Food for thought

After I told him, "And the longest they ever let a 'broiler chicken' live is 42 days! And birds like that would be able to live, like, ten years!", Patrick stared at me with his head cocked to one side, a deep thoughtful frown etched in his features. "Well," he said finally, "is that bad necessarily? Is mutton more ethical than lamb?" I thought about it for a while in stony silence and then felt tears pouring down my cheeks. "Hey! I didn't mean to--" Pat started. "But they just hang there!" I cried in anguish, "Upside down, on a conveyor belt by their feet and a machine slits their throats and the blood drains out. And they're so scared that they poop on themselves which is why virtually all chickens have E. coli," I finished with a final snuff. And there you have it. I have officially become someone I hate.

I don't want to stop eating animals because I look at livestock like something stuffed that littered my bed as a child. These aren't the anthropomorphized, hard-plastic eye-balled toys that we offer to children as odd parodies of the shitting, pecking, scratching, grub-snatching animals. The fact is, I may very well just love those little boogers that trot around the backyard of my home in IL, but they just don't love me back. They love the feed we offer them, or the bedding: but the sweetness of the coop our family built together, the care with which my sister, Erin changes the straw or hangs icons for each season behind the water dish are only meaningful to us. Frankly, those birds would just as soon bed down in garbage bins (and they've done this).

And yet this isn't to say that there is no reason for grief. Later during our conversation Pat said something else that has been rolling around in my head all afternoon: Its not as troubling that these awful things happen to chickens as it is that these things happen to our food. At first this comment might sound anthropocentric, but I think there's some truth glimmering behind his meaning. If human beings are the meaning-makers and not the chickens (who didn't even notice this year when we exchanged the Epiphany icon for a Lenten one), and if we are the beings with one foot in the world of philosophy and symbolism (one thing definitely means many other less-tangible things) and one foot in the needy natural (chances are even before you finish reading this you will think of what you'd like to eat for dinner or that you need to use the restroom) , doesn't the question of what we eat deserve the dignity of careful, critical consideration? If what we eat (and therefore support with our dollars) as thinking individuals is cruel or wasteful we must ask ourselves what it means to inhabit this odd space on the food chain. What are we if we eat whatever we feel like eating, or those things with which our culture has become the most comfortable? Its as Jonathan Safran Foer says in his aforementioned book: "To ask 'What is an animal?' ... is inevitably to touch upon how we understand what it means to be us and not them. It is to ask, 'What is a human?'" (p. 46)