I stopped eating pork earlier this year, a decision that breaks my heart on a gastronomic level, as nothing is tastier than pork chops with spinach and applesauce, unless it's a good rosemary-encrusted pork loin roast*.
The reason for the pork embargo is not because I'm Irish and Catholic and predisposed to crave suffering, but because I realized my criteria for which animals it was not okay to eat applied to pigs. The criteria: does the animal have a reasonably complex emotional life? Is it smart enough to understand what's happening to it? I had figured that elephants, wolves, most cetaceans, and most primates were off the list. After reading several haunting reviews of Jeffery Masson's The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The Emotional World of Farm Animals, I concluded that pigs also met my criteria. Therefore, they're off the plate.
I've not ironed out any sort of comprehensive stance vis a vis the ethical issues of eating other animals or animal products. I haven't worked out what moral responsibilty we assume by virtue of being smart animals, and how that plays against the biological evidence that we've been omnivorous for a long, long time. Don't wait for a Manifesto On The Morals Of Eating Cheese or an announcement that my conversion is complete and I'm a raw-foods vegan. But in the mean time, read the Harper's Aug 97 piece, "The Inhumanity of the Animal People-Animal Rights Movement," as it manages to articulate both the nuttiness of some animal-rights arguments (like putting your carnivorous cat on a vegan diet) and the reason this stuff matters: "Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them is crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but to humankind's intellectual and moral evolution."
Ingrid Newkirk got a lot of heat for her statement "a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy," which is actually an excerpt from the statement, "When it comes to having a nervous system and the ability to feel pain, hunger, and thirst, a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." Thinking about that sentence in that context makes me uncomfortable: I've killed my share of lab mice, and one of the reasons I left science was because I could not handle the idea of personally killing animals in the service of discovering a greater good. I am intellectually okay with the argument that it's necessary, but every time I picked up a struggling mouse by the base of the tail before breaking its neck, I thought, "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy."
How lab animals are treated is a hot issue, and I need to learn more about it as I continue to puzzle over animal welfare questions. The Scientific American review of What Animals Want, "Speaking for the Animals" (Aug 04), provides a good thumbnail overview of the issues today, and the book may be a good jumping-off point.
In a sort of related note, I picked up Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's We 3, which reminds me uncomfortably of Richard Adams' The Plague Dogs. I am hard-wired to crave suffering, aren't I?
* I should note here that Phil, whose love of the other white meat matches mine, has been marvelously supportive of my decision, even to the point of buying and using turkey bacon. He's great! A round of applause for the man who now has to treat pork like contraband in order to keep the marital peace!
My moral criteria has always been: would this animal eat me if the food chain were flipped upside down?
And the answer is always yes, oh yes. I suspect I'd be pretty tasty. In fact, I think hear Snowball and Napoleon plotting now.
Pork: the life you save may be your own.
Posted by: Greg Knauss | 2004.10.01 at 09:57
Greg, your comment reminds me of the one that online journalling mensch Rob often makes: "one has to work the food chain in order to remain on top of it." Rob is being tongue-in-cheek, I'm sure, but the point is that he is certainly no meat apologist.
I'm a straight-up ostrich, on the other hand... I avoid books and articles like the ones Lisa referenced, because if I read them and think about the theories, I'll likely give up some things too. It's why I won't read Fast Food Nation: I don't want my Whopper ruined. La la la la la I can't hear you!
Posted by: PG | 2004.10.01 at 11:18
Pork was ruined for me last semester when we read João Ubaldo Ribeiro's It Was a Different Day When They Killed the Pig in Latin American lit. My diet might have survived unscathed if I hadn't visited my sister's barn one week later and heard a pig being forced into a trailer (for a birthday party, not a slaughtering.) I was convinced a child was being murdered somewhere nearby, but then someone said, "Oh, no, that's just Blackjack getting forced into the trailer." The stupid thing was screaming bloody murder - talk about not going gently into that dark night. I immediately flashed back to Ribeiro's story and went to sleep that night with a horrific soundtrack to add to my already graphic visual images about what a pig slaughter entails.
Food chain or no food chain, I'd rather not have my food cause me nightmares. But I do miss bacon...ignorance is bliss.
Posted by: Alexandra | 2004.10.01 at 12:18
Yes. I miss pork barbecue. And pork-based sausage. And ... oh, the list goes on.
I mean, I've already cut a lot of seafood out of my diet due to overfishing concerns, and now pork. It's getting to the point where the only things I can order when I eat out are beef and chicken, and it's not like THOSE don't come with their ethical issues.
Posted by: Lisa | 2004.10.01 at 13:27