“It is true, I came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself….” (Henry David Thoreau)

I spent last weekend in the company of six heavily armed women at Madroño Ranch.

Don’t worry; we’re not training up a secret army of Sarah Palin clones. No, these Hill Country Dianas were attending “Hunting School for Women,” our first ethical hunting workshop of the new season. Jesse Griffiths of Austin’s Dai Due Butcher Shop and Supper Club decided to limit the enrollment to six rather than the usual eight, since five of the six were first-timers and he wanted to make sure they received as close to a one-on-one experience with a guide as possible.

The weekend was a huge success, at least from our perspective, and while I know I shouldn’t make sweeping generalizations based on such a small sample size, I couldn’t help concluding that most women are more likely to “get” the whole ethical hunting thing, and more willing to listen and learn, than most men. (Of course, if I simply substituted “inexperienced hunters” for “women” and “experienced hunters” for “men,” that statement would be equally true; perhaps the most important factor in making this school so successful was the fact that five out of the six attendees were novices, not that all six were women.) For whatever reason, though, the weekend was as far removed as possible from the boys’-night-out mentality that prevails in some hunting circles, for which we’re grateful.

The ringer in the group was our dear friend Valerie, an experienced hunter and a regular customer of Jesse’s at the Sustainable Food Center’s Saturday morning farmers’ market in downtown Austin. In addition to her hunting expertise, Valerie brought a wicked sense of humor to the proceedings; she was the one who affixed the full-page PETA ad of Sir Paul McCartney proudly proclaiming his vegetarianism to the Madroño Ranch refrigerator, just below the inspirational magnet pictured above.

Helping Jesse and the multitalented Tink Pinkard make sure everything ran smoothly were Morgan Angelone, the phenomenal Dai Due “camp chef”; our daughter Elizabeth, the assistant chef; Jeremy Nobles and Josh Randolph, the trusty guides; and our son Tito, the assistant guide.

As if that weren’t enough of a hunting vibe, we also had two residents at the ranch: Jackson Landers, a hunter/author from Virginia, and Helena Svedberg, a student of environmental filmmaking at American University who is filming him for her master’s project.

It was, in other words, a fairly bloodthirsty group. But as Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, told the guests, we provide an opportunity for them to hunt; we do not, and cannot, promise them that they will kill, or even see, an animal. In the event, five of the six guests did register kills from our blinds, and all six went home with coolers full of venison and/or hog meat.

All in all, then, we’re happily counting Hunting School for Women as a win. But coming on the heels of our second bison “harvest,” it has us (again) thinking long and hard about our somewhat vexed attitude toward meat eating.

Now, I take a back seat to no one in my appreciation of meat. Morgan’s bison burgers (a Friday night hunting school tradition), Jesse’s charcuterie, Ben Willcott’s pork Milanese at Texas French Bread—these are among my very favorite things to eat. And we happily accepted Valerie’s invitation to come over for dinner once she’s turned the 130-pound feral hog she shot into pork curry or some other delectable dish. But neither Heather nor I is a hunter; the only animal I’ve ever shot was an obviously deranged raccoon, presumably rabid, that we encountered staggering along the road at the ranch at midday on a scorching summer day several years ago.

In other words, while we certainly hope to make enough money from the sale of our bison meat to help support our residency program, and while we understand the need to control the deer and hog populations not just for the sake of a balanced ecosystem at the ranch, but for the good of the animals themselves (no one likes to see the starving individuals that result from overpopulation), we are a little, um, squeamish about doing the deed ourselves. Instead we are, in effect, allowing Jesse and Tink and Robert and the hunting school guests to do our dirty work. Does this make us hypocrites? Wouldn’t it be more honest for us to take rifle in hand and take care of this business ourselves?

Well, yes. Honestly, I don’t think I have a huge problem with the general concept of killing a feral hog, or even a deer, though I’ve been warned about the dreaded Bambi effect. (The bison, I confess, are a different story; they are so big, so magnificent, so valuable, that I’d be intimidated if I were the one required to shoot them.) What bothers me is the possibility that I might not be a sufficiently good shot, despite the numbers of beer cans and paper targets I’ve blasted over the years; I would agonize over the possibility that, due to my incompetence, the animal might not die instantly.

Of course I also understand that for us hunting would be a luxury, as it is for many enthusiastic hunters, and not a necessity; we are lucky to have other people who kill and process our food before we buy and cook and eat it. Moreover, not everyone can, or should, be a hunter; a healthy human ecology requires diversity and balance—vegetarians and vegans as well as carnivores; urban hipsters and rural rednecks; multinational corporations (well regulated, please!) and corner stores; butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. There should be room at the table for all.

That said, however, I believe firmly that every carnivore should, at some level, confront the meaning of meat: the death, blood, evisceration, and butchering that are inextricable parts of the process by which this chop or that sausage ends up on our dinner table. We’ve seen that process up close and personal during bison harvests and hunting schools at the ranch, and at the processing facility in Utopia that turns our bison carcasses into stew meat and steaks. But we haven’t actually pulled the trigger or wielded the knife ourselves—not yet, anyway. Perhaps we never will. But I hope we will always be uneasy about that fact, and thankful for the animals whose flesh we eat, and for those who allow us to do so.

What we’re reading
Heather: The Sun
Martin: Anthony Trollope, The Warden

Martin’s post last week describing the first slaughter (and I use the word “slaughter” advisedly) in our new endeavor as purveyors of bison meat elicited a comment that urged us to consider the ethical fault line (presumably) running through every conscience, that unsteady place where we find ourselves rationalizing our actions to ourselves or to whatever audience our imaginations conjure up.

Martin tried to make his/our unease clear with the post’s title: Bloody Hands. So I’m wondering once again about the ethics of carnivorocity, as visible and treacherous a fault line as abortion, euthanasia, gun control, climate change, or cloning: when you stand on one side of the fault line, it’s easy to think that the earth itself will justify you when it opens up and swallows the dummies over there, proving that you were on the right side, at which point you can stop worrying all the time, for heaven’s sake, and go on your merry way without thinking about the issue ever again.

As usual, diving into the conversations available on the internet just sucked me deeper into the murk. A defense is available for every possible position and offered with wildly varying degrees of civility: meat-eaters supporting vegans and trashing vegetarians; meat-eaters sneering at any thought of self-restriction; vegetarians and vegans calling meat-eaters all sorts of names; vegetarians acknowledging that some meat-eating is environmentally acceptable; meat-eaters acknowledging that American meat production and consumption is for the most part grotesque. What’s a utopian-minded bison rancher to think?

Serendipity, as usual, is my guide: in chasing internet rabbits down their holes, I found a momentary resting place in a review of Maggie Kozel’s book The Color of Atmosphere: One Doctor’s Journey In and Out of Medicine. After describing a flummoxing patient she had as a second-year medical student, Kozel said, “[I] devoured the answers without asking the right questions.”

Of course, if you’re obsessive the way I am, then you’ll immediately begin worrying about what the right questions are, as in, if I’m “right” then others must be “wrong.” One of the hallmarks of the debate about meat-eating and its impact on the environment or the individual soul is the array of statistics and science that each side has amassed to prove the objective superiority of its argument. I’ve been persuaded by both sides and neither side, depending on the time of day, what I’ve just read, the weather, my most recent meal, and/or the health of my family, among other random criteria.

In other words, I don’t think science and statistics by themselves allow us to ask the right questions, since apparently convincing evidence can be found to shore up either side. Eating is one of those human activities rich with multiple levels of meaning; expecting questions directed at a specific level to adequately address the full range is a little like expecting a monoculture to support the diversity a polyculture allows. Although science poses some vitally important questions when it examines the issue of meat-eating, the nature of its inquiry must ignore other equally pressing but less quantifiable questions, such as, what conditions allow a multi-species community to flourish? Does eating meat (by humans) contribute or detract from our community’s flourishment (a word coined by our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison)?

I hear the howls of protest even before I finish typing this sentence: how do you measure flourishment? Who decides the standards? Invalid! Too subjective! Well, yes. That’s what makes this a fault-line issue: it addresses the limits of our humanity and so necessarily includes subjective experience. To be honest, I don’t know how to measure flourishment; I suspect you just know it when you see it. And when you see it, you’re moved to describe it, knowing that the urge will be frustrated to at least some degree because flourishment, like all fruit, is the result of such a complex interaction of elements in space and time that any description will be incomplete. And of course it’s not a steady state; it waxes and wanes as circumstances change and sometimes double back on themselves.

In this context, the question of whether meat-eating is ethical can be answered unequivocally: it depends. One of the preconditions for flourishment is a sense of justice, a perspective that includes but also rises above the immediate tit-for-tat concerns of fairness. The scope of justice includes not just humanity but the earth itself—and perhaps the cosmos. It unrolls over the course of history, recognizing that particular injustices sometimes take generations, centuries, or millennia to wither, even with the powerful witness and effort of prophets and their followers. As I said in an earlier post, it may be that vegetarians and vegans are living forward into a time where justice is more fully realized. At the same time, issues of fairness and justice press at us every moment in this world where the lion and the lamb cannot yet lie down together, where predators are a vital part of an ecosystem that has developed in sync with domesticated animals.

Can meat be produced and consumed in a way that encourages justice and, hence, flourishment? I think it can. There are multiple instances of communities and societies that eat meat and live within that delicate balance that looks to the long-term well-being and dignity of the system as a whole, places like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, although there are many, many others. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.) There are multiple instances of communities and cultures flourishing without eating meat, most notably for the purposes of this post the Hindu cultures whose vegetarian cuisines I eat with great pleasure. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.)

Likewise, there are communities and cultures that eat meat without flourishing, including most of the industrialized world, where concern for short-term profits and their consequent incitement of unrestrained appetite smother any hope of flourishment under mountains of animal excrement and anguish. Those places that encourage us (in the industrialized world) to measure the value of food in one way only—cheap is best—smother flourishment. Food is at the center of family, of community, of myth, of life. To reduce its essence to a single component is to denature its multivalent nutritional value.

Back to the ethical fault line, that place we stand uneasily, knowing that we may be swallowed: may those of us who recognize the fault line join hands—bloody or not—across the chasm and help each other seek the firmer footing of justice as our foundation. Flourishment will surely follow.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (still!)
Martin: Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks

My friend and former graduate school colleague, Tinky Weisblat, who lives in Hawley MA, asked her many blogging friends to publish a post on Massachusetts food during the week of August 22–28 as part of Loving Local: Celebrating the Flavors of Massachusetts, a “blogathon” celebrating the Bay State’s Farmers Market Week. I highly recommend her blog, In Our Grandmother’s Kitchens: Cooking, Singing, and Sharing in New England and Beyond. Tinky, this post is for you.

My favorite Massachusetts meal of all time is probably one at which I wasn’t even present. It took place during the fall semester of our senior year at Williams College. Heather lived off campus that year, in a funky old two-story house on Water Street that she shared with three housemates, an enormous wood stove, and some unidentified fungi in the upstairs bathtub. I had long since become convinced that she was The Girl For Me, but she did not yet share my conviction. So one chilly winter night when all three of her housemates were elsewhere, she invited our classmate Bill Holt down for an intimate dinner, with distinctly romantic ends in mind.

Bill was actually a good friend of mine—he lived one floor above me during freshman year, and he was a kind, funny, sweet-natured guy—a real gentleman. Cute, too. Heather was in one of her Molly Katzen vegetarian phases, and made one of her specialties—a vegetable pie—for dinner, with ingredients carefully selected at the Slippery Banana, the little organic grocery store on Spring Street. She even bought a nice bottle of wine, by which I mean one that cost more than two dollars. (This was college, remember?)

After Bill arrived, they opened the bottle of expensive wine and chatted for a while, and things seemed to be going according to plan. When they finally sat down for dinner, she placed a steaming slice of pie before Bill.

He took a bite and said, “Wow, this is great! What’s in it?”

With the earnestness that often characterizes youthful vegetarian evangelists, Heather proudly rattled off the ingredients: broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, peas, peanuts for complementary protein, in (naturally) a whole wheat crust…. Bill nodded, patted his mouth with his napkin, and stood up.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s really delicious, but I have to leave now.”

Heather was stunned—this was definitely not how she had imagined the evening ending—but Bill was politely determined. She was left with most of a vegetable pie, an almost-full bottle of wine, and a lot of unanswered questions.

When she next saw Bill, on campus a few days later, he immediately apologized for his abrupt departure. In the course of the conversation, he grudgingly let slip that he had actually gone straight from her house to the college infirmary, where he had spent the next three days recovering from a severe anaphylactic reaction. Turns out he was deathly allergic to peanuts—she’d almost killed him with that vegetable pie and its complementary protein!

Bill was hardly one to carry a grudge, but the romance between them never blossomed. As for me, I knew an opportunity when I saw one. I spent the next several months discreetly and repeatedly reminding Heather that I, unlike some others I could name, had no food allergies. That spring, perhaps intoxicated by the scent of the lilacs, she finally succumbed to my many charms, and the rest, as they say, is history; we were married four years later. But who knows how our lives would have turned out had Bill Holt not been allergic to peanuts?

Heather’s vegetarian phases seem to be behind her; we still have a well-thumbed copy of Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook on the shelf, though I don’t think Heather has looked at it in years, and she has permanently retired that vegetable pie from her repertory. Perhaps that disastrous romantic dinner remains a little too memorable for her.

What we’re reading
Heather: Oscar Casares, Amigoland
Martin: Peter Fish (ed.), California’s Best: Two Centuries of Great Writing from the Golden State

In a recent op-ed column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat examines the underlying values of James Cameron’s movie Avatar and links it to a tide of pantheism coursing through Hollywood in particular and America in general. As a nation, Douthat argues, we have almost from our inception tended to collapse distinctions and seek unity, a tendency Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s: “When the conditions of society are becoming more equal… [t]he idea of unity so possesses man and is sought by him so generally that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself to repose in that belief. Not content with the discovery that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a Creator, he is still embarrassed by this primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole.” We Americans, it seems, are born to pantheism as the sparks fly upward.

Douthat believes that we should fight, or at least question, this impulse. He doubts whether nature “actually deserves a religious response.” The traditional monotheistic religions confront the problem of evil, struggling to reconcile a loving creator with suffering and death. Pantheism can’t address this basic human concern, according to Douthat, because nature “is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its ‘circle of life’ is really a cycle of mortality.” Religion, he believes, exists in part to pull self-conscious humanity, simultaneously of nature and outside it, out of this tragic cycle. Without religion—Christianity, for Douthat—there is no escape “upward,” only a downward abandonment of our consciousness. Pantheism leaves us with only dust and ashes.

Since the Madroño Ranch mission and vision statements rest comfortably on a foundation of Christian pantheism—defined as finding God in all things—I can’t help but respond. Here’s why I think Douthat’s definition of Christianity and its relationship to the material world—i.e., nature—needs to be questioned.

Christianity arose at the confluence of two distinct and, in some ways, contradictory traditions: Judaism, which tended to see the divine as simultaneously transcendent and thoroughly enmeshed with created matter, and Platonism, which opposed the corruption of the material to the purity of the eternal. The Nicene Creed, adopted in 325, endorsed the latter view by asserting the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, which asserts that creation did not arise from eternally preexisting materials and that God created the universe from scratch.

The poetic cosmology of the creed, however, left room for multiple interpretations. My personal favorite comes from Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), who set the scene for Eastern Orthodoxy and declared that Jesus was the first person to become fully human and thus, paradoxically, divine. Jesus thereby reopened the clogged conduit between the created and divine realms, and his call to humanity is to live fully, as he did, into the image of the divine imprinted in all of us. Western Christianity, however, preferred a top-down model in which the initiative for divine-mortal interaction was exclusively unilateral, leaving humanity in the dust, so to speak.

I present this radically reductive, tongue-in-cheek summary to suggest that the relationship between God and creation (and humanity and the rest of creation) may be more complicated than some Western Christians (like Douthat) believe. Shortly after reading Douthat’s column, I read another recent New York Times article by Natalie Angier. In it, she describes research being conducted on the complexity of plants, specifically on “their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar….” Says one researcher, “Even if you have quite a bit of knowledge about plants, it’s still surprising to see how sophisticated they can be.” Attributes we’ve always ascribed to humans alone seem to be much more widely spread than anyone imagined, moving out of the animal kingdom, even. Using and eating plants may be a much more fraught enterprise than we’d supposed. If the right relationship between humans and animals has inspired a multigenerational series of philosophical and theological contortions, what will happen when we find that algae are, like us, just a little lower than the angels?

One of the things that’s becoming clear to this utter non-scientist and spastic theologian is that the created order becomes more intricate and surprising the more we study it, repeatedly requiring us to question assumptions that we had thought were beyond questioning. “Your job as a scientist is to find out how you’re fooling yourself,” says astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter. I would say this is true in most human endeavors, most particularly if you’re claiming knowledge of God. (Which I do all the time. I figure God has got to be a bossy oldest daughter, like me.) Does nature deserve a religious response? How can it not?

Douthat may have been saying that nature is not worthy of worship, but worship is not the only religious response available to us. According to many Christian thinkers (and doers), we are called to love even our enemies because they too are formed in the image of God. What might it mean to find the image of God outside the narrow confines of humanity? Surely we would need to love that image with the same constancy and self-discipline required to love our irritating fellow humans. Rather than trapping us in the tragic cycle of mortality, this kind of commitment—to love the natural world as we would love God, our neighbors, and ourselves—strikes me as precisely what leads to wisdom, even if it means collapsing traditional distinctions (sorry, Alexis!) between heaven and earth.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (still!)
Martin: Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

]]> http://madronoranch.com/?feed=rss2&p=302 3 http://madronoranch.com/?p=298 http://madronoranch.com/?p=298#comments Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:46:00 +0000 http://madronoranch.com/?p=298 Continue reading →]]>

Meat-eating has been the topic of much discussion recently, at least in what I’ve been reading. Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals, has generated a significant buzz; if you Google “foer eating animals,” you get 961,000 results. Foer spent three years investigating meat production in the United States, factory farming in particular. Although he himself is a vegan, he says that he has no interest in converting anyone to veganocity; he just wants people to think about where their food—specifically, their meat—comes from.

Although I haven’t come to his vegan, or even vegetarian, conclusions, I think Foer is right. (Ahem. I haven’t read the book.) In my previous post on carnivorocity (a word my spell-check still doesn’t like), I wrote very convincingly about the ethical precondition necessary for meat eating, to wit: awareness of and gratitude for the sacrifice required to satisfy the appetite of the meat-eater, awareness that demands, for those who are to be sacrificed, a life of comfort in the world to which they are adapted. In fact, I think this awareness needs to be extended to vegetables as well; after all, even vegans require sacrifice—it’s just not as messy. By the very act of eating, all creatures—including, most emphatically, humans—participate in the circle of sacrifice, and a circle it most assuredly is; in nature, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

What sacrifice, then, is demanded of us? This year’s edition of The Best American Essays, edited by Mary Oliver, includes an essay by Wendell Berry entitled “Faustian Economics,” originally published in Harper’s Magazine. In it, Berry rails against the American propensity to confuse personal freedom with unlimited consumption, a fantasy that perhaps arose due to the intersection of the Industrial Revolution with the discovery of vast natural resources in the American West. As a nation, we’re confronting the end of this fantasy and “entering a time of inescapable limits”—an opportunity, according to Berry, to become reacquainted with traditional definitions of humanness. By their very nature, humans are, well, natural, and therefore limited. What distinguishes us from other animals (although I think this topic is being hotly debated) is our capacity for self-limitation, self-restraint, particularly as it is “implied in neighborliness, stewardship, thrift, temperance, generosity, care, kindness, friendship, loyalty, and love.”

As long as we base our identity on limitlessness, we deny an essential—and liberating—element of our humanity. As long as we base that fundamentally human activity, commerce, on fantasies of limitlessness, it will be inhuman and inhumane, what Berry calls an “economy of community destruction.” Instead, he would have us cultivate a mindfulness of human limits—agricultural, economic, medical, technological, scientific—in order to reclaim “the knowledge that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible.” He cites intact ecosystems like working forests and farms that give inexhaustibly, given the practice of human self-restraint. He compares this practice to the willing submission of artists to the constraints of their art forms—the poet to the sonnet, the painter to the canvas. The work that arises from this sort of discipline has the capacity to feed us inexhaustibly, a capacity we’ve all experienced when revisiting favorite novels or symphonies or buildings.

The title of Berry’s essay comes from Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, first published in 1604, in which Faustus (that’s him in the picture above) sells his soul to Lucifer in exchange for knowledge and power. What Faustus learns—or, more accurately, refuses to learn—is that the human mind and soul are and ought to be subject to limits. When creatures refuse to acknowledge limits, hell is born.

So how do we practice the self-restraint necessary to maintain our humanity? Some, like Foer, argue that abstaining from eating meat is a logical and reasonable sacrifice. I don’t disagree with him, but I don’t think there’s a single way to humane self-restraint. Many indigenous cultures have focused on—even worshipped—the animals that fed them, Native Americans and bisons being a case in point.

I’m not sure any of this will mean much to those people and businesses that value scale and efficiency over humanness. Nor will it mean much to most Americans accustomed to the availability of cheap meat at every meal. But, with Berry, I believe that our humanity is at stake in the choices we make when we eat. When we choose to abet the suffering of animals and ecosystems to feed ourselves, we whittle away at our own humanness. When we choose to limit our choices, we paradoxically open ourselves to the possibility of inexhaustible plenty.

Sounds like a deal to me.

What we’re reading
Heather: Sylvia A. Earle, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One
Martin: Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin

Since we’re in the early planning stages for our first Madroño Ranch bison harvest, I’ve been reflecting on issues of carnivorocity, which my spell-checker tells me isn’t a word. It suggests “carnivorousness” instead. But I prefer my neologism because it retains echoes of the ferocity that undergirds all meat-eating.

I have been a happy meat-eater all my life, with the exception of my senior year in college, when I chose to be a vegetarian for financial and life-style rather than ethical reasons. Although I still eat meat, I’ve grown increasingly troubled by the system that produces most of it in the United States, and no longer eat meat at most restaurants or from supermarkets.

In some ways, I think that vegetarians may be more evolved than meat-eaters. According to Genesis, all creatures—not just humans—were vegetarians in the beginning. God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in it for fruit. And to every beast of the earth, and every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food’” (Genesis 1:29–30). Thus modern vegetarians are hearkening back to their Edenic roots, to a human dominion over nature that reflected the aboriginal harmony and mutual respect among species—unless, of course, you happened to be a green plant.

But the story became more complicated, as good stories always do. As punishment for various transgressions, God sent a flood that only Noah and the passengers on his ark survived. In thanksgiving, Noah built an altar to the Lord and made of every clean animal and bird (although this was before the laws differentiating clean from unclean) a burnt offering. When God “smelled the pleasing odor, he said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…’” (Genesis 8:21). From that time on, humans were given animals for food, with the stipulation that they should not eat flesh that still had blood in it.

Complicated? My goodness, yes. Eating meat is God’s concession to the fact that something in the original balance of the world has been thrown out of whack—and that the smell of cooking meat is profoundly satisfying. Those who can resist the lure of barbecue are made of sterner stuff than God! The line between vegetarians and meat-eaters is the line between self-identified utopianists and realists—or between utopianists and people who don’t think about the issue. I tend toward the utopian end of the spectrum. So why do I eat meat?

In his fascinating book The River Cottage Meat Book, British chef and farmer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall points out that scripture has been used to justify the most heinous acts, including the abuse of animals for human consumption. He finds the “commitment to eliminate the pain and suffering of animals at the hands of humans… to be morally superior to the commitment to ignore it.” But he also finds the pro-vegetarian argument based on the desire to eliminate the pain and suffering of animals unconvincing. Animals inevitably suffer, even without human intervention. He points out that “dying of old age” rarely occurs in nature, and that wild animals are quite likely to end their lives as food for something.

Eating meat is a reminder that we belong to the system over which we exercise dominion. We are not above the law that ordered the universe; we do not lie outside the natural order. Not long ago I took a cooking class from Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due, one that took a chicken “from gallina to pollo,” as our daughter Elizabeth put it. We started with two live roosters, which we were to kill, pluck, and clean. After Jesse showed us how to hold a rooster upside down—which disorients and calms it—he put it headfirst into a lopped-off traffic cone and slit its jugular. The whole business took ten seconds or less per bird and was strangely intimate, giving me an insight into some of the labyrinthine dietary and purity laws in Leviticus. Surely we are meant to eat meat with a profound awareness of the sacrifice that doing so entails. As usual, no one has said it better than Wendell Berry:

What we’re reading
Heather: George Johnson, Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order
Martin: Richard Price, Lush Life