The Omnivores Dilemma and Consider the Lobster Assignment | Essay Help Services

write a thesis centered essay of at least 500 words in response to this one question using excerpts from the Omnivores Dilemma and ”Consider the Lobster” to support writing

Borough of Manhattan Community College
City University of New York
English Department
“Consider the Lobster” (an excerpt)
David Foster Wallace
The enormous, pungent, and extremely well-marketed Maine Lobster Festival is held
every late July in the state’s midcoast region, meaning the western side of Penobscot Bay, the
nerve stem of Maine’s lobster industry.
[…]
Tourism and lobster are the midcoast region’s two main industries, and they’re both
warm-weather enterprises, and the Main Lobster Festival represents less an intersection of the
industries than a deliberate collision, joyful and lucrative and loud. The assigned subject of this
Gourmet article is the 56th Annual MLF, 30 July-3 August 2003, whose official theme this year
was “Lighthouses, Laughter, and Lobster.” Total paid attendance was over 100,000, due partially
to a national CNN spot in June during which a senior editor of Food & Wine magazine hailed the
MLF as one of the best food-themes galas in the world. 2003 festival highlights: concerts by Lee
Ann Womack and Orleans, annual Maine Sea Goddess beauty pageant, Saturday’s big parade,
Sunday’s William D. Atwood Memorial Crate Race, annual Amateur Cook Competition, carnival
rides and midway attractions and food booths, and the MLF’s Main Eating Tent, where
something over 25,000 pound of fresh-caught Maine lobster is consumed after preparation in the
World’s Largest Lobster Cooker near the grounds’ north entrance. Also available are lobster rolls,
lobster turnovers, lobster sauté, Down East lobster salad, lobster bisque, lobster ravioli, and
deep-fried lobster dumplings. Lobster thermidor is obtainable at a sit-down restaurant called the
Black Pearl on Harbor Park’s northwest wharf. A large all-pine booth sponsored by the Main
Lobster Promotion Council has free pamphlets with recipes, eating tips, and Lobster Fun Facts.
The winner of Friday’s Amateur Cooking Competition prepares Saffron Lobster Ramekins, the
recipe for which is now available for public downloading at www.mainelobsterfestival.com.
There are lobster T-shirts and lobster bobblehead dolls and inflatable lobster pool toys and
clamp-on lobster hats with big scarlet claws that wobble on springs. Your assigned correspondent
saw it all, accompanied by one girlfriend and both his own parents — one of which parents was
actually born and raised in Maine, albeit in the extreme northern inland part, which is potato
country and a world away from the touristic midcoast.
For practical purposes, everyone knows what a lobster is. As usual, though, there’s much
more to know than most of us care about — it’s all a matter of what your interests are.
Taxonomically speaking, a lobster is a marine crustacean of the family Homaridae, characterized
by five pairs of jointed legs, the first pair terminating in large pincers claws used for subduing
prey. Like many other species of benthic carnivore, lobsters are both hunters and scavengers.
They have stalked eyes, gills on their legs, and antennae. There are a dozen or so different kinds
worldwide, of which the relevant species here is the Maine lobster, Homarus americanus. The
name “lobster” comes from the Old English loppestre, which is thought to be a corrupt form of
the Latin word for locust combined with the Old English loppe, which means spider. […] The
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point is that lobsters are basically giant sea insects. Like most arthropods, they date from the
Jurassic period, biologically so much older than mammalia that they might as well be from
another planet.
[…]
But they are themselves good eating. Or so we think now. Up until sometime in the
1800s, though, lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized.
Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding
lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like
making people eat rats. […] Now, of course, lobster is posh, a delicacy, only a step or two down
from caviar.
[…]
As an a la carte entree, lobster can be baked, broiled, steamed, grilled, sautéed, stir-fried,
or microwaved. The most common method, though, is boiling. If you’re someone who enjoys
having lobster at home, this is probably the way you do it, since boiling is so easy. You need a
large kettle w/ cover, which you fill about half full with water (the standard advice is that you
want 2.5 quarts of water per lobster). Seawater is optimal, or you can add two tbsp salt per quart
from the tap. It also helps to know how much your lobsters weigh. You get the water boiling, put
in the lobsters one at a time, cover the kettle, and bring it back up to a boil. Then you bank the
heat and let the kettle simmer — ten minutes for the first pound of lobster, then three minutes for
each pound after that. (This is assuming you’ve got hard-shell lobsters, which, again, if you don’t
live between Boston and Halifax is probably what you’ve got. For shedders, you’re supposed to
subtract three minutes from the total.) The reason the kettle’s lobsters turn scarlet is that boiling
somehow suppresses every pigment in their chitin but one. If you want an easy test of whether
the lobsters are done, you try pulling on one of their antennae — if it comes out of the head with
minimal effort, you’re ready to eat.
A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that each lobster
is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle. This is part of the lobster’s modern appeal
— it’s the freshest food there is. […] So then here is a question that’s all but unavoidable at the
World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, and may arise in kitchens across the US: Is it all right to boil a
sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure? A related set of concerns: Is the previous
question irksomely PC or sentimental? What does “all right” even mean in this context? Is the
whole thing just a matter of personal choice?
[…]
Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how
different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain
on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. And comparative
neuroanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience,
we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the
principles by which we can infer that other human beings experience pain and have a legitimate
interest in not feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy — metaphysics, epistemology, value
theory, ethics. The fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use
language to communicate with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer
or additional complication in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals.
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And everything gets progressively more abstract and convulsed as we move farther and farther
out from the higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then
birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.
The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue
is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just
about anyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel
or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to
avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that
many readers of Gourmet wish to think about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of
their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this
article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of
a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard
about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest
way to avoid certain moral questions.
There are several reasons for this. For one thing, it’s not just that lobsters get boiled alive,
it’s that you do it yourself — or at least it’s done specifically for you, on-site.1 As mentioned, the
World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, which is highlighted as an attraction in the festival’s program, is
right out there on the MLF’s north grounds for everyone to see. Try to imagine a Nebraska Beef
Festival2 at which part of the festivities is watching trucks pull up and the live cattle get driven
down the ramp and slaughtered right there on the World’s Largest Killing Floor or something —
there’s no way.
The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most
lobsters get prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism “prepared,”
which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic
scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle
filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they
cam home in … whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a
lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in
1 Morality-wise, let’s concede that this cuts both ways. Lobster-eating is at least not abetted by the system
of corporate factory farms that produces most beef, pork, and chicken. Because, if nothing else, of the
way their they’re marketed and packed for sale, we eat these latter meats without having to consider that
they were once conscious, sentient creatures to whom horrible things were done. (N.B. “Horrible” here
meaning really, really horrible. Write off to PETA or peta.org for their free “Meet Your Meat” video,
narrated by Mr. Alec Baldwin, if you want to see just about everything meat-related you don’t want to see
or think about. (N.B.2 Not that PETA’s any sort of font of unspun truth. Like many partisans in complex
moral disputes, the PETA people are fanatics, and a lot of their rhetoric seems simplistic and selfrighteous.
But this particular video, replete with actual factory-farm and corporate-slaughterhouse
footage, is both credible and traumatizing.))
2 Is it significant that “lobster,” “fish,” and “chicken” are our culture’s words for both the animal and the
meat, whereas most mammals seem to require euphemisms like “beef” and “pork” that help us separate
the meat we eat from the living creature the meat once was? Is this evidence that some kind of deep
unease about eating higher animals is endemic enough to show up in English usage, but that the unease
diminishes as we move out of the mammalian order? (The is “lamb”/“lamb” the counterexample that
sinks the whole theory, or are there special, biblico-historical reasons for that equivalence?)
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boiling water. If you’re tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will
sometimes try to cling to the container’s sides or even to hook it’s claws over the kettle’s rim like
a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster’s fully
immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and
clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature’s claws scraping the sides of the kettle
as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much like you or I would behave
if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming3). A blunter way
to say this is that the lobster acts as if it’s in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the
kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into
another room and wait until the whole process is over.
There happen to be two main criteria that most ethicists agree on for determining whether
a living creature has the capacity to suffer and so had genuine interest that it may or may not be
our moral duty to consider.4 One is how much of the neurological hardware required for painexperience
the animal comes equipped with — nociceptors, prostaglandins, neuronal opioid
receptors, etc. The other criterion is whether the animal demonstrates behavior associated with
pain. And it takes a lot of intellectual gymnastics and behaviorist hairsplitting not to see
struggling, thrashing, and lid-clattering as just such pain-behavior. According to marine
zoologists, it usually takes lobsters between 35 and 45 second to die in boiling water. (No source
I could find talks about how long it takes them to die in superheated steam; one rather hopes it’s
faster.)
[…]
Still, after all the abstract intellection, there remains the facts of the frantically clanking
lid, the pathetic clinging to the edge of the pot. Standing at the stove, it is hard to deny in any
meaningful way that this is a living creature experiencing pain and wishing to avoid/escape the
painful experience. To my lay mind, the lobster’s behavior in the kettle appears to be the
expression of a preference; and it may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive
criterion for real suffering.5 The logic of this (preference —> suffering) relation may be easiest to
3 There’s a relevant populist myth about the high-pitched whistling sound that sometimes issues from a
pot of boiling lobster. The sound is really vented steam from the layer of seawater between the lobster’s
flesh and its carapace (this is why shedders whistle more than hard-shells), but the pop version has it that
the sound is the lobster’s rabbit-like death-scream. Lobsters communicate via pheromones in their urine
and don’t have anything close to the vocal equipment for screaming, but the myth’s very persistent —
which might, once again, point to a low-level cultural unease about the boiling thing.
4 “Interests” basically means strong and legitimate preferences, which obviously require some degree of
consciousness, responsiveness to stimuli, etc. See, for instance, the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer,
whose 1974 Animal Liberation is more or less the bible of the modern animal-rights movement:
It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road
by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer. Nothing that we can do
to it could possibly make any difference to its welfare. A mouse, on the other hand, does have an
interest in not being kicked along the road, because it will suffer if it is.
5 “Preference” is maybe roughly synonymous with “interests,” but it is a better term for our purposes
because it’s less abstractly philosophical — “preference” seems more personal, and it’s the whole idea of
a living creature’s personal experience that’s at issue.
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see in the negative case. If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep
crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we
assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re
really saying is that there’s no sign the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer
not to have gotten cut in half.
Lobsters, though, are known to exhibit preferences. Experiments have shown that they
can detect changes of only a degree or two in water temperature; one reason for their complex
migratory cycles (which can often cover 100-plus miles a year) is to pursue the temperatures
they like best. And, as mentioned, they’re bottom-dwellers and do not like bright light — if a
tank of food-lobsters is out in the sunlight or a store’s fluorescence, the lobsters will always
congregate in whatever part is darkest. Fairly solitary in the ocean, they also clearly dislike the
crowding that’s part of their captivity in tanks, since (as also mentioned) one reason why
lobsters’ claws are banded on capture is to keep them from attacking one another under the stress
of close-quarter storage.
In any event, at the MLF, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest
Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled
claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you
approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some
rudimentary version of these feelings… and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it?
Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person
who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? I’m not trying to give you a PETAlike
screed here — at least I don’t think so. I’m trying, rather, to work out and articulate some of
the troubling questions that arise amid all the laughter and saltation and community pride of the
Maine Lobster Festival. The truth is that if you, the festival attendee, permit yourself to think that
lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF begins to take on the aspect of something like
a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.
Does that comparison seem like a bit much? If so, exactly why? Or what about this one:
Is is possible that future generations will regard our present agribusiness and eating practices in
much the same way we now view Nero’s entertainments or Mengele’s experiments? My own
initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme — and yet the reason it seems
extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human
beings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, e 6 ven to myself, I have to acknowledge
that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals
and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven’t succeeded in working out any sort of
personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.
Given this article’s venue and my own lack of culinary sophistication, I’m curious about
whether the reader can identify with any of these reactions and acknowledgements and
discomforts. I’m also concerned not to come off as shrill or preachy when what I really am is
6 Meaning a lot less important, apparently, since the moral comparison here is not the value or one
human’s life vs. the value of one animal’s life, but rather the value of one animal’s life vs. the value of one
human’s taste for a particular kind of protein. Even the most diehard carniphile will acknowledge that it’s
possible to live and eat well without consuming animals.
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more like confused. For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and -presented meals
involving beef, veal, lamb, pork, chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think about the (possible) moral
status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved? If you do, what ethical convictions have
you worked out that permit you not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of
course refined enjoyment, rather than mere ingestion, is the whole point of gastronomy)? If, on
the other hand, you’ll have no truck with confusions or convictions and regard stuff like the
previous paragraph as just too much fatuous navel-gazing, what makes it feel truly okay, inside,
to just dismiss the whole thing out of hand? That is, is your refusal to think about any of this the
product of actual thought, or is it just that you don’t want to think about it? And if the latter, then
why not? Do you ever think, even idly, about the possible reasons for your reluctance to think
about it? I am not trying to bait anyone here — I’m genuinely curious.
Wallace, David Foster. Gourmet. August 2004.
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Borough of Manhattan Community College
City University of New York
English Department
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
(excerpt from “The Anxiety of Eating” & “The Ethics of Eating Animals”)
Michael Pollan
One way to think about America’s national eating disorder is as the return, with an almost
atavistic vengeance, of the omnivore’s dilemma. The cornucopia of the American supermarket
has thrown us back on a bewildering food landscape where we once again have to worry that
some of those tasty-looking morsels might kill us. (Perhaps not as quickly as a poisonous mushroom,
but just as surely.) Certainly the extraordinary abundance of food in America complicates
the whole problem of choice. At the same time, many of the tools with which people historically
managed the omnivore’s dilemma have lost their sharpness here — or simply
failed. As a relatively new nation drawn from many different immigrant populations, each with
its own culture of food, Americans have never had a single, strong, stable culinary tradition to
guide us.
And so we find ourselves where we do, confronting in the supermarket or at the dinner
table the dilemmas of omnivorousness, some of them ancient and others never before imagined.
The organic apple or the conventional? And if the organic, the local one or the imported? The
wild fish or the farmed? The trans fats or the butter or the “not butter”? Shall I be a carnivore or a
vegetarian? And if a vegetarian, a lacto-vegetarian or a vegan? Like the hunter-gatherer picking a
novel mushroom off the forest floor and consulting his sense memory to determine its edibility,
we pick up the package in the supermarket and, no longer so confident of our senses, scrutinize
the label, scratching our heads over the meaning of phrases like “heart healthy,” “no trans fats,”
“cage-free,” or “range-fed.” What is “natural grill flavor” or TBHQ or xanthan gum? What is all
this stuff, anyway, and where in the world did it come from?
[…]
Being an omnivore occupying a cognitive niche in nature is both a boon and a challenge,
a source of tremendous power as well as anxiety. Omnivory is what allowed humans to adapt to a
great many environments all over the planet, and to survive in them even after our favored foods
were driven to extinction, whether by accident or because of our own too-great success in overcoming
other species’ defenses. After the mastodon there would be the bison and then the cow;
after the sturgeon, the salmon, and then, perhaps, some novel mycoprotein like “quorn.”
Being a generalist offers us deep satisfactions, too, enjoyments that flow equally from the
omnivore’s innate neophilia — the pleasure of variety — and neophobia — the comfort of the
familiar. What began as a set of simple sensory responses to food (sweet, bitter, disgusting)
we’ve elaborated into more complicated canons of taste that afford us aesthetic pleasures undreamed
of by the koala or cow. Since “everything that is edible is at the mercy of his vast appetite,”
[Jean Anthelme] Brillat-Savarin writes, “the machinery of taste attains a rare perfection
in man,” making “man the only gourmand in the whole of nature.” Taste in this more cultivated
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sense brings people together, not only in small groups at the table but as communities. For a
community’s food preferences — the strikingly short list of foods and preparations it regards as
good to eat and think — represent one of the strongest social glues we have. Historically, national
cuisines have been remarkably stable, and resistant to change, which is why the immigrant’s
refrigerator is the very last place to look for signs of assimilation.
Yet the surfeit of choice that confronts the omnivore brings stresses and anxieties also
undreamed of by the cow or the koala, for whom the distinction between The Good Things to Eat
and the Bad is second nature. And while our senses can help us draw the first rough distinctions
between good and bad foods, we humans have to rely on culture to remember and keep it all
straight. So we codify the rules of wise eating in an elaborate structure of taboos, manners, and
culinary traditions, covering everything from the proper size of portions to the order in which
foods should be consumed to the kinds of animals it is and is not okay to eat. Anthropologists
argue over whether all these rules make biological sense — some, like the kosher rules, are probably
designed more to enforce group identity than to protect health. But certainly a great many of
our food rules do make biological sense, and they keep each of us from having to confront the
omnivore’s dilemma every time we visit the supermarket or sit down to eat.
The set of rules for preparing food we call a cuisine, for example, specifies combinations
of foods and flavors that on examination do a great deal to mediate the omnivore’s dilemma. The
dangers of eating raw fish, for example, are minimized by consuming it with wasabi, a potent
antimicrobial. Similarly, the strong spices characteristic of many cuisines in the tropics, where
food is quick to spoil, have antibacterial properties. The meso- American practice of cooking
corn with lime and serving it with beans, like the Asian practice of fermenting soy and serving it
with rice, turn out to render these plant species much more nutritious than they otherwise would
be. When not fermented, soy contains an antitrypsin factor that blocks the absorption of protein,
rendering the bean indigestible; unless corn is cooked with an alkali like lime its niacin is unavailable,
leading to the nutritional deficiency called pellagra. Corn and beans each lack an essential
amino acid (lysine and methionine, respectively); eat them together and the proper balance
is restored.
[….]
Guided by no natural instinct, the prodigious and open-ended human appetite is liable to
get us into all sorts of trouble well beyond the stomachache. For if nature is silent what’s to stop
the human omnivore from eating anything — including, most alarmingly, other human omnivores?
A potential for savagery lurks in a creature capable of eating anything. If nature won’t
draw a line around human appetite, then human culture must step in, as indeed it has done bringing
the omnivore’s eating habits under the government of all the various taboos (foremost the
one against cannibalism), customs, rituals, table manners, and culinary conventions found in
every culture. There is a short and direct path from the omnivore’s dilemma to the astounding
number of ethical rules with which people have sought to regulate eating for as long as they have
been living in groups.
[….]
The first time I opened Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation I was dining alone at the Palm,
trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare. If that sounds like a recipe for cognitive dissonance,
if not indigestion, well, that was sort of the idea. It had been a long time since this par-
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ticular omnivore had felt any dilemma about eating meat, but then I had never before involved
myself so directly in the process of turning animals into food: owning a steak-bound steer, working
the killing cones in Joel Salatin’s processing shed, and now preparing to hunt a wild animal.
The steak dinner in question took place on the evening before steer number 534’s slaughter, the
one event in his life I was not allowed to witness or even learn anything about, save its likely
date. This didn’t exactly surprise me: The meat industry understands that the more people know
about what happens on the kill floor, the less meat they’re likely to eat. That’s not because
slaughter is necessarily inhumane, but because most of us would simply rather not be reminded
of exactly what meat is or what it takes to bring it to our plates. My steak dinner, eaten in the
company of the world’s leading philosopher of animal rights, represented my somewhat tortured
attempt to mark the occasion, and to try — a bit belatedly, I know — to see if I could defend
what I had done already and what I was about to do.
Eating meat has become morally problematic, at least for people who take the trouble to
think about it. Vegetarianism is more popular than it has ever been, and animal rights, the fringiest
of fringe movements until just a few years ago, is rapidly finding its way into the cultural
mainstream. I’m not completely sure why this should be happening now, given that humans have
been eating animals for tens of thousands of years without much ethical heartburn. Certainly
there have been dissenters over the years — Ovid, St. Francis, Tolstoy, and Gandhi come to
mind. But the general consensus has always been that humans were indeed omnivores and, whatever
spiritual or moral dilemmas the killing and eating of animals posed, our various cultural traditions
(everything from the rituals governing slaughter to saying grace before the meal) resolved
them for us well enough. For the most part, our culture has been telling us for millennia that animals
were both good to eat and good to think.
In recent years medical researchers have raised questions about the good to eat part,
while philosophers like Singer and organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
(PETA) have given us new reasons to doubt meat is good to think — that is, good for our
souls or our moral self-regard. Hunting is in particularly bad odor these days, even among people
who still eat meat; apparently it’s the fact of killing that these people most object to (as if steak
should be gotten any other way), or perhaps it’s the taking pleasure in killing an animal that is
the trouble. It may be that as a civilization we’re groping toward a higher plane of consciousness.
It may be that our moral enlightenment has advanced to the point where the practice of eating
animals — like out former practices of keeping slaves or treating women as inferior beings —
can now we seen for the barbarity it is, a relic of an ignorant past that very soon will fill us with
shame.
That at least is the animal philosophers’ wager. But it could also be that the cultural
norms and rituals that used to allow people to eat meat without agonizing about it have broken
down for other reasons. Perhaps as the sway of tradition in our eating decisions weakens, habits
we once took for granted are thrown up in the air, where they’re more easily buffeted by the
force of a strong idea or the breeze of fashion.
Whatever the cause, the effect is an unusual amount of cultural confusion on the subject
of animals. For at the same time many of us seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration
to other species, in our factory farms we’re inflicting more suffering on more animals
than at any time in history. One by one science is dismantling out claims to uniqueness as a
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species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language, and even possibly selfconsciousness
are not, as we used to think, the exclusive properties of Homo sapiens. And yet,
most of the animals we eat lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously
claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There’s a
schizoid quality to our relationship with animals today in which sentiment and brutality exist side
by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us ever
pause to consider the life of the pig — an animal easily as intelligent as a dog — that becomes
the Christmas ham.
We tolerate this schizophrenia because the life of the pig has moved out of view; when’s
the last time you saw a pig in person? Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and
packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. (When was the last time you saw a
butcher at work?) The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which
there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality; it is a space in which the Peter Singers
and the Frank Perdues of the world fare equally well.
A few years ago the English writer John Berger wrote an essay called “Why Look at Animals?”
In which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals
— and specifically the loss of eye contact — has left us deeply confused about the terms of our
relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had brought the vivid
daily reminder that animals were both crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed
something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, courage) but also something irretrievably other (?!).
Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat
animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays
it seems we either look away or become vegetarians. For my own part, neither option
seemed especially appetizing; certainly looking away was not completely off the table. Which
might explain how it was I found myself attempting to read Peter Singer in a steakhouse.
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (an excerpt). The Penguin Press. New York. 2006.
295-98 & 304-07.
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