WHY COWS AND NOT COLLIES?
Would you give up eating animal products if it made you look half your age? Omnivore Lin Sampson is not sure the sacrifice is worth it
Lin Sampson explores carnism, the meat-eating habit that has humans gripped firmly in its jaws
IDON’T know if you’ve noticed but vegans are multiplying. Vegans are sort of supervegetarians who live on leaves and nut cutlets and don’t stamp on ants. These vegangelicals use emotive and scary words to describe the torture a chicken goes through laying an egg. It’s sort of like childbirth and then having your baby kidnapped.
I do believe that all intensely farmed animals live in hell. I have visited a hen battery and seen the sad eyes of hens with wonky hips and no beaks. I have heard the whimpery moo of a cow’s cry when her calf is taken from her so we can drink the milk.
I might be a hypercarnivore but I am aware. I see sheep taken to the abattoir, staring ahead without even a gin and tonic to calm their last ride. So why do I go on eating meat? I wouldn’t think of chopping up Fluffy the cat or Benjie the dog or a panda bear, but I happily tuck into a beef steak.
This is the question that passionately occupies Dr Melanie Joy, a Harvard-educated psychologist, professor of psychology and sociology whose TEDx talk “Beyond Carnism” (a word she coined for meat eaters) was judged one of the most watched.
We meet in the sepulchral atmosphere of the vegan restaurant Plant. She is 50, something she likes to emphasise because she looks 25. She leans into the conversation with her Byzantine face, passionate and intense.
“Every day we engage in a behaviour which is contrary to how we would normally behave,” she says. “I am talking about something deeply intimate.”
No, she isn’t talking about sex, but the wholesale killing of animals to eat.
“But the real problem is that we don’t see it as destructive and we don’t even know we have a choice.
“Out of over seven million animal species, people seem to classify only a handful that are edible. All the rest are disgusting. The question is, why don’t we ever ask why?”
A shedload of research has been done into animal agriculture and the harm it does to our bodies and the planet. However, for every statistic there is repudiation. We just don’t know.
One problem is that red meat is the best (some say only) source of vitamin B12, a vital building block. One researcher recalls a vegan student who asked if she could just biopsy herself, grow a steak and eat it.
The reason most of us so easily accept the wholesale slaughter of animals is bizarre. Even the hardly sensitive Russell Brand said: “I don’t see why someone should lose his or her life just so I can have a snack.”
Joy has a number of answers. She says our main defence is denial; we are not born carnists but we are born into carnism. She says that we learn to think of farmed animals as abstractions lacking individuality.
But few of these answers are satisfactory. Are vegetarians more compassionate and decent than meat eaters?
Was the meat-eating Virginia Woolf more morally evolved than Leonard Cohen, who was a vegetarian? Hitler was a committed vegetarian.
One problem is that we know so little about lower animals. We don’t know how they think or feel or suffer. We either chat them up or chop them up. We are not even sure if they are sentient beings. It is convenient for us to turn our heads.
For those of us who find giving up meat hard, Joy believes that we need not go the whole hog, to coin a phrase; we can start to become ethical eaters, more thoughtful about where our food originates, and try to cut down on eating factory-farmed animals.
Amid growing concerns about largescale meat production fuelled by such recent books as The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The 100-Mile Diet, some consumers are bypassing supermarket meat aisles and even the local butcher shop in favour of cowpooling — clubbing together to buy half or whole carcasses directly from small local farms.
Artificial meat, shmeat, is not the answer. As I eat my eggs benedict made from mashed potato and tofu and salad at Plant I think of Fran Lebowitz saying: “Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.” LS
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