The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  Across the pond, the United Kingdom banned chlorine-washed chicken for reasons that have less to do with health risks and more to do with systemic sanitation. Because there are fewer welfare protections for the birds in the United States, more of them can be crammed into cages or grow-out houses, which often results in sicker birds and a greater spread of fecal matter and disease. The chlorine rinse is the safeguard that ensures that the bacteria are washed off before the birds go to market. In the United Kingdom and European Union, however, the logic is reversed. The minimum allowable amounts of space, light, and ventilation required for hens are greater in Europe than in the United States. The US minimum space requirement per bird is half a square foot (465 cm2). The UK minimum is double that. Either way, it’s not a lot of room for birds, particularly broilers, who are engineered to be relatively large, six-pound animals.*2

  All this is to say, when it comes to what we eat, our eyes often deceive us.

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  FOR YEARS, PEOPLE HAVE TRIED to justify the five-second rule. The “rule” suggests that if food falls on the ground, you have five seconds to pick it up before it becomes bacterially contaminated. Of course, there is no science to back this up. Instead, we come up with our own justifications like, “Don’t worry. It’s just a slice of cheese. You can wipe it off quickly,” or “It’s a jelly bean, not a gummy bear. See? Nothing stuck to it.” The science however, is definitive: drop your food on the ground and almost instantaneously it will have bacteria on it. So why does the myth persist? Simply, because we want it to. We can’t see the bacteria and it doesn’t appear to cause any harm, so most people (79 percent, according to one survey) will pick up and eat food that’s been dropped on the floor. Now, a dirty jelly bean is one thing, but when it comes to the dirty truth of our food system, are we able to confront the facts or do we do the same thing and look away because we want to?

  With food, there are things we’d rather not know. And here’s the rub: we know we’d rather not know. Scientists have found that our brains will shut down information that doesn’t make us feel good, or that causes us stress, which is one reason why we tune out suffering. But as Margaret Heffernan writes in her book Willful Blindness, “Not knowing, that’s fine. Ignorance is easy. Knowing can be hard but at least it is real, it is the truth. The worst is when you don’t want to know because then it must be something very bad. Otherwise you wouldn’t have so much difficulty knowing.”

  If we were the least bit curious to know where our food comes from, it wouldn’t be hard to get the facts. The gothic horrors of the meat-packing industry have been well known since Upton Sinclair published The Jungle more than one hundred years ago. Though you might be a little less likely to find a rat in a tin of corned beef today, the sheer scale of the slaughter has grown enormously, and mechanization over the past century has arguably only made slaughterhouses and industrial-scale farms more shocking. As James Pearce notes in his essay “A Brave New Jungle,” “Perhaps the most insightful way to illustrate the intensification of animal-intensive agricultural production over the course of the twentieth (and into the twenty-first) century is with a simple statistic: the poultry industry today slaughters more birds in one day than the entire industry did in the year of 1930.”

  And while those who profit from the carnage are content to keep the facts and statistics hidden, unpleasant truths are the easiest things in the world to hide. If someone doesn’t want to know something, they’re not going to know it.

  Disgust is another powerful inhibitor. Disgustologists, as the scientists who study the subject like to call themselves, have found that the emotion of disgust is universal, and it does have benefits. That we recoil and grimace when we see sores or lesions on putrid flesh, for instance, is an evolutionary advantage. Disgust keeps us away from pathogens. It protects us from disease.

  But many things we might potentially be disgusted by are no longer in view. In particular, when it comes to cheap meat in the food industry, we are in the dark about important facts about our food. Facts like, the animals we eat are routinely fed garbage and other animals’ feces.*3 Facts like, most bacon comes from pigs that were put in a gas chamber. And facts like, there are steaks in supermarket meat cases that came from a steer that was skinned alive.

  Perhaps you’d rather not know that. Some facts definitely make it more difficult to eat, or at least to shop. It is certainly not suitable conversation for dinner. Reading off the ingredients in, say, artificial coffee creamer is unappetizing enough, but it’s a different matter entirely to contemplate the provenance of a cutlet. And while we are content to know little to nothing about everyday ingredients—dipotassium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides, silicon dioxide, sodium stearoyl lactylate, soy lecithin, and artificial flavours—in the case of food that was once alive, knowing little to nothing is a different kind of opacity and at least partly a matter of conscience. Not knowing is a way to keep our consciences clear.

  Think back to the previous chapter and the animals whose inner lives and sensory experiences are as rich as ours. We are animals too, after all. And animals tend to have an innate regard for other animals. The esteemed American biologist E.O. Wilson called this “biophilia,” or “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.” Many humans feel a sense of reverence or connection when in the presence of nature, perhaps because we are a part of nature. It is all but impossible to resist the desire to nurture and protect a puppy or kitten; few can approach a horse without wanting to put a hand on its neck. A sense of kinship with fellow animals is not the subject of rigorous scientific study, but the evidence for it is impossible to ignore. We love animals.

  Deep down, our similarities are difficult to deny. A cow’s experience, or a chicken’s, or even a bat’s, as we’ve already seen, is certainly different from our own. We don’t know what it’s like to be a cow or a chicken or a bat, but it’s like something. When we think about what it’s like to be an animal, we are in the same position a robot with artificial intelligence (or a Martian) would be in when processing the question of what it’s like to be human. That is, the fact that our behaviours can be dispassionately described doesn’t mean it should be assumed we are incapable of rich experiences. And we have no grounds to make that assumption about other animals. As Thomas Nagel points out, “To deny the reality…of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance.” We can’t believe that each of us sees and experiences the world in a unique way and at the same time deny that other animals see and experience it just as uniquely.

  Cognitive dissonance is really just a name for the discomfort we feel when we both know something and avoid knowing it. In the case of where meat comes from, the result is a willful blind spot big enough to hide a mechanism of death so grisly, so gruesome, and so huge that it has already changed the face of the planet almost beyond recognition. And if we can miss several billion deaths without batting an eyelash, what else has been hidden in plain sight?

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  LET’S START BY looking at what’s right at our feet. What we stand upon is the solid base of the food chain. It even shares the same name as our planet: we are sustained by earth. It is a scientific wonder, when you think about it: the colourful cornucopia of foods at your supermarket, all that variety—watermelons, strawberries, kale, hot peppers, spinach, lychees, Brussels sprouts, peaches, pumpkins, sweet potatoes—emerges from the same alchemy of water, sunshine, DNA, and, of course, dirt.

  Soil health isn’t easy to detect with the naked eye, but Canadian farmers have found an unusual technique to make it more visible: by burying men’s cotton underwear in the earth for about a month, they can get an indicator of how healthy the soil is. That’s because cotton underwear is 99 percent cellulose, essentially long chains of glucose molecules that provide a spectacular feast for the microbial residents of the soil. By placing several pairs of men’s briefs in plots of land that have been farmed differently, you can get a goo
d comparative gauge of how microbially rich the soil is.

  Claire Coombs, a research technician at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, put this to the test and buried several pairs of underwear in a conventionally tilled field grown continuously with soybean and in a no-till field with excellent crop rotation to see if there was a difference. After two months, the underwear in the tilled field was basically intact and wearable. The underwear in the no-till, high rotation field, however, was skimpy, to say the least. To hold it up, there was only the elastic band, the rest was “almost non-existent.” The microbes had devoured the underwear, indicating that the soil was buzzing with life, a boon both for the earth and for the crops above.

  It’s been said that “civilizations rise and fall on the quality of their soil,” and with our human population expected to rise to ten billion by mid-century, ignoring the steep degradation of soil would be a huge oversight. Citing a World Resources Institute report, British author Nafeez Ahmed writes,

  Over the past 40 years, about 2 billion hectares of soil—equivalent to 15% of the Earth’s land area (an area larger than the United States and Mexico combined)—have been degraded through human activities, and about 30% of the world’s cropland have become unproductive.*4 But it takes on average a whole century just to generate a single millimetre of topsoil lost to erosion.

  Soil is therefore, effectively, a non-renewable but rapidly depleting resource.

  We are running out of time. Within just 12 years, the report says, conservative estimates suggest that high water stress will afflict all the main food basket regions in North and South America, west and east Africa, central Europe and Russia, as well as the Middle East, south and south-east Asia.

  There is no single cause for soil degradation. It stems from drought and spreads with water and wind erosion due to lack of vegetation. But it also comes from industrial agriculture: from the dramatic rise of monocrop cultures, to the excessive use, and even lack of use of fertilizers. Ultimately, scientists have issued dire warnings that how we care or don’t care for the dirt at our feet will soon affect two-fifths of the human population. The situation is so critical, a senior official at the UN has stated, that, at the current rate of soil degradation, we could have only sixty harvests left.

  Soil is like a womb for seeds. It nurtures and nourishes plant life so that it can flourish and grow. But despite the fact that there are millions of different types of seeds (the renowned Svalbard Global Seed Vault, for example, currently contains 890,000 samples and has room for 4.5 million crop varieties), globally only twelve plant species and five animal species make up three-quarters of all our food.

  And relying on so few species of plant or animal for food, and in particular relying on just one variety of a species, means that it takes only one disease or one major weather event to potentially wipe out a food source. It has happened before. In the 1800s, the Irish Potato Famine was caused by a water mould called Phytophthora infestans. The peasants in Ireland had been squeezed off the land as the landowners wanted to graze cows for beef, so instead they became dependent on monocropping one variety of potato called the “lumper.” When the “blight” hit in 1845, the primary source of food for three million people turned into a rotting black slime.

  The result was not just hunger, but one of history’s most haunting tragedies. Over a decade, Ireland lost about 1.5 million people to death and emigration, about a quarter of its population. It took over a century to recover.

  Bananas are just as vulnerable as potatoes. The Gros Michel was the gold standard of bananas until the 1950s, when a fungus called Panama disease destroyed commercial crops. To create a scalable and identical product with no diversity, the seedless banana plants had been propagated by replanting cuttings, which meant that they were genetically identical clones. In fact, collectively, bananas are the world’s largest single organism. And while most people have never tasted a Gros Michel, it’s been said that we don’t know what we’re missing, because the Gros Michel was apparently much better tasting than the Cavendish, the type of banana we now buy in the stores. The Cavendish represents 99 percent of all banana exports, and as a seedless clone it is also under threat: a new, deadlier strain of Panama disease has spread from Asia to Africa and India, and is en route to Central America. When it arrives, many varieties of banana, including the Cavendish, could be wiped out.

  But biodiversity is not just disappearing because of the plants we grow for our own food. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 60 percent of global biodiversity loss is due to land being used to feed our food.*5 That is, the land is used to produce feed for animals raised for their meat. And the way we “grow” meat is similar to how we grow monocrops: we control the seeds.

  Like banana plants, many of our domesticated animals don’t have sex. We control their gene pool too. If you trace your brunch back to its very beginnings, you’ll find that natural sex has been snipped out of the picture. Your average dairy cow will be impregnated every year but will likely never see a bull in her lifetime. That’s because today, for 95 percent of dairy cows and 90 percent of pigs, life starts not with a twinkle in an animal’s eye but in a petri dish. The vast majority of these animals are conceived by artificial insemination.

  For semen collection, the bull is either teased by a steer—a castrated male, which the bull will attempt to mount—or it is placed behind a dummy cow, which, in its simplest form, looks much like a vaulting horse from a high school gym. “Milking” the bull generally takes one of three forms. The first, and most common, method involves an artificial vagina. As the bull rears up to mount, a “collector” rushes in to fit the vagina over its penis, which is quite the job considering bull erections can be two feet long. To simulate the real thing, the rubber interior of the vagina is lined with a lubricant and its wall is filled with warm water. Using “thermal and manual stimulation,” the collector harvests the bull semen. In artificial insemination centres, the bulls go through this collection process two to three days a week, and ejaculate is collected on those days two to three times.

  For bulls that can’t mount or are more difficult to restrain, the electro-ejaculation method is the preferred choice. The animal is guided into a metal chute so that only its rear end is accessible. The collector massages the bull rectally with a gloved hand to relax it. Next a large metal anal probe with electrodes is inserted into the rectum and delivers increasing pulses of electricity to the pelvic nerves. Vets use electro-ejaculation on wild and endangered animals to obtain semen and increase their numbers as well, though wild animals are anesthetized for the procedure. Bulls don’t have that benefit.

  The final method requires a more direct form of human involvement. The collector inserts a gloved arm elbow-deep into the bull’s rectum, and massages the ampulla and accessory glands through the rectal wall, essentially masturbating the bull from the inside, until he ejaculates.

  Usually, we think of cows as the ones we milk for profit, but ounce per ounce, bull sperm is far more valuable. A single straw of semen can go for as high as $2,000, with one ejaculation yielding up to five hundred straws.*6 At the elite level, one “star” bull can bring in over $7 million annually and sire over five hundred thousand offspring. As the lynchpin of the $600-billion global dairy industry, bull semen is considered “white gold.” The bulls that sire the best milking daughters make fortunes for their owners and go on to become celebrity studs in the field. In the dairy industry, Comestar Leader, Sunny Boy, and Toystory are all household names. These bulls belong to the “millionaire’s club,”*7 not only for the cash they bring in but specifically for their level of production: the ability to produce over a million doses of sperm.

  So why is sperm such a big business? As geneticist Christine Baes explains, “A cow produces no milk unless she’s recently given birth, which is why it’s important to impregnate a cow as often as she can physically bear it—say, about once a year. A cow will milk for 305 days, rest for 60, and then be up to bat again.�
�� You’ll note that unlike bulls, cows, who actually produce the milk the industry depends on, receive no public recognition at all. They are invisible. After a lifetime of producing milk—about 120 glasses a day per cow—they are considered spent and taken to slaughter to be ground up as dog food or hamburger.

  This “jizz biz” is not just domestic; the United States and Canada export hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of semen straws around the world every year. Despite sanctions, the United States even exported $2-million worth of bull sperm to Iran, as it qualified as “humanitarian aid.” Sending live animals in a 747 cargo plane is of course expensive, so instead semen is sent over in flat packs.

  These days, with Nasdaq and the Dow Jones, we tend to forget that the stock market began as the trade in animal livestock. Today, however, even simple animal auctions have become high-tech and abstract: instead of putting live animals on the block, companies like Genomix host semen and embryo auctions. The goal is to buy the perfect line of genetics. Buyers look for traits like pounds of beef per cow, animal growth, and calving ease and check off the genes they want to boost their herd. In fact, bull semen has become such a hot commodity that in recent years there have even been barnyard break-ins, with thieves stealing semen vials worth tens of thousands of dollars on the black market.

  This white gold is precious, not only for private business but also the state. Cryopreserved, or frozen, semen is stored in liquid nitrogen at –196°C. This allows it to be kept for at least fifty years, or even, some say, indefinitely. In the event of a large-scale disaster or disease, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has a secret liquid nitrogen storage facility, like the seed vaults for plants, to serve as a Plan B. Housed in Fort Collins, Colorado, the National Animal Germplasm Program (NAGP) is like a genetic Noah’s Ark. The idea is that if something wiped out full populations of domestic animals on Earth, the NAGP has the ability to “repopulate entire breeds.” More than seven hundred thousand straws of semen from eighteen different animal species are kept there at the ready. Semen of vintage, or “heirloom,” breeds is also stored in the ten-thousand-square-foot facility alongside that of common breeds of pig, turkey, chicken, and cattle.