you can’t run away on harvest day 221incomparable, what these different “killings” have in common is needless
waste and some presumed measure of regret.
Most of us, if we know even a little about where our food comes from,
understand that every bite put into our mouths since infancy (barring the
odd rock or marble) was formerly alive. The blunt biological truth is that
we animals can only remain alive by eating other life. Plants are inher-
ently more blameless, having been born with the talent of whipping up
their own food, peacefully and without noise, out of sunshine, water, and
the odd mineral ingredient sucked up through their toes. Strangely
enough, it’s the animals to which we’ve assigned some rights, while the
saintly plants we maim and behead with moral impunity. Who thinks to
beg forgiveness while mowing the lawn?
The moral rules of destroying our fellow biota get even more tangled,
the deeper we go. If we draw the okay- to-kill line between “animal” and
“plant,” and thus exclude meat, fowl, and fish from our diet on moral
grounds, we still must live with the fact that every sack of flour and every
soybean-based block of tofu came from a field where countless winged
and furry lives were extinguished in the plowing, cultivating, and harvest.
An estimated 67 million birds die each year from pesticide exposure on
U.S. farms. Butterflies, too, are universally killed on contact in larval form
by the genetically modified pollen contained in most U.S. corn. Foxes,
rabbits, and bobolinks are starved out of their homes or dismembered by
the sickle mower. Insects are “controlled” even by organic pesticides;
earthworms are cut in half by the plow. Contrary to lore, they won’t grow
into two; both halves die.
To believe we can live without taking life is delusional. Humans may
only cultivate nonviolence in our diets by degree. I’ve heard a Buddhist
monk suggest the number of food- caused deaths is minimized in steak
dinners, which share one death over many meals, whereas the equation is
reversed for a bowl of clams. Others of us have lost heart for eating any
steak dinner that’s been shoved through the assembly line of feedlot
life—however broadly we might share that responsibility. I take my gospel
from Wendell Berry, who writes in What Are People For, “I dislike the
thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me.