Why I Stopped Eating Animals
I was 16 the first time I realized that ordering a Large Number 1, three times a week at Zaxby’s might be having a detrimental effect on my health. Just for a point of reference, a Large Number 1 at Zaxby's consist of: 6-8 chicken strips, enough crinkle fries to feed a family of four, two pieces of Texas Toast and a slide of cole slaw. I understand that to any normal person that might sound insane, but when you grow up in the South, food just isn’t really something you question. It’s just something you eat before you go to Sonic for Happy Hour.
Flash forward to 3 years later, at the age of 19, when I decided to move from Gaffney, South Carolina (Frank Underwood, anyone?) to Nashville, TN. While Nashville is certainly a southern city, with a lot of southern eats, it is also EXTREMELY healthy conscious. Country singers may sing about mama’s mashed taters and gravy but they don’t look the way they do in that music video by eating them. The following weeks in my new home would introduce me to eaters across the spectrum whom I thought only existed in movies; Pescatarians (who eat a mainly plant-based diet with the inclusion of fish), Vegetarians (who eat only a plant-based diet but sometimes animal by-products like cheese and eggs), and Vegans (who exclusively eat a plant-based diet, no animal by-products and most of the time LOVE to tell you about it).
Looking back (I’m now 27), I think meeting and having some of these people present in my life had a huge impact on my eventually becoming a vegetarian. Still, I don’t think they would have been enough. Vegetarianism, like every other value in life, was shown to me, explained to me and in this case even fed to me, but none of that really mattered at the end of the day. I still dreamt of the bacon waiting for me in my fridge the next morning.
It wasn’t until I read a book by one of my all-time favorite authors that I really knew, deep in my bones, that I had to change my eating habits. Jonathan Safran Foer is in my not-so-humble opinion one of the most important voices of our generation. He’s written two of the most valued pieces of literature on my shelf, ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’ (pretend the movie doesn't exist) and ‘Everything is Illuminated’ (I still haven’t seen the movie but isn't the book always better?)
But it wasn’t until 2012, when I got my hands on a copy of his ‘Eating Animals’ that everything changed. And I mean everything.
This post isn't about me convincing you to become a vegetarian. This post isn't about a New Year, New Me! mentality that will wear off in about two weeks. This post is about me outlining some of the facts and information Foer has tirelessly and diligently compiled to make sure you see the full picture. My total knowledge of the farming industry and the impacts of what the world eats is still very, very small. But it was completely non-existent before I read this book. And I think there's more than enough here to make a framed decision about what you eat and why you eat it. There's a lot to digest here (pun intended) so my hope in posting this is two things: 1.) You'll actually read it and 2.) You'll have the desire to know more. Because it matters. It matters more than we'll ever give it credit for.
From this point on, I take absolutely no credit in obtaining this information or the years of work that went into collecting it. From this point on, all factual information will be in the words of Jonathan Safran Foer and/or the heavily cited and documented resources he uses. From this point on, I ask that you put away your party hats, put on your thinking caps and really try to let some of this soak in. Here we go.
First off, let's start with some basic definitions so we all have common ground. These are either literal and/or paraphrased definitions set forth by agencies like the USDA or common understandings accepted by the agricultural industry.
BATTERY CAGE: The typical cage for egg-laying hens allows each 67 square inches of floor space, which is somewhere between the page of a medium sized paper back novel and a sheet of printer paper. These cages are stacked between 3 and 9 tiers high. Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is so crowded you are often held aloft. This is kind of a blessing, as the slanted floor is made of wire, which cuts into your feet. After some time, those in the elevator will lose their ability to work in the interest of the group. Some will become violent; others will go mad. A few, deprived of hope and food, will become cannibalisitc. There is no respite, no relief. No elevator repairman is coming. The doors will open once, at the end of your life, for you journey to the only place worse (see: processing).
BROILER CHICKENS: You probably thought that chickens were chickens. But for the past half century, there have actually been two kinds of chickens -- broilers and layers -- each with distinct genetics. Broiler chickens are chickens raised to become meat, opposed to layers. They tend to get a single square foot of space. Through genetic engineering, these chickens have been designed to grow more than twice as large as normal in half the time. Life expectancy of a chicken used to be 15-20 years, a typical broiler is now killed at 6 weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400 percent.
LAYER CHICKENS: Chickens raised to lay eggs only, not used for meat. You may be thinking what happens to male offspring of layers? Well all of them, HALF of all the layer chickens born, more than 250 MILLION CHICKS A YEAR -- are destroyed. Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing about. Most are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. Some are tossed into large plastic containers, where they suffocate slowly. Others are sent fully conscious through macerators (picture a wood chipper filled with chicks).
BYCATCH: A bullshit term used to describe sea creatures caught by 'accident' -- except not really 'by accident', since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods. Modern industrial fishing lines can be as long as 75 miles -- the same distance from sea level to space. Take shrimp, for example. The average shrimp trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.
CAFO: 'Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation' - a.k.a Factory Farm. This is where more than 99% of the animals killed for meat in America come from.
This is what we like (and were raised to believe) to picture:
All of these farms harm animals in ways that would be illegal according to even relatively weak animal welfare legislation. Thus:
CFE: 'Common Farming Exemptions' make legal any method of raising farmed animals so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry. In other words, farmers -- corporations is the right word -- have the power to define cruelty. If the industry adopts a practice -- hacking off unwanted appendages with no painkillers, for example, but you can let your imagination run with this -- it automatically becomes legal.
DOWNER: An animal the collapses from poor health and is unable to stand back up. This does not imply grave illness anymore than a fallen person does. There aren't reliable statistics available about downers (who would report them?), but estimates put the number of downed cows at around 200,000 per year. In most of America's 50 states, it is perfectly legal (and perfectly common) to simply let downers die of exposure or toss them live, into dumpsters.
FREE-RANGE: Applied to meat, eggs, dairy, and every now and then even fish, the free-range label is bullshit. It should provide no more piece of mind than 'all-natural', 'fresh', or 'magical.' The only qualification for chickens to be called 'free-range' is to have 'access to the outdoors'. (This can include a shed containing 30,000 chickens, with a small door at one end that opens to a 5 x 5 dirt patch -- and the door is closed all but occasionally).
FRESH: Another bullshit term. According to the USDA, 'fresh' poultry has never had an internal temp below 26 degrees or above 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Fresh chicken can be frozen (thus the oxymoron 'fresh frozen') and there is no time component to food freshness. Pathogen infested, feces splattered chicken can technically be fresh, cage-free, and free-range, and sold in the supermarket legally (but the shit does need to be rinsed off first).
ORGANIC: For meat, milk and eggs labeled organic the USDA requires that animals must: (1) be raised on organic feed (that is, crops raised without most sythetic pesticides and fertilizers), (2) be traced through their life (leave a paper trail), (3) not be fed antibiotics or growth hormones and (4) have 'access to the outdoors'. The last criterion, sadly, has been rendered meaningless -- in some cases 'access to the outdoors' can mean nothing more than having the opportunity to look outside through a screened window. Organic foods in general are almost certainly safer and often have a smaller ecological footprint and better health value. They are not, though, necessarily more humane.
These are only a small handful of some of the definitions discussed in 'Eating Animals' but I've tried to pick what I think are some of most commonplace and misunderstood vocabulary in the farming industry. Just from these definitions alone, I think it should be clear that something is very, very wrong in the way we consume meat. Not to even begin with the fact that one of the most highly profitable industries in the world is completely self-regulating.
I've read Foer's book three times through over the past few years, and each time I try to highlight what I think are some of the bigger talking points. Here are a few facts and statistics that alarm me more every time I read them. Again, none of this is opinion. The book itself is about 1/4 footnotes and bibliography.
1: According the UN (United Nations), the livestock sector is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. That is around 40% more than the ENTIRE transport section - cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships, - combined. Animal agriculture is the number one cause of climate change.
2: The average distance our meat travels hovers around 1500 miles.
3: From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of broiler chickens increased by 65%, while their time-to-market dropped 60% and their feed requirements dropped 57%. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be 300 lbs. in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.
4: Taking inflation into account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history.
5: For each animal food species, animal agriculture is now dominated by the factory farm -- 99.9% of chickens raised for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs, and 78% of cattle.
6: Since the 1990's, the ADA (American Dietetic Association) has issued what has become the standard we-definitely-know-this-much summary of the healthfulness of a vegetarian diet. The ADA takes a conservative stand, leaving out many well-documented health benefits attributable to reducing the consumption of animal products. Here are the three key sentences from the summary of their summary of the relevant scientific literature.
A. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence, and for athletes.
B. Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium, and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids, and other phytochemicals.
C. Vegetarian diets are often associated with a number of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease (which alone accounts for more than 25% of all annual deaths in the nation), lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of hypertension and Type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index (BMI), that is, they are not as fat, and lower overall cancer rates (cancers account for nearly another 25% of all annual deaths in the nation).
Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-more-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers.
First, find a chicken that will grow big fast on as little feed as possible. The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease. Somewhere between 1 and 4% of the birds will die in writhing convulsions from sudden death syndrome, a condition virtually unknown outside of factory farms. Three out of four will have some degree of walking impairment, one out of four will have such significant trouble walking that there is no question they are in pain.
Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually ALL (upwards of 95% of) chickens become infected with E. Coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right -- how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? -- but the birds will be injected with 'broths' and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell and taste.
The farming done, now it's time for processing.
First you'll need to find workers to gather the birds into crates and 'hold the line' that will turn the living, whole birds into plastic wrapped parts. You will have to continuously find the workers, since annual turnover rates typically exceed 100%. Pay your workers (often times illegal immigrants) minimum wage, or near to it, to scoop up the birds -- grabbing five in each hand, upside down by the legs -- and jam them into transport crates. Approximately 30% of all live birds arriving at the slaughterhouse have freshly broken bones as a result of their Frankenstein genetics and rough treatment.
Load the crates into the trucks. Ignore weather extremes and don't feed or water the birds, even if the plant is hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival at the plant, have more workers sling the birds, to hang upside down by their ankles in metal shackles, onto a moving conveyor system. More bones will be broken. The conveyor system drags the birds through an electrified water bath. This most likely paralyzes them but doesn't render them insensible. In America, where the USDA's interpretation of the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act exempts chicken slaughter, the voltage is kept low -- about one tenth the level necessary to render the animals unconscious. After it has traveled through the bath, a paralyzed birds eyes might still move.
The next stop on the line for the immobile-but-conscious bird will be an automated throat slitter. Blood will slowly drain out of the bird, unless the relevant arteries are missed, which happens, according to another worker I spoke with 'all the time'. So you'll need a few more workers to function as backup slaughterers who will slit the throats of the birds that the machine misses. Unless they, too, miss the birds, which I was told also happens 'all the time'. According to the National Chicken Council (representatives of the industry) about 180 million chickens are improperly slaughtered each year. When asked if these numbers troubled him, Richard L. Lobb, the council's spokesman sighed, 'The process is over in a matter of minutes'.
After the birds heads are pulled off and their feet removed, machines open them with a vertical incision and remove their guts. Contamination often occurs here, as the high speed machines, commonly rip intestines, releasing feces into the birds' body cavities. Once upon a time USDA inspectors had to condemn any bird with fecal contamination. But about 30 years ago, the poultry industry convinced the USDA to reclassify feces so that it could continue to use these automatic eviscerators. Once a dangerous contaminant, feces are now classified as a 'cosmetic blemish'. As a result, inspectors condemn half the number of birds. Perhaps Lobb and the National Chicken Council would simply sigh and say, 'People are done consuming the feces in a matter of minutes.'
Next the birds are inspected by a USDA official, whose ostensible function is to keep the consumer safe. The inspector has approximately two seconds to examine each bird inside and out, both the carcass and the organs, for more than a dozen different diseases and suspect abnormalities.
Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the 'water in these tanks has been aptly named 'fecal soup' for all of the filth and bacteria floating around'. The law now allows that 11% of any chicken bought at the grocery store can be constituted of the liquid absorption of this water. The exact percentage is indicated in small print on the packaging, have a look next time. US poultry consumers now gift massive poultry producers millions of additional dollars every year as a result of this added liquid. The USDA knows this and defends the practice -- after all, the poultry processors are, as so many factory farmers like to say, simply doing their best to feed the world.
Back to me and my own story.
I've never dropped anything as quickly as I dropped meat from my life after finishing 'Eating Animals'. I hoped and prayed that something about it had to be wrong or grossly inaccurate, but the more I've sought out the truth the worse the nightmare has become. I have been a vegetarian for three years now. There have been times, almost all in those first few months of transition where I struggled with it. However, after adjusing to my new diet and actually learning to prepare and cook most of my food, I genuinely no longer even think of having or preparing meat. Do I still think the smell of bacon feels like Sunday morning? Yes. Every now and again do I miss my meemaw's fried chicken? Hell yeah. But I geniunely believe that there are things in life that mean more than me, and more than my preferences. That my health and my ethics won't be compromised. As Foer says while quoting his grandmother, 'If nothing matters, there's nothing to save'.
This is why I started caring about my diet and stopped eating animals.
You can (and should) buy the book here.
