healthy, the logical, the natural. But one feels in both, finally, an adherence less to a moral logic than to an aesthetic illogic: Passard was once Henderson, Henderson could easily become Passard; their real morality is neither that of evangelical vegans nor beautiful beast-eaters but simply that of the extreme case taken seriously. So perhaps one may be forgiven if one feels, in their single-mindedness, not common sense at all but something of that appetite for perversity which is at the root, and forces the flowers, of art.
7. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Chicken, Pudding, Dogs
Dear Elizabeth:
I have read and reread your chapter on the perfect dinner many times. And I like it. How hard we have to work to make perfection, and yet when it happens, the truth is that it falls on us like grace. For instance, I made the best meal of my life tonight, and it happened more or less by chance and is unlikely ever to get made again, or not so well. Grace just falls on the head of us amateur cooks sometimes—like anvils on the head of silent-movie comedians: for no reason, life’s like that—after absenting itself for months. I think it’s true of all committed ham-handed, clumsy cooks that the best meals we make are never the meals we serve to guests. We struggle with something fancy and tricky—chicken with roasted lemons, or a poached leg of lamb with whisky-mint sauce, or the like—and it all comes out okay, but we’re worn out and the guests are oppressed by the fanciness of it all. Then, over twenty-five minutes, with the radio playing Christmas songs, we hit gold. Tonight, I made one of my set-piece meals: fresh tuna au poivre, with basmati rice and green beans—an ordinary weekday dinner, but a happy night, Christmas week, best week of the year, time to open a bottle of champagne and enjoy. And… everything worked. Every night I struggle with rice—how to do it in that nice pilaf way, where you cook the rice in spices and hot olive oil for a few minutes before you add the water, which boils furiously as you add it, and then simmer it. I’ve tried all kinds of spices: cinnamon, of course, and cardamom and a Cajun mix and whole cumin and Chinese five-spice mix… it’s all okay, and I always add turmeric, partly from superstition—it’s supposed to be the ultimate anti-inflammatory, all-purpose, Alzheimer’s-stopping miracle spice—and partly from cosmetic scruples: it does add a lovely yellow tone to the rice.
Tonight, I don’t know why, I reached in and decided to toast together turmeric and not spicy but sweet curry and black, African cardamom, the musky, dense, mysterious primitive relation to bright, intelligent Indian cardamom. African cardamom is to Indian cardamom, which I love, as a tribal nail fetish is to a lecture by Krishnamurti: one is lethal, the other lilting. It was perfect, the best rice I’d ever done, and I added frozen baby peas at the last minute, which added color and green meaning. The tuna I did four minutes on one side, three on the other, which I find, don’t you, is almost always the perfect balance for any protein thing without a bone you have to cook?—and did it with a dense coating of hashed black and pink peppercorns in oil. The sauce was a quick reduction with cooking brandy and then supermarket veal stock—though you could have used plain bouillon from a cube, it would have been just as good, and half a cup of crème fraîche. The beans I just steamed for eight minutes, which brings out their beany taste, with fresh ginger grated over them. It was all good food—the cardamom spoke to the fresh ginger, the crème fraîche negotiated with the black pepper, the yellow and soft-green rice stood nicely against the brown and pink tuna. It was nearly perfect, the children liked it, in the a
bsentminded way children like things—only grown-ups say “Oooh!”; children say “Oh!” and then it’s all gone.
For dessert we had butterscotch pudding, which Olivia and I had made earlier in the day in honor of her new Havanese puppy, whose name is Butterscotch. Nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be more quietly demanding: just as the key with a good penne all’amatriciana is the fusion of pancetta and onion, so the key to a really good butterscotch pudding is burning the one and a half cups of sugar to caramel without scorching it, so that it has a deep, residual flavor, without an unpleasant burned taste. But once that is done, the only other trick is adding the milk and melted butter soon but not too soon: you want it to bubble with the super-hot sugar, but not explode out of the pan, as has happened to Olivia and me before. Then it’s just egg yolks mixed with cornstarch and whipped with a whisk until it boils and thickens. The cornstarch is key—a humble, forgotten thing that creates pudding as efficiently, though with far less diva-like self-dramatization, as egg whites create soufflés. Then you chill the pudding, and serve it with freshly whipped cream. Nobody doesn’t like it; it is the ideal recipe to represent a small, sweet, happy dog; you can’t help but like it, you can’t resist it, it makes no demands on your mind, only on your heart.
Having a dog in the kitchen, by the way, is the best way to understand what it really is to be a person in the kitchen, don’t you think? The key to dogginess is that dogs are pure creatures of sensation. By that I mean that they absorb life as vast, intriguing, and vaguely replicable clouds of stuff, endlessly interesting—smells and places and actions and times and above all foods—without breaking it down into neat causal sequences of act and effect. Every dog delights in food, but no dog could cook dinner, which depends on remembering which comes first, the caramel or the cornstarch. When Butterscotch sees me come home with bags from the grocery store, she leaps with joy as her memory tells her that something good will happen, that there is some vague connection between this thing and the tastes she loves and needs. But what the sequence is, where it starts and where it ends, obviously baffles her, just as she knows that some cloud-nexus of taking elevators and putting on leashes and making phone calls produces a chance to play with Lily, the Havanese upstairs. But exactly how this works eludes her: some days when she hears the name Lily she rushes to the door, sometimes to her leash, sometimes goes to the elevator and sometimes to the door on our floor that corresponds to the door on the eighth floor where Lily lives. It is a joy, obviously, to live life in this way: her head is, in every sense, in the clouds. The life of pure appetite and affections, where Butterscotch resides, is obviously a happy one, free not just of intimations of mortality but of any intimations at all: it is all just stuff rolling at you, some predictably nice, some usually nasty, all rolled up in a big ball that you can eat or push or chew to pieces, as the occasion demands.
