Eating People Is Wrong

with an Almost Vegetarian summer recipe

Before you begin, just tap on that little heart in the upper left corner, please. It tells my elders that you continue to support me.

Those of us who’ve been readers of the New York Times for much of the past century—not to mention writing for it, working for it, wrapping fish in it, starting fires with it, etc.—like to complain that it ain’t what it used to be—more to the left, more to the right, stuck in the center, grown too trivial, too impressed with its own importance, trying too hard to be cool, and, by the way, what is that Wirecutter business doing in the newspaper of record? “All the news that fits,” we used to say, mocking the Times’ own meme, “All the news that’s fit to print.”

Well, for once, the venerable institution has got it right with an absolutely brilliant story about. . . wandering cows. At least it starts off with a cow and a steer over in rural Newfane, New York, that meandered from their home pasture and ended up in a compound created to rescue animals from. . . farms. But the story goes on to encompass our entire national culture and wriggles its way very cleverly into diagnosing, if not resolving, what’s wrong and what a bunch of crazies we Americans really are at heart. It’s the kind of story that deserves a Pulitzer, at least, if not a Noble Prize for Journalism (which does not, so far as I know, actually exist).

But the story started me thinking because it details efforts on the part of its compassionate protagonist, Tracy Murphy, to rescue farm animals from slaughter and treat them to a good life on her upstate acreage, and, as a consequence, to encourage veganism. Or at least vegetarianism.

There’s a lot to be said for her viewpoint. Americans are constantly encouraged to eat less meat or to avoid animal protein altogether, for a whole raft of reasons. Here are some of the most compelling:

• Some people give up eating meat for ethical reasons, believing that it’s just outright wrong to kill living, sentient animals in order to supply the protein needs of humans. (These people often end up, like Tracy Murphy, as vegans, eschewing animal products altogether, including eggs and dairy.)

• Others give up eating meat because of cruel, inhumane methods used in industrial-scale animal husbandry which treats animal life as a sort of disposable protein, a slot machine to disburse chunks, wedges, and ground masses of animal flesh to a carnivorous market at maximum profits for the producers. (These people might eat meat if they can be satisfied that the animal has had a decent life with a respectful and relatively pain-free ending.)

• Others give up eating meat for health reasons, believing, rightly, that Americans’ high consumption of red meat (beef, pork, lamb, veal, venison) has led to any number of health problems, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and premature death. The UK’s National Health Service recommends just 70 to 90 grams (about 2.5 to 3 ounces) of red meat daily. A quarter-pound burger just fits; a half-pounder does not.

• Still others give up eating meat because of the indisputably pernicious environmental effects of raising meat, especially beef (for meat or for dairy) and pork. According to the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), cattle account for 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions, much of that methane. (Methane is 80 times worse than carbon dioxide in its global warming effects, although not so persistent as CO2. It comes primarily from animals like sheep and cattle that belch out huge amounts of the stuff as a normal part of their digestive processes.) Water is another issue: A New York Times report states that it take 2,110 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef,  520 gallons to produce a pound of cheese, and 410 gallons to produce a pound of chicken. Incidentally (or not!), the United States is the world’s largest producer and largest consumer of beef. If we were all to give up eating meat, switching to a vegan or vegetarian diet, or at most indulging in meat--as I’ve seen people do all over the Mediterranean--only on rare, festive occasions and eschewing it the rest of the year, if we were to do that, it would mean a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions.

So for all these reasons, ethics, morality, individual health, planetary health, or just because it’s newly fashionable, many people are eating less meat and some people are eating no meat at all.

But hang on a minute! Are they right? Should we be eating less meat? Or possibly no meat at all? What’s behind the statistics? And what should we do with the 28 million beef cattle, 9.3 million milk cows, 75 million pigs, and incalculable number of chickens that are alive in the United States at any given point in time? All those cattle, sheep, chickens, and porkers exist solely because we humans domesticated them eons ago and continue to be their unique source of survival. Do we simply turn them all out to fend for themselves? Very few would be able do so. And the thought alone is overwhelming. Abandoning them would be, well, inhumane—cruelty to animals.

Ed Behr, author-editor of The Art of Eating (find his Substack here), argues that as human stewards we have a responsibility for the animals we’ve bred over the centuries into a domesticity ingrained in their DNA to the extent that they cannot survive without our human help. Like domestic dogs and to a lesser extent cats, they depend on humans for their very survival. As some philosophers have suggested, we have a clear moral obligation to kill and eat the animals we raise.

But there’s another argument for raising meat (eating it too, that goes without saying) and that’s also an environmental one. Originally, cattle of all kinds were domesticated to take advantage of areas of the world where a rich assortment of plant life simply was not possible. I’m thinking especially around the Mediterranean and throughout Central Asia where inhospitable climates combined with inhospitable rocky, mountainous landscapes to make growing legumes, grains, seeds, and greens a difficult task that failed to provide humans with sufficient calories to survive. That’s where dairying especially evolved. And dairying, if it’s done on a small scale, providing for an immediate culture group, can be and often is the best and most productive use of such an environment.

At the most recent Oxford Symposium, Ursula Heinzelmann talked movingly about dairying in three different environments—in eastern Anatolia, on the shores of Lake Constance in Switzerland, and in the Netherlands—where dairy folk have succeeded in matching cheese production to the demands of the environment. Pasture, Heinzelmann claims (rightly in my opinion), should be viewed as a garden, with all the cultural aspects that gardens claim. This is a link to her talk but there may be a paywall. Another person who has done a great deal of analysis, in the field and in the laboratory, of the structure of various pastures and how that relates to the quality of milk and the characteristics of cheese is Roberto Rubino, who works primarily in Italian environments that are greatly varied, from mountains to plains to river valleys. If you’re interested in the positive relationships between animal husbandry and the environment, he’s a good one with whom to familiarize yourself.