Lifestyles of the local and sustainable

I am not a fan of industrial meat, remain pro-carnivore, and generally support artisanal food endeavors, but something about this offering* makes me uncomfortable:

Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats carries premium beef, pork, lamb, veal, poultry, dairy, cheese and eggs from regional farmers who have raised their animals on a primarily grass-based diet or according to organic standards. These animals live natural stress-free lives and are not treated with antibiotics, hormones or fed animal-by-products, therefore they produce healthy, great-tasting meat.

"Primarily grass-fed or organic" is a bit more amorphous than one might wish, but the kicker is later --"These animals live natural stress-free lives..." Here, we seem to get dangerously close to imagining that these animals have lifestyles,  which is an anthropomorphic bridge too far for me.**  It is  hard not to imagine subsequent pitches like this:

The mass of livestock lead lives of quiet desperation, but not the ones that become Fleisher's Grass-Fed and Organic Meats!

The quotation above I made up, but not the one below:

“We wanted to create a place where people can come and feel good about what they eat. Not solely because it is delicious, but because they know that the animals were raised and slaughtered humanely; that they are buying a product that doesn’t contain antibiotics or hormones.”

 

I realize that I am occupying a narrow peninsula between The Gulf of Meat is Murder and Why Else Would They Make Animals Out of Meat Bay, but it just might be possible to put too much emphasis on this issue of how good we can feel when we eat meat. For one, there are the related questions of the welfare of the animal, and the healthiness of the product for humans, and then there is the question of slaughtering. An abbatoir is not a hospice. There is no slaughtering facility in the country where Elsie and Wilbur and Foghorn sit around, listen to some Elliot Smith tunes, and quitely overdose on barbituates. Meat requires the violent death of animals. It is better if it is more humane, but the difference between an outfit like this and Tyson  is  one of degree as much as kind. Ethical carnivorism requires an awareness of Fred Shero's famous analysis of the difference between bacon and eggs -- "the chicken makes a contribution - the pig makes a commitment." Conceiving of meat, whether you choose to eat it or not, as wholly humane or stress free, dishonors that commitment. Make no mistake: I am all for businesses like Fleisher's. I wish there was one down the road from me. I dream of the day when a significant proportion of our meat comes from places like this. I do think, however, it is possible for the cloak of righteousness to fit a bit more loosely than it does here.

*I learned about this farm, because they are sponsoring a showing of "The Meatrix 2 1/2." Call me cynical, but I had a hard time getting past the idea that the film in this iteration was essentially using the suffering of factory animals, and meatpackers, to market artisanal foods.

**I mean, personally, for me. If you, like, want to send emails to Barbaro, that's totally cool.

Comments

[BK]

So glad you went not to Morrissey for the easy layup, but to Freddie "The Fog" Shero -- who also taught us difficult lessons like “Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must first set yourself on fire.”

[augieland]

you are a genius, keep it up.

[Eater]

For once I'm not sure I get the nuance of your argument. I don't think the copy you quote significantly oversells its product. It is, after all, trying to create awareness of a distinction that most eaters want eagerly to overlook. I believe Fleisher's was started as a response to local farmers having insufficient outlets for their meat, not to hungry yuppies demanding cruelty-free ribeyes.

"Stress-free" seems like a reasonably unambitious way to describe what a decent life for a cow might be. They're not saying "happy" or "serene," which you do hear from less idealistic producers, and which sound more like pathetic fallacy to me. (It's a little-known fact that the massages received by Kobe cattle are not for the cattle's own relaxation at the end of a long week's grazing, but just to integrate their fat more evenly into their muscles. Which is why I get massaged too.)

[Fesser]

BK- Shero is like catnip for you.
Augie- Thanks
Eater- I like what Fleisher's and its ilk do on the production side of the ledger -- it is on the marketing and consumption side that I get a little squirrely. What I was trying to get at here, and in earlier posts on similar topics, esp foie gras bans, is that there is something a little bit not okay about even the most righteous meat consumption, and I feel that pitches like Fleisher's operate on the notion that there is okay meat and not okay meat. Rather than a distinction eaters want to avoid, I'd argue there is a contiuum, and one has to make economic and ethical choices about where to be on that curve. It is a subtle gripe, granted.

[Eater]

I guess my gut feeling too is that there is okay meat and not okay meat, largely coincident with a concrete difference between extensive and intensive farming. The two do lie on a continuum insofar as all bacon is murder, but as a murderer who has been to Perdue facilities as well as petted my fuzzy soon-to-be dinner, I see a discontinuity.

It's a fine point, an ethical distinction that I'm educated to make and that matters to me, but that's meaningless to, say, a vegetarian.

[max]

I occupy your peninsula, even if I might map it a little differently.

And, eater, extensive is in theory at least unsustainable: the more land we need to feed each person, the less there is for, say, songbirds, or beetles, or what have you. This is the malthusian dilemma of organicness that no one (except crazed reactionaries) wants to talk about.

Also.

[Fesser]

Fair enough. The problem I was trying to get at is that many folks do not do the legwork to make that distinction for themselves, but allow marketing to stand in for their own moral judgements-- there are words like "humane," "grass-fed," and "sustainable" that seem interchangably useful in signifying the okayness of the product, even though they mean different and specific things.

[Eater]

Peter Singer in The Way We Eat gives a chart of the actual certifications linked to five coffee-bean epithets: "free trade," "shade grown," a few more, all of which are desirable but which may or may not overlap in any given bean, and quickly make even the most conscientious consumer's head spin.

Using key words like "pastured" as icons to mean "okay" is destructive of the language we love, but there's obviously a need for a shorthand to help consumers with the burden of every meal being an ethical choice. Of course, producers quickly and eagerly pervert the key words -- young corn shoots are now considered grass for the purpose of calling beasts "grass-fed," and on and on, and Fleisher's' marketing is hardly putting an end to that cycle.

Max: we only need to farm extensively until New Harvest perfects their vat-grown, bungless meat.