you can’t run away on harvest day 225who work to raise animals humanely, or who support such practices with
our buying power. I don’t want to cause any creature misery, so I won’t
knowingly eat anything that has stood belly deep in its own poop wishing
it was dead until bam, one day it was. (In restaurants I go for the fi sh, or
the vegetarian option.)
But meat, poultry, and eggs from animals raised on open pasture are
the traditional winter fare of my grandparents, and they serve us well here
in the months when it would cost a lot of fossil fuels to keep us in tofu.
Should I overlook the suffering of victims of hurricanes, famines, and
wars brought on this world by profligate fuel consumption? Bananas that
cost a rain forest, refrigerator- trucked soy milk, and prewashed spinach
shipped two thousand miles in plastic containers do not seem cruelty-
free, in this context. A hundred different paths may lighten the world’s
load of suffering. Giving up meat is one path; giving up bananas is an-
other. The more we know about our food system, the more we are called
into complex choices. It seems facile to declare one single forbidden fruit,
when humans live under so many different kinds of trees.
To breed fewer meat animals in the future is possible; phasing out
those types destined for confinement lots is a plan I’m assisting myself, by
raising heirloom breeds. Most humans could well consume more vegeta-
ble foods, and less meat. But globally speaking, the vegetarian option is a
luxury. The oft- cited energetic argument for vegetarianism, that it takes
ten times as much land to make a pound of meat as a pound of grain, only
applies to the kind of land where rain falls abundantly on rich topsoil.
Many of the world’s poor live in marginal lands that can’t support plant-
based agriculture. Those not blessed with the fruited plain and amber
waves of grain must make do with woody tree pods, tough- leaved shrubs,
or sparse grasses. Camels, reindeer, sheep, goats, cattle, and other rumi-
nants are uniquely adapted to transform all those types of indigestible
cellulose into edible milk and meat. The fringes of desert, tundra, and
marginal grasslands on every continent—coastal Peru, the southwestern
United States, the Kalahari, the Gobi, the Australian outback, northern
Scandinavia—are inhabited by herders. The Navajo, Mongols, Lapps,
Masai, and countless other resourceful tribes would starve without their
animals.