This post is very long, but I agreed to comment on this chapter and when the dust settled I was left with a rather long response. It’s not necessary to have read the chapter to take something away from this discussion, but it would obviously help. I posted a ’sight un-seen’ response in the comment section of the aboot page, and I think what I wrote there is a perfectly valid –though shorter and less specific– response.
I want to make a few things clear, Pollan never talks about animal rights or veganism in any real or accurate way. He never considers that animals have an interest in living, though he does consider their interest in not being caused overt physical harm, at least the kind one might classify as gratuitous. That is, his arguments are inherently concerned with the welfare of animals and at no point is the morality of taking an animal’s life considered. Pollan seems to think that it is possible to treat animals ‘well’, where such treatment includes confinement and slaughter. I have no idea how anyone can seriously argue that this treatment is compassionate or humane!
From a philosophical point of view the chapter is extremely confusing since he claims Peter Singer is an animal rights thinker despite being an act Utilitarian. Utilitarianism is a school of philosophy that supposes that the most ethical action is the one that results in the most net happiness. It is completely inconsistent with the notion of rights, which supposes that beings have an untradable set of rights that must be observed; regardless of the consequences. It isn’t hard to understand why Utilitarianism is incompatible with the notion of rights, or how a Utilitarian could frame an ethical argument for performing medical research on mentally challenged humans.
The Steakhouse Dialogues:
Pollan begins the chapter by noting the cognitive dissonance he felt while reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation while eating a steak and contemplating the fate of his own steer (number 534) which, we learn later, would be slaughtered in a Kansas slaughter house while Pollan flew overhead. He later describes, or rather has Temple Grandin describe, how exactly his steer was slaughtered. If you want even more profound cognitive dissonance I suggest replacing all occurrences of the word steer with kitten. Here’s an example:
“The cat-rump dinner in question took place on the evening before kitten 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.”
“Does the kitten know it’s going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them going into the squeeze chutes on the feed lot, getting their shots, and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant.”
It is much more disturbing to read when you imagine this happening to a kitten! Of course we have emotional relationships with cats and dogs. We understand them in a way that we don’t understand cows, pigs, chickens, etc… We know that they feel pain, and understand (at least on an emotional level) that killing them is wrong. Of course this a because our culture has not stripped us of this knowledge, we have not grown up eating these animals and in fact have grown up learning to respect and love them. My point is that there is no moral difference between a cat and a steer. There is no reason to accept the killing and eating of one, yet be repulsed by the killing and eating of another. You can shrug it off and say we should be eating cats, but if you’re honest with yourself I think you’ll at least appreciate the hypocrisy and inconsistency present in our relationship with animals.
Pollan also comments on this schizophrenic relationship, but goes on to describe that our lack of contact with the animals we slaughter has eroded our understanding of the relationship between humans and the animals we kill. He offers the following insight:
“That eye contact [with the animals we kill], 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.”
So animals are like us in many ways, they feel pain and emotions, yet they are unlike us and it is this difference that justifies our killing them. He admits it’s a paradox, yet offers no justification for our killing them except that in some significant way animals are other. This plays directly into our sense of worth as a species, that we humans are exclusively of value, and that the suffering of other animals is justified by our most frivolous whims.
There is a lot more text in this section but I simply can’t comment on everything Pollan says. He does offer a good description of what speciesism is, and discusses what might make someone morally significant. I will touch on a few things he brings up here in later sections.
The Vegetarian’s Dilemma:
Pollan criticizes vegetarianism on the grounds that it disrupts the host-guest relationship, by having a guest with ’special’ needs. This is absurd for several reasons. All hosts, by virtue of hosting, are going out of their way to be accommodating. No host would be upset at a guest who is allergic to peanuts asking to not eat any; similarly, a guest who is vegetarian (or vegan) need not be ashamed of their choice not to consume animals. Any self respecting host would think nothing of accommodating the interests of a guest.
Why bring this up at all? Because it’s a perfect example of Pollan playing on the social conformity built into people: their knee jerk reaction to be alike and not question truly meaningful issues for fear of being different. Apparently not causing social waves is reason enough to engage in unethical behavior. The slave owner didn’t want to enslave other humans, they were simply victim to the tradition of slavery in their society. If confronted by the possibility that slaves are worthy of moral consideration, the slave owner could take refuge in asserting that humanity has a long and ingrained history of slavery, that we have many rituals surrounding slaves and that it isn’t as simple as just ending slavery because we would be ending this part of our cultural histories and surrendering a part of ourselves. This is the exact argument Pollan makes, claiming that his desire for a ballpark frank is a rich part of his cultural heritage, one that makes vegetarianism unappealing because he must forfeit a part of his traditional sensibilities.
I have very little sympathy for Pollan on this issue. He is pandering to people’s fear and is acting to alienate vegans further by trivializing the importance of the ethical choices they make. He also makes a suite of unsubstantiated claims concerning pre-historic humans, including the evolutionary function of our teeth as well as our intestinal tract, and sources of the vitamin B12. Each of these issues concerns an active field of academic research and claiming them to be one way or another is dishonest. One can find ample citations claiming that our teeth and intestinal tract have developed from the plant based diets of our ancestors, and that humans developed primarily as gatherers, not hunters. The paleolithic diet is a very active field of research and we quite frankly have no real answers at this point. As for B12, no one knows where it comes from exactly or what foods it’s in, and to what amounts, since we can’t detect it directly (here is an extensive essay on B12 http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Article/Food/b12.txt).
Pollan ends the section by equating our desire for sex and our desire to eat meat. I would argue that our desire for sex is a fundamental human urge that would be present independently of any cultural dogma. That’s not to say that culture doesn’t play an important role in how we behave sexually; indeed culture is extremely influential in our development as sexual beings. However these influences generally inform us on what is taboo, who is a suitable partner, etc… the urge to have sex –the basic desire– will be present regardless of cultural influence. This isn’t the case for eating meat. It is not a basic human urge, but a desire that is formed completely from cultural dogma. This is clear in which animals people consider to be food. In North America pigs, chickens and cows are happily lusted after. If you suggest someone eat kangaroo, groundhog or dog they’ll almost certainly be disgusted at the idea… which is quite an odd reaction if eating meat is a basic human desire…
Animal Suffering:
Let me start by saying that Pollan is very effective at displaying the mindless cruelty in factory farming, and he even mentions the capitalist machine, that values profit over all else and will never stop to consider the lives it destroys. This applies equally well to humans and nonhumans, though there is some disparity between the type and severity of pain and suffering imposed upon nonhumans.
Which leads to his opening discussion of animal cognition. He gracefully admits that animals are not Descartian machines, mere robots acting on nothing but impulse and instinct. This should be amply apparent to a child, let alone anyone with even a passing knowledge of evolutionary biology. His argument is then that animals don’t feel pain in the same way we do. He admits that he cannot substantiate that claim, and then continues to argue for its validity. I find this very troubling, and this is an obvious incarnation of the ‘humans are better than animals’ school of thought. The premise of the claim is that we know our suffering to be suffering, and animals do not, which should only appear obviously true if you have already assumed that it is.
Again, we don’t really know the mental landscape experienced by animals, and their lack of language (as we know it) is hardly reason to think that they don’t fear death. Animals certainly experience the world. They are self-aware and they form relationships with one another, they have memories and are informed by a subjective sense of the world they experience. It ought to be obvious that they have emotions as well, if only from an evolutionary point of view. How these emotions manifest themselves in animals is sometimes obvious and sometimes not and it’s hard to argue what exactly it’s like for a deer to be shot down, or for a pig to go to slaughter. Even if we accept the claim that the suffering experienced by animals is somehow less than that experienced by humans it does not imply that we are morally justified to impose suffering on animals.
Animal Happiness
In the previous section Pollan touches on the physical horrors of the factory farm, and it certainly suggests that Pollan is placing himself in the camp of an animal welfarist. He does not consider that animals have rights, but they suffer, and that makes him uncomfortable, so if we could remove all the visual signs of suffering (save of course their slaughter, which we aren’t allowed to witness anyway), then he can be a happy meat eater. In other words, the only thing that constitutes suffering is physical pain, and an animal loses nothing in death except if that death is too painful.
This argument misses a fundamental truth, that animals have lives which are of value, that they are not machines acting on instinct alone with no inner selves. Captivity seriously affects the mental state of animals (human or not) and to make the captivity such that no physical distress is immediately apparent does not make that captivity humane, nor does it mean that those captive are truly happy. At the very least taking the lives of those animals is not in accordance with their interests.
This is a sticky spot for welfarists, who admit that animals have interests that are morally significant, but maintain that the one interest that humans consider the most vital, the interest in continued existence, is somehow non-existent in other animals. I find this an appallingly illogical train of thought and blatantly contradictory. To admit that these animals have a need for social organization, that they have relationships that are emotionally meaningful to them and contribute to their well-being, but do not have an interest in continuing to live is absurd. Pollan wants me to believe that we owe animals a happy existence, but we don’t owe them an existence. That is, if they do exist we should treat them well, but treating them well includes killing them whenever we see fit.
If this logic makes any sense to you then I urge you to join PeTA. There you will find many other people who lack an ability to think critically, act consistently and treat animals ethically.
An equally troubling argument is made in this section, that our domestication of animals has been a resounding evolutionary success for the animals. Clearly Pollan understands very little about how one measures success. Is a number count of a species an indication of how well it is doing evolutionarily speaking? What does it even mean to say a species has done well? Is it a race, is there a victory point track, are the ladybugs still three points behind the hummingbirds?
The number of a given species does not indicate success, evolution is about the proliferation of genetic mutations, those that benefit thrive and a species takes shape by encountering many competing genetic alterations that get selected based on usefulness. Domesticated animals are bred by humans, and we select which animals are bred, so domesticated animals are no longer under the supervision of Darwinian evolution. However, in recent years, they are falling prey to the genetic manipulation of humans, who have bred/altered/drugged them to grow as large as possible in as short a time as possible. These modifications have not been to their benefit. In fact, they often sacrifice the health of the animal whose limbs cannot support their engorged bodies and whose lives are ended prematurely.
To say that our manipulation and confinement of animals is to their benefit is ludicrous! If an alien race enslaved humanity and bred billions of us and gave us a happy confinement (perhaps like in the Matrix movies, except with aliens instead of robots) would this be a healthy and beneficial relationship? Would the human race claim this to be an evolutionary success!? Perhaps the aliens would claim that for us, and they would note that there are no visible signs of distress, we humans seem to be happy, so the treatment is clearly ethical.
The Vegan Utopia
Pollan offers the idea that veganism can only make sense in an urban environment, where conflicts between humans and nonhumans are minimized. He does not define what veganism is, or describe the goals of veganism at all. Veganism seeks to reduce harm to animals, which necessarily includes the complete abolition of all forms of exploitation, since these forms of harm are trivially ended. So the vegan utopia would mean that we honestly balance the interests of humans and nonhumans, keeping in mind that we all have an interest in not suffering and thus we should all be considered equally when the moral question at hand is “should I make a sentient being suffer”. There are practical limitations to the extent that one can eradicate their effect on other beings on this planet, but one very easy and reasonable form of suffering that can be eliminated is our commodified use of animals for food, sport, entertainment, product testing, clothing and experiments.
Pollan notes that animals are killed during agricultural production, for example by wheat thrashers. There is no reason why we couldn’t amend the current forms of agriculture to reduce our impact on these animals. Furthermore raising animals for our consumption requires that we grow much more plant crops than would be needed to feed people on vegan diets, therefore any harm done to animals due to agriculture will be drastically reduced if we stop raising animals for consumption. Pollan seems to be arguing that because practices currently harm animals they must necessarily harm animals, which makes no sense because current practices have not been designed with the interest of animals in mind. Therefore it isn’t clear at all the extent to which animals would be impacted if we tried to reduce our impact on them!
Pollan also seems to think that a diet of vegetables will require more fossil fuels, land and resources in general. I have no idea where he gets this idea, but it is completely without merit. A vegan diet requires roughly one twentieth the amount of land as an omnivorous diet. For every kilogram of animal protein produced, animals consume almost 6 kilograms of plant protein. It takes more than 100 000 liters of water to produce a kilogram of beef, and about 900 liters to produce a kilogram of wheat (these figures are cited in Gary Francione’s ‘Animals as Persons’). I can’t imagine the contrived situation that Pollan imagines where a vegan diet would be worse on the environment than that of an omnivore. For example it would require –at a minimum– that we only raise cattle on grass, since humans can’t eat grass this is a useful form of protein conversion. Basically it would be a world of the small farm that Pollan discusses throughout the Chapter, even though he admits that this type of farm is wholly inadequate as a means to produce the amount of animals currently consumed. So that in order for animal production to come even remotely close to veganism in terms of environmental impact people would have to basically stop eating animals so that the little they do eat can be produced on such farms. If you ask me this section should have been named ‘The Omnivore’s Utopia’.
As a final note on this section I want to mention Pollan’s continued confusion about philosophy. He notes that utilitarian thinkers, such as Peter Singer, have no problem with the act of eating animals. This is not a revelation, and it certainly does nothing to address the very real concern of people who take moral issue with our eating of animals, and our use of them in general. At the very end of the section he notes that utilitarians can justify killing retarded orphans, so that killing isn’t the issue for them as it is for others, such as himself. So he admits that killing is, as a rule, a moral wrong, yet he fails to mention why it is okay to differentiate between the killing of a human animal and the killing of a nonhuman animal. He never offers a reason to exclude animals from moral consideration except that they may experience pain and suffering in a different way than humans (as expressed in the section ‘Animal Suffering’).
Concluding Remarks
The chapter on a whole probably makes omnivores more comfortable with eating meat, after all they might feel slightly guilty about harming animals and Pollan tells them that it’s okay. What he doesn’t do is properly frame the moral argument for veganism, and therefore he never actually refutes the position of veganism. When he does approach philosophical questions, he tends to use utilitarian philosophy and reaches conclusions consistent with animal welfare. Let me briefly pose the moral quandary he should have addressed.
As a general rule we agree that animals should not be made to suffer unnecessarily. The basic underpinnings of this morality is our shared sentience. All animals (human and otherwise) feel pain and can suffer, and since we share this interest we are obliged to apply the rule of equal consideration. That is, since we all suffer and have an interest in not suffering we must respect that interest in all beings that share it. To exclude animals from moral consideration requires that we have a morally justified reason to exclude them from consideration. Any characteristic that you can think of for differentiation, such as intelligence, appears in humans to varying degrees. There are smart humans and very very stupid ones too, so if you differentiate animals because of their minds you are saying that intelligence is a morally relevant characteristic and that smart humans are more morally relevant than very very stupid ones, which almost no one would agree with. There are also characteristics that animals have that humans do not, for example the ability to breath under water, or fly. We don’t consider these abilities morally relevant, a bird’s ability to fly is no more morally relevant than a person’s height or annual income.
What Pollan needs to do –what any omnivore needs to do– is ask themselves what makes the suffering they experience more morally relevant than the suffering experienced by other animals. Why are humans with far less physical and mental abilities than some animals included in the moral community and animals not? Dividing the moral relevance based on species is not a morally defensible thing to do. It is equally indefensible to exclude moral consideration from a human based on race or gender.
Suggested Reading
Anyone who seriously wants to consider animal rights should read Gary Francione’s ‘An Introduction to Animal Rights’. He also has a new book of essays entitled ‘Animals as Persons’ which (at the time of writing) can be found at a very reasonable price at chapters, $27 for a hard cover! If you want to understand the philosophy behind veganism then you have to read Francione, there are no comparable texts! Reading poorly framed and sparsely argued defenses of meat eating is not very meaningful if you don’t yet understand what it is you are defending your actions against.
I also stumbled on an article written about Pollan’s book you can read it online. I particularly like how the author describes Pollan’s tactics when it comes to discussing moral issues:
“[Pollan's] spurious show of open-mindedness recalls Hans Küng, the Swiss theologian who uses a comparable technique when defending Christianity against secular critics. The similarity is not surprising, considering that our dietary and religious habits are both acquired in early childhood, which makes them hard to break no matter what we learn in later life. The Pollan-Küng Technique goes like this: One debates the other side in a rational manner until pushed into a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended it. The irreconcilability of one’s belief with reason is then held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties.”
