VEGETARIANISM: DAY SEVEN
I received an Atlantic article today via Facebook, written by Joe Pinsker called “How the Meat Industry Thinks About Non-Meat Eaters.” You can check out the article here. The article essentially is a conversation with the editor of Meetingplace, a trade magazine for meat producers. The article is interesting, if solely for the purpose of understanding how the image and uses of meat have changed.
When asked about what meat producers are most scared of, Keefe stated, “The most immediate concern right now is trade.” Keefe recognizes that meat consumption in the United States has fallen. Meat producers have sought markets outside of the United States, particularly “impoverished" countries.” Accordingly, both the Trans-Pacific Partnership and NAFTA serve to help bolster the meat industry in America. The question then is what Trump’s trade policies will do to the meat industry.
Second, Keefe recognizes that diet has changed the way that Americans eat, citing both portion control and the incorporation of meat products into dishes wherein meat has no longer become the “dominant” ingredient. The number of meat eaters hasn’t decreased, It’s just that “people are eating meat differently.”
Finally, Keefe recognizes that there is a stigma attached to the meat industry as being inhumane which she blames on the failure of the industry to participate in communication with consumers:
"You still have an industry that says, ‘We don’t have to communicate to anybody, because we haven’t done that in 250 years.’ And that’s the cultural part of the industry that puts it at a disadvantage when faces with criticism from the folks who would say, ‘You’re raising animals inhumanely,’ or ‘Everybody should be vegan,’ or whatever it is the anti-meat folks are saying at any particular time. The meat industry had a difficult time—it’s better than it used to be—but it’s had a difficult time responding, because culturally it just never had to.”
In response, it appears that the meat industry has changed the way it has marketed meat, using buzzwords, as Keefe calls them, to label beef such as “no antibiotics,” or “free-range.” Ironically, she admits that such “buzzwords” lack any real meaning and that the most of the meat products purchased by consumers are “conventionally raised and not particularly marketed to anybody.”
If there is a point to all this, it is this: does one have a social or moral obligation to eat consciously? There is the myth spread about the Native Americans that when they killed an animal, they honored it as scared and used each and every part of it, wasting nothing. To certain degree, hunters have adopted this notion of the sacredness of the kill to legitimize their hunting activities. “I eat what I shoot,” they say, or something like that.
There is a lot of effort in trying to eat socially and morally responsible. It involves asking a lot of questions, a lot of difficult questions, which a lot people don’t want to hear the answer to.
Look at any food website or watch any show on the Food Network. The plates are presented as beautiful prepared works of art. What we don’t see is the chicken who lives in a tiny cage to a certain age when he will be retrieved and his head removed from his body violently, his feathers plucked in humiliation, and his corpse cut up into pieces. No one, including me, wants to see that. We want the door closed on that side of preparation. We just want to see the work of art of the finished product.
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