My Own Version of "Meeting the Meat"

I've been wondering when would be the right time to post a recent personal essay I wrote about my associations and feelings about animal agriculture, and well, Oprah dropped me a line.  So, take a few minutes and read my experience.  You might learn something.  It's worth it. Trust me :) 

                                                                  Meeting the Meat

I was thirteen when I received a computer for Christmas, a bulky desktop Compaq.  My dad lugged it up to my room and I took every piece out of the box, gingerly placing them together and hooking up the life cords.  Finally, I had connected myself to an unending world wide web free of parental prying eyes.  One of the first sites I visited was PETA.org.  I had seen the TV commercials, the ones showing caged primates and kittens with tubes sticking out of their brains in the name of science, circus animals bound and tortured and movie stars saying how they would “rather go naked” than wear fur.  Animals were suffering and they needed my help.  I found the link urging me to join the “Action Team”, so I filled in my address, phone number, full name and soon I was a member, even though I had to decline the optional credit card charge.  I felt like I had made a big step towards actualizing my lifelong love of animals.

            A couple weeks later, I remember walking into the kitchen as my dad came in the door from work.  I have a vivid picture of my mom standing over the sink peeling something with a paring knife.  My first “Action Team” newsletter had arrived and it was sitting on the counter in a pile of mail, a huge rooster crowing out from the cover.  My dad looked at me as I picked it up. 

            “What is that?” he asked.

            “I joined PETA,” I stated proudly.

            “You did what?”

            “I joined PETA, online.”

            “As in, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals?”

            “Yesss.  I care about animals.  I’ve wanted to join for a long time.”  My dad looked at me like I had just jumped out of a spaceship. 

            “I don’t care what you do; take your Goddamn name off that list!  Those people are fanatics!  Oh my God!  You probably won’t be able to ever get a job.  Amanda! The FBI hunts down these people, now your name is on a terrorist list, you can never get it off.  They will associate us with you; it could ruin our business!  Call them! Tell them it’s a mistake and you don’t want anything else in the mail.”

            “Fine.”  As I rolled my eyes I told him I would send them an email and ask to be taken off the list.  I never did.  I had no idea then that one of PETA’s four main agendas is ending animal agriculture.  Their website directly states, “PETA focuses its attention on the four areas in which the largest numbers of animals suffer the most intensely for the longest periods of time: on factory farms…”  I probably am still on some PETA list somewhere.    

…

The Charolais bull was heavy on its feet, thick necked with a whitish pallor and a gristly, manure stained tail.  The folds of skin around its eyes drooped as it lowered its head and unsteadily gained footing while pawing the ground with all its massive weight, despite a broken leg.  Like a dense cannonball of muscle, it launched its body at my dad.  The bull flew through the barbed wire fence with dad as a facemask, ripped his coveralls almost completely to shreds in a matter of seconds, and then discarded its human plaything onto Highway 11 like a limp mouse in a cat’s paw.  My dad drug himself to the side of the truck and a farmhand drove him into town.  The other workers distracted and corralled the bull back through another gate, away from the highway.  The farmhand said my dad was unconscious most of the way to the hospital.  The ER sent him home later that night.  He had a torn hamstring and a concussion.

…

I am not in love with meat. I am not addicted to the salty, tender, tasty muscle fibers of any particular animal, and in fact I was a vegetarian from August to November of my freshmen year of college.  My little brother, an avid hunter, was appalled.  When I came home for my first holiday break, he told everyone he could at Thanksgiving dinner what I had “become” like I was carrying a disease they may all catch.  My grandma refused to believe him.  I just wanted to see if I could do it, to try to understand what all the vegetarian hype I kept hearing in my first semester on campus was about and to see if I felt any different or lost any weight.  Not much happened. 

No, it is not a pleasant thought to picture animals being slaughtered for one’s own carnivorous pleasure, but for me, the decision to eat meat is personal.  I feel tied to my consumption because my family’s farm is a Missouri Century Farm and we have been involved in animal agriculture production for four generations.  My grandma used to look at me and say, “Whatever happens, don’t sell the farm.”  She was born on our farm, grew up there and worked on the land right up until the end of her 87-year long life.  Our farm was a constant in her life, a source of another income, food and shelter.  When I was a senior in high school, I remember she was very distraught when my parents made the decision to sell our cattle herd and let a family friend run a cow-calf operation by renting our land instead.  

Farming is hard work.  My parents both had full time jobs on top of farm duties and it was too much.  Three hundred cows and their calves had become a spring bubbling with worries about money and heartbreak.  Money from the sale of calves started to barely cover the increasing costs of vaccines, castration, insemination, veterinarian bills, taxes, insurance, ear tags, grain, salt licks, pesticides, fencing, gas, hired help, electricity and water bills and more.  My parents had stuck with it for eighteen years and my mom was physically ill the day the cows all left our pastures and went to the market in a caravan of cattle trailers.  We gave the three or four cows we had raised by hand and bottle-fed in our backyard to friends because we couldn’t stand to see them go.   

…

The air was crisp, my breath puffed out in front of me in faint wisps as I lugged the ten gallon bucket full of water the hundred odd yards to the calf pen.  We had the male calf in town because his mother had died during birth.  He had spent the first few weeks of his life in our garage, sleeping on old quilts with our cats and drinking warm milk from a huge bottle of milk-replacement my mom mixed together on a regular schedule.  Quickly he had outgrown his indoor lifestyle and now was free to frolic as a young steer in a pen in our big backyard.  

I was furious because I did not want to feed him that morning.  Picture day in sixth grade was a big deal.  The night before, I had picked out my outfit and put curlers in my wet hair so I could have bouncy ringlets the next morning.  As I got ready in my bathroom at 6am, my parents tried to wrangle my bad behaving brother into his nonexistent morning routine.  After I had finished perfecting my hair, makeup and wardrobe, I walked downstairs and was ordered to go take care of the calf.

Filling up the feed was easy for me, but he was out of water.  As I angrily attempted to pour the heavy sodden bucket through the fence into his water trough, it slipped out of my cold hands.  Roughly ten gallons of water splashed all over me in the fall morning air, soaking me down to my underwear and drenching my curls.  I wasn’t wearing a coat and I was instantly freezing.  I ran into the house, tears streaming down my face while my dad carried out more water.  Picture day was ruined.  

…

There are deep divides in the United States over food production.  Agriculture has been incriminated for problems such as antibiotic use, soil erosion, global warming, disease, government subsidies, and the list goes on.  The issues are so complex that even the most educated person can become very confused.  Anti-agriculture corporations like PETA, based out of Norfolk, Virginia, and the Human Society of the United States (HSUS), based out of Washington D.C., have publically stated that ending animal agriculture is the main agenda of their companies. 

PETA says, “The more than 16 billion animals who are killed for food every year in the U.S. have little legal protection from cruelty…They are neglected, mutilated…and killed in gruesome and violent ways.”  HSUS promotes people to adopt the “Three Rs”, one of which is “replacing meat and other animal-based foods in the diet with plant-based foods.”  PETA is very clear about their agendas for total animal rights, which they are entitled to.  HSUS is not clear.  HSUS operates under the guise of helping animal shelters, when in actuality it is not affiliated with a single pet shelter anywhere in the world.  According to their 2009 tax records, the company spent less than one percent of their income on helping humane societies with animal care although they took in $86 million in contributions alone.  In salaries, wages, and other employee compensation they spent over $30.9 million.  Their biggest expenses were for direct mail and online marketing costs.  These are utilized to grab more donations and to issue propaganda on their proposals.  In 2008, the company spent over $2 million lobbying in California for Proposition 2 against animal confinement, without any regard to discussing these issues with farmers.  

Along with defending themselves from these groups, farmers and agriculture corporations are actually constantly looking for ways to increase animal comfort, health, minimize soil erosion and pollution; the list of wanted improvements is never ending.  It is important for people to understand that farmers want to move towards better, more sustainable production because they know that agriculture is the most important industry in the U.S. and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has data to prove it:

U.S. is the largest food-producing nation in the world. This huge industry allows us to enjoy one of the most abundant food production systems and the safest supply of food in the world.  Agriculture generates approximately $190 billion in cash receipts a year, of which just over 50 percent are generated from livestock agriculture. These exports make the U.S. one of the largest suppliers of food for humanitarian programs in developing countries.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only two percent of U.S. citizens are farmers, thus there is an incredible amount of people very disconnected to food production.  Out of that two percent producing food, family farmers run 98% of U.S. farms.  Large or small, they are proud of the great strides in food production and often feel as if they have to take personal responsibility for American food.  Since the Great Depression, the increase in the amount of food available to us and the relative low costs of that food is astonishing.  In 1940 one American farmer fed 19 people, today the average is 155.  For decades after the Dustbowl, the idea in our food system was more, more, more because there had been none.  But in the last twenty years, the tables have turned and where there was once celebration in abundance, there is now ridicule of practice and a general public that does not remember why or how these practices came to be.  This is why attacks on production are so personal to people involved in agriculture.

Very few people know how feedlots originated, but they have heard the term “factory farm.”   Feedlots originated solely because of the railroad system in the late 1800s.  Transportation made the centralization of stockyards possible, which at the time was more economical.  Because smaller, local stockyards then closed, the feedlots of Kansas and Texas only grew because there was nowhere else to take the cattle for finishing.  This still holds true today.

Missouri ranks second in cow-calf operations in the U.S. with the average herd having thirty-six cows.  Cow-calf operations consist mostly of adult cows that are bred with either a stock bull or are artificially inseminated with purchased semen.  Once the calves are born, their mothers raise them until weaning age.  After they are weaned, they are kept on their own until they are sold to a backgrounding farm, also known as a stocker, and when they reach a certain age they are slaughtered at a slaughtering facility.   

 Local stockyards are very unlikely to open back up in major cities.  Imagine a stockyard in New York City receiving cattle from neighboring states.  It is almost comical and this lack of historical knowledge is only growing.  I have started to think of animal production as a rut; a sludgy groove where on either side problems rise, like cliffs, and the mud in the middle is so sticky no one knows exactly how to get out.

…

The cows weren’t supposed to start calving in February, but there were always those few who would somehow be the exception.  Northeastern Missouri winters are brutal, the layer of ice beneath the snow doesn’t melt until mid-March and the wind chill hardly ever reaches above 0 degrees.  My dad knew some of the cows were ready to calve any day and he had taken to sleeping in the cabin at the farm because checking on them every two hours in the middle of the night wasn’t feasible from our house in town, 14 miles away.  It was probably about 3am, it was snowing, and he had bundled up as best as he could to drive the farm truck across the frosty pasture and attempt to scan the field with his heavy duty spotlight in the dark.  He was counting heads and he kept coming up one short.  With a sinking feeling, he pointed the truck towards the large ditch, which cuts the pasture in two.  There he found her, weighed down by her own bulk in the slush mixture created by halfway running creek water, mud and ice.  The cow was stuck, her front legs in about a foot and her torso twisted from the exertion of trying to push a frozen baby calf out of her body.  My dad pulled the bloody calf out of her, carried it up the bank and into the cab of his truck to try and revive it, but it was too cold and they both had been struggling for too long.  The calf died in my dad’s afterbirth covered arms.

…

The summer before my sophomore year of college, I did volunteer animal conservation work in Central America.  I lived in a tree house alongside the Bribri, an indigenous Costa Rican tribe spotted throughout the Telamanca mountain range in dense rain forest, who can only be accessed by steep, muddy footpaths.  They are the poorest people in the country and speak their own language mixed with limited Spanish.  Most of our meals consisted of rice, beans, and various meats that the niños pequeños were chasing around the forest as pets the day before.  The great grandmother of the tribal chief kept a hog she was fattening tied on a 3-foot long rope beneath her shack built on cinderblocks.  It ate the kitchen droppings she let fall between the floorboards that it could rescue from the hungry, pecking chickens and turkeys scattered around.  Those droppings were falling right onto the animal’s own droppings, in the same space it had to lie down, and the only space it had to root around, meaning it was eating its own feces and that of the chickens and turkeys on a daily basis. 

This is a very different scene than the one from which we buy our meat, not only because of the sanitation, but also the fact that the Bribri were personally raising their food.  The majority of Americans are not.  U.S. farmers work hard to feed two million people, only counting the U.S population, and often have to employ hired workers to help them.  Tom Rivers is a journalist who decided to try his hand at manual farm labor, like working on a dairy, for a column he was writing in the Batavia Daily News.  The feedback he received from people shocked by his descriptions was so strong that he turned his experiences into a book, Farm Hands.   He says, "People have these radically old-fashioned ideas about what farms are.  I don't want to be disparaging -- but it would take an exceptional American to be able to do these jobs today.  Farms are really big out here (in rural Western New York) they don't deserve to be second-rate stories."  Telling the story of animal agriculture is important so that people can understand where their food comes from and the work and sacrifice of the people providing it. 

…

My grandpa wasn’t the best with patience and it seemed cows could make it worse.  If a cow didn’t go where he wanted it to, he would cuss with every expletive he could muster.  Sometimes animals seem to bring out the worst in people: anger, fear, impatience.  Attempting to handle animals takes immeasurable amounts of perseverance because nothing ever goes as planned.

The cow’s nickname was “Horny” because she had horns and she was jet black with a white face, probably a Black Angus mix.  My grandma kept her as a calf from a cow out of a line of heifers she had purchased in the late 1970s.  She was old and she was mean.  Horny had such a bad disposition that we would attempt to corral her weeks before she was due to calve because in the open field there was no helping her and Horny always seemed to need help.  This instance she was in the barn, a couple days after a traumatic birth that had required her calf to be pulled.  Now she wouldn’t let it suckle and the baby wasn’t doing well.  My grandpa was trying to distract her while my dad and uncle grabbed the calf out of the pen.  Horny grew tired of the distraction and went in for the kill.  Even though she wasn’t caring for her calf, she didn’t want anyone else to.  She threw her immense cow frame up against my grandpa, pinning his arm between her and the sidewall of the barn.  The bones in my grandpa’s arm were crushed. 

…

Troy Hadrick is a rancher in South Dakota who has dedicated his life to telling the story of the modern American farmer.  He says, “We’ve seen the need to humanize farmers and ranchers for quite some time now yet it seems that very few have implemented strategies to accomplish it.”  Many writers have tried to dehumanize modern animal agriculture, like Richard Rhodes, who wrote his essay, “Watching the Animals” about swine slaughterhouse practices compared to his own animal agriculture experiences.  He talks with gentle nostalgia about his time as a child on a farm, watching a steer being shot in the head and says that the man shooting, “did not want to miss, did not want to hurt the animal he was about to kill.”  Then he compares similar slaughterhouse practices to the Nazis, implying cruelty, neglect, and evil, which is far from the truth. 

Many years of research have led to modern slaughterhouse practices.  Every calculated motion in a correctly managed modern animal slaughtering facility has been outlined by strict guidelines insuring the best welfare and least emotional stress on animals as possible. When animals are in fear of their lives they produce a stress hormone, which affects the quality of meat and degrades an already low price.  The American Meat Institute is the oldest meat association in the U.S.  This is what they say about animal slaughter: 

The U.S. meat industry is subject to the federal Humane Slaughter Act, originally passed in 1958. This law is the most comprehensive animal welfare law covering animal agriculture and is continuously enforced by federal inspectors who are in meat packing plants at all times. These inspectors monitor food safety and humane handling practices and enforce a variety of regulations, including a prohibition on non-ambulatory cattle entering the meat supply.  In 1991, the industry created an animal handling program that sought not just to meet regulatory requirements, but to exceed them. This effort started with a partnership with livestock welfare expert Temple Grandin, Ph.D., whose innovative approach to understanding and handling livestock has literally transformed the industry’s practices.  Grandin authored the industry’s comprehensive “Recommended Animal Handling Guidelines and Audit Guide,” originally released in 1999. That guide is endorsed by groups like the American Humane Association and Certified Humane and is widely used as a condition of business by major restaurant and retail chains.

…

The Kirksville Police Department had him surrounded, cornered in the side yard of an unsuspecting neighbor on Cottage Grove street in front of Kirksville Junior High.  Some police cars blocked traffic while others parked in front yards, their tires digging ruts into the soft spring mud.  The sirens wailed, piercing screams slicing the foggy early morning air.  Flashing red and blue lights bounced off of house windows assuring no neighbor would sleep through this commotion.  When my dad drove by on the way to take my brother to school, the police men were hiding behind their open car doors, guns drawn, pointed straight at the terrified white face of the perpetrator.  His hairy face was smeared with mud, making it look like he had dirt colored tear stains. 

My mom had not yet left for work. My dad called her while she was getting ready to let her know what had happened.  She threw on some clothes and walked across our backyard with a bucket.  When he saw her with his white bucket, the bucket that held the delicious mixture of corn, molasses and powdered milk he could never get enough of, he forgot he was surrounded by pistols.  Four hundred pounds of steer bounded towards my mother and followed her home, back into the pen he had so cleverly broken out of because that bucket tasted much better than flowerbeds.  That was his last day living in town.  

…

I’m not trying to romanticize farming, but at the same time I do find a personal antique romance in it.  England has the pastoral and we have our wide expanse of “country,” a Laura Ingalls Wilder-esque look at how we used to get our food, and for a select few, still do.  The people of the United States have gradually turned urban, according to the 2000 census, 79.2% of the population to be exact, and thus have no real ties to food production, except that they still eat.  Shoppers at a supermarket fail to think of the work put into how their food came to be available.  Lately, with help from popular writers like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, more and more people have started reading where some of their food comes from, but not without biases.  Pollan’s writings tend to show modern “industrial” agriculture in a sarcastic light, are heavy with judgments and, as he admits, stark when it comes to solutions. 

Organic production has moved from a niche market to mainstream and I think that is wonderful.  I want to make it clear that I have nothing against the small or the giant industrial organic farmer (which, according to Pollan is what makes up the norm in supermarket suppliers), or the farmer who takes their food to the farmer’s market, or the farmer who only sells locally. I also want to make it clear that I do not hold modern agriculture production without faults in some sectors and I believe there will always be many areas for improvement.  That is the beauty about the word “modern”.  Modern implies improvement and when taking a historical look at agriculture, there are many, many advancements that have been made for the betterment of human health, animal health and welfare, the environment and, I am sure countless more to appear in the future.  I like to think there is room for everyone to have what he or she wants, without making food prices outrageously high or decreasing our supply. 

Kingsolver writes, “It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit, when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.”  She preaches a need to eat only locally grown food, but she also recognizes that in many areas this is not possible.  She calls on sustainability as a necessity, but what I think she fails to realize is that modern farmers want sustainability also.  Sustainability is the driving reason behind practices such as the use of genetically modified crops and the use of genetic gene pools in animals, which is the selective breeding process that occurs to reach an offspring with a more superior feed to gain ratio than the generation before it.  Less feed intake means less fuel and less energy.  Modern sustainability practices are also important for pastures and soil- the very reasons the U.S. can have a thriving agriculture system in the first place.  The American Farm Bureau considers that, “Activists would have you believe that because someone farms a large number of acres or raises a lot of animals; he or she does a bad job; that they endanger the environment and mistreat animals.  Not true.  Quality assurance programs, regulations and inspection programs keep farmers accountable.”   

The Hand That Feeds Us, a project of farmpolicyfacts.org, makes an interesting claim for modern agriculture production:

U.S. farmers are the ultimate stewards of the land and continually adopt new, sustainable methods to maximize the use of finite resources. As Frederick Kaufman of OnEarth Magazine, who studied non-organic farms in California and was impressed by their resource-saving techniques, suggested: “[traditional] agriculture, is not only essential to, but could also be the future leader of, sustainable food production.”

 Stephen Budiansky is an op-ed contributor for The New York Times and in his article, “Math Lessons for Locavores” he wants to inform Americans that U.S. farmers are still leading the way in efficiently and sustainably producing food and fiber.  His words on modern production are also something to consider:

In return for that quite modest energy investment [on the production side], we have fed hundreds of millions of people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow.  Don't forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.

There is never going to be a whole democracy of people with the right to opinions that agrees on the correct way to farm.  And there doesn’t have to be.   Like Troy Hadrick, I too want to “humanize farmers and ranchers.”  Because I grew up with a farm I have a strong love of animals, a respect for nature and a feeling of responsibility to teach people that farms are not “prisons” or “factories” and farmers are not “mutilators.”  I understand that humans have a lot of power in the animal food chain and it is our responsibility to act humanely when wielding that power and I think farmers realize that.    

For agriculture to move positively forward there needs to be more understanding of where it has come from.  My hope for the future of this industry that I care so much about is that a middle ground can be found, like Montana Attorney General, Steve Bullock says, “There are core values each of us share.  I’ve never heard a rancher say they didn’t want their children to have the viable option to carry on the family business. So, if nothing else, ensuring that family farming and ranching is viable for today’s and tomorrow’s producers should be the shared focal point as we move forward.”

                                                   ******** Original words by Amanda, no copying or reproducing without writer permission.