Charlie Custer

I have decided to stop eating most meat.

This is a personal choice, and not one I intend to shove down anyone else’s throat. Eating is a communal activity, though, which means I can’t pretend that this decision has no effect on others—in particular those I eat with frequently. That means I need to offer some explanation as to why I intend to make all of their lives at least marginally more difficult.

I recently finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a book I read intentionally as a kind of challenge to myself. Like most people, I have seen the occasional news snippet or horrific video about the factory farming system. But also like most people, I had resisted looking behind the curtain for too long, because I like eating meat.

Factory farming

Eating Animals is not a perfect book, and there were parts of it I didn’t agree with at all. But there’s no disputing its most basic premise: factory farms are horrifying from pretty much every angle you look at them.

On the subject of animal welfare, you’re probably already familiar with the stories of some common abuses, but the truth is that the entire life of most factory-farmed animals is abuse. The animal welfare argument is the one that interests me least, and I don’t intend to post gruesome photos here to spoil your lunch. But the lives of most factory animals are joyless and their deaths can be horrific. There is ample evidence of this, both in Eating Animals and elsewhere, should you require convincing.

I was somewhat surprised to learn that factory farms are also terrible to human workers. Most of these places pay their workers low wages to work long hours at physically dangerous and psychologically challenging jobs. These jobs are so bad, in fact, that turnover rate at some farms over the course of a season exceeds 100%. Working in meat-packing, in particular, has returned to near-The Jungle levels of terrible, and meat-packing is now one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

But factory farms are terrible for reasons that extend far beyond animal and worker welfare. They are an environmental nightmare. The vast quantities of cows and pigs we eat generate huge amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas far more powerful than CO2. Factory farms also produce huge concentrations of manure that are dumped into deadly “lagoons” that sometimes leak or are spilled, with horrific consqequences. Factory farming also requires huge amounts of water, and the transportation of factory farmed animals and meats all over the country also contributes to the destruction of the environment. And that’s all just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, eating less meat may be the biggest single change most people could make that could help slow climate change.

Factory farming is also terrible for human health. Because it’s cheaper to pump animals full of drugs than to provide them with the conditions they require to be healthy, factory-farmed animals are typically pumped full of antibiotics. Our overuse of antibiotics is already on the verge of setting medicine back decades, and factory farming plays a big role in that by helping to develop more and more antibiotic-resistant bugs. And because regulation of the industry is not what it should be, all kinds of contaminants can and do get into the meat, from hormones to diseases to good old fashioned shit. Close to one-third of Americans will get some form of food poisoning over the course of a year, and this is a big part of why.

All of this matters because factory farms produce virtually all of the meat that we eat. More than 99% of the chickens we eat come from factory farms. Ditto 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs, and 78% of cattle.

(It’s worth noting that a similar argument could be made about seafood. I haven’t paid as much attention to or given as much thought to seafood because I already don’t eat it, but “farmed” seafood has many of the same problems as factory-farmed meat, and the methods used to catch wild seafood are also environmentally and ecologically devastating.)

On “ethical meat”

There are local farms that don’t have these problems. Jonathan Safran Foer is a vegetarian, but he highlights several of these in his book. There’s no way to eat meat without killing the animal, but it is possible (if challenging) to find farmers who treat their meat animals well and whose farms don’t pose the environmental and health risks to humanity that are posed by factory farms.

Vegetarians and vegans (including Foer) would argue that eating meat sourced from these farms is still unethical in the sense that it’s still causing the death of an animal for one’s own satisfaction. I agree. I disagree, however, that it’s possible for humans to eat ethically at all—eating a purely plant-based diet still results in the deaths of millions of animals and likely billions of insects. Veganism may be more ethical in the sense that it probably results in the death of fewer animals, but I’m not going to become vegan, because I think that from another perspective, it’s actually less ethical than “ethical meat” eating.

Here’s my logic:

1. While a world without factory farming would not be perfect, eliminating factory farming would resolve a number of major environmental, health, and animal welfare issues. Therefore, the primary goal of anyone concerned by those issues should be to end factory farming.
2. Our personal eating choices don’t have any real impact on this system individually—Tyson will not notice that I stopped buying chicken. We can only have real impact by affecting others and creating a movement.
3. Meat-eating is too ingrained in most human cultures to be eliminated quickly. I do believe a future world without meat-eating is possible, but I do not believe it is possible within my lifetime. So if we want to affect actual change in national or global eating habits, the model we provide cannot eliminate animal products entirely.
4. The most convincing and effective way to impact others is not to lecture but to walk the walk and provide a clear and replicable example of eating habits that others may follow.

If you buy into those premises—and not everyone does—then I’d argue that vegetarianism and veganism may be less effective than “ethical meat” eating at affecting change.

Can you imagine a Thanksgiving without turkey? Yes, probably. But it’s also probable that you’ve eaten meals with vegetarians many times, heard their arguments many times, and you’re still planning to buy a turkey this Thanksgiving.

This isn’t just my personal opinion; it appears to be supported by the data. Consumers may be buying more vegan and vegetarian products like soy milk, but between 1999 and 2012, the percentage of Americans calling themselves vegetarian actually decreased according to Gallup polling.

To put it bluntly: vegetarianism isn’t growing. If you believe (as I do) that the best single change we could realistically make to benefit the environment, human health, and animal welfare is the elimination of the factory farming industry, then vegetarianism isn’t the answer. A perpetual 5% of the American population not eating meat will feel good about their own choices, but they will not impact the factory farming system at all.

So how can we best destroy the factory farming system? By promoting what I’m going to, for lack of a better term, call Reduced Ethical Animal Locavorism (REAL). The tenets of this approach to eating—my personal approach to eating—is:

• Eat less meat
• When you do eat meat, eat only meat that’s been procured from a local farmer whose practices are sustainable and humane.

This is still a tough sell, of course. Local, ethical meat is more expensive, and it can be a pain in the ass to buy. It’s certainly not as easy as going down to the supermarket and picking up some pre-packaged chicken breast.

Still, it should be easier to convince people to eat less meat than to eat no meat. It should be easier to convince people to eat more expensive but healthier and more ethical meat than to eat no meat. Becoming a REAList doesn’t mean giving up turkey for Thanksgiving or pork dumplings for Chinese New Year or barbeque for the Fourth of July. It simply means changing the way that those meats are procured, and eating less on other not-so-special occasions.

Why do I think this will be a more effective and fast-spreading movement than vegetarianism? Mostly it’s just a guess, based on primarily on the fact that most people want to do the right thing but don’t really want to make massive lifestyle changes. That said, it isn’t just my gut—there are signs that locavorism, apparently unlike vegetarianism, has some forward momentum.

Given that, and given my personal belief that convincing a significant proportion of the world or even the US to adopt vegetarianism is unrealistic in the next few decades (at least), I believe that if one wishes to eliminate or at least reduce the impact of factory farming, becoming a “REAList” is the best possible choice because unlike vegetarianism, that change is one that’s more likely to inspire others to follow in your footsteps.

The other white meats

There’s a whole other side of any discussion of ethical, environmentally-responsible eating that comes up so rarely I’ve found it difficult to explore: insects. Certainly, insects are an incredible source of protein and other nutrients that, at least theoretically, can be farmed with relatively little environmental impact. They’re arguably better suited to being raised in huge numbers in tight quarters (many species seem to prefer it, in fact), and they can be killed by freezing, which some entomologists say is probably more human than any method of killing animals we currently employ. It has even been argued that vegans who truly want to reduce their effect on animals to the greatest extent possible should eat insects rather than plants.

Unfortunately, at present there are a lot of problems with entomophagy (eating insects) as a solution to factory farming. In most of the West there’s a huge taboo to overcome, of course, and there are issues with regulation, developing the best and most economical methods, and figuring out how to cook the damn things. Most household cooks know a few dishes for various sorts of meats and veggies, but very few would know what to do with a bucket of mealworms or cricket flour, even if their family was willing to eat it.

Still, I think entomophagy is something anyone with an interest in reducing factory farming and/or environmentally sustainable eating habits should be keeping an eye on.

Lab-grown meat is another thing worth considering. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet, but a lab-grown burger and eggless scrambled eggs are both close, and the picture five or ten years from now could look markedly different. It’s possible that in a decade or two, even vegetarians could go back to eating meat with a clear conscience.