Steak

The problem is simple.  Red meat cut from butchered cows is a food that many people have traditionally enjoyed, even though most people can go without it without harm for their entire lives.  Yet butchering animals brings up painful moral issues, and raising animals en masse causes innumerable ecological problems as well. 

A cut of sirloin at the supermarket or served at a restaurant is simple animal biology, an anticipated taste, a delicious barbecued dinner.  Humans are constructed to enjoy just about everything, and this food not only provides variety, but also satisfaction partly because it is so nutritious.  Other meats are also available, of course, also requiring slaughter after generally terrible growth conditions.  But the higher up the “great chain of being” one goes, the more squeamish thinking about the source of food can become.  It is somehow less difficult to think about eating grains of wheat than dead people, although cultural adaptation can pretty much force use to use (and even enjoy) anything when we must.

A lot of it comes down to definitions.  In large parts of the current Western culture, cows, pigs, chickens, fish, and plants and pretty standard fare.  There is more resistance to rats, dogs, cats, horses, and pigeons.  And great ambiguity about things like deer.  The more complete the nervous system, the more the consciousness approaches are, the more like cannibalism it seems.  And that perception, of course, depends more on our background than on any scientific measurement.

Raising huge quantities of  such animals, outside of everything else, is affecting  local ecologies severely, and may be impacting the planet as well.  The obvious solution would be to learn to manufacture acceptable substitutes from soy or algae, even though purists would complain.  But one grey lump, manufactured or not, is pretty much like another under gravy.  And cheese puffs or cola certainly prove that there is an easy slope to accepting totally artificial constructions as sustenance.

An argument can be made that one must live within the culture one is born into.  If everyone else is eating steak, there is little one person not wanting to eat steak can do to affect the balance, even though we desperately want to believe in the power of one.  But it is also possible to believe one can rise above the culture, be better than it, and at least be an example of what could be.
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I need to admit right out that I truly like steak once in a while.  I tend to eat red meat in some form once or twice a week for dinner, and have chicken or fish most other nights.  It’s delicious, makes me feel good, and is relatively inexpensive.  Yet, I am aware of the moral issues involved.  Unfortunately, they are not easy to logically resolve.

For one thing, there is the question of whether there is an absolute issue involved.  To say I only eat red meat once a week is not far different from saying I only commit murder once a week.  It’s either wrong or not, no matter how often done.  To say I mostly eat chicken or fish is to somehow judge just how precious a given kind of consciousness is.  And it remains true that I could certainly live happily on cheese, eggs, and shellfish, for example.

The conditions in which food is raised are another concern, but again the moral distinction is hazy.  Perhaps feed lots and claustrophobic cages are horrid, but eating once contented cows or free range chickens strikes me as a little like that Aztec tradition of granting a captive a year of splendor before ripping out his heart.

Environmental concerns about ruminant methane _ well, ok _ but at our current population density intensive agriculture is no friend of the Earth’s ecology.  You can eat soybeans all your life and still be destroying large areas.  The fact is, until human population is controlled, all food sources _ including manufactured _ will lead only to a decreasing quality of life for everything.  So this particular issue is not much affected by what I eat.  I would also point out that non-intensive agriculture as serenaded by locavores is far less romantic that usually pictures, and a family farm life is a hard, nasty, and dangerous life.

The final consideration is that all things are mortal, death is part of life, and “natural” conditions for both people and animals are far more savage and brutal than nature shows generally allow on camera. So I eat my steak, and think my thoughts, and do nothing else.  I am not sure yet of the true moral path and in the meantime, I indulge in my animal appetites.
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Mary had a little lamb

Its fleece was white as snow And everywhere that Mary went The little lamb would go. Mary also had a cow A pig, a duck and more Mary’s family had to eat She don’t have them no more. Suppose that Mary had a dog An elephant of cat If she chose to butcher them What would you think of that? Steak -

You will have certain philosophies about eating, even if you think you don’t.  If you eat unconsciously, or just eat to live, you are making a declaration of your importance compared to everything else.  If you make careful decisions about what you consume and why you will find yourself in conflict with others who have strong but different views on the same subject.  There are those who enjoy their food as naked as possible, and others who rework it into something unrecognizable with processes, sauces, and spice.  Nobody, right now, is sure of the right way.  Almost everything seems unsustainable, given current population levels and consumption trends.

How much steak or other meat you consume, if any, is one of the more fraught decisions in dining.  It involves health, of course, in both directions _ sometimes the concentrated energy of red meat is the only thing that can keep you healthy, while too much will lead to many health problems and presumed early death.  But outside of that _ well nothing is as clean as you probably think.

That nicely wrapped meat has an origin in pain and filth.  Those locally produced chops still required a lot of energy to supply the feed, house the animals, support the farmers lives, butcher, transport, store, and package.   If you do not eat any, it will go to waste and add to the refuse problem.  The claims of organically raised livestock, or happy contented animals roaming the fields, may be colorful lies invented by the typical flaks of corporations. 

Perhaps you hunt, find your own game, cull the weak, smoke it yourself, and remain wholly self-sufficient.  If you do that exclusively, living only by your own wits, you cannot have much time for anything else, you are marginalized in society, and to be honest you have no impact on the food chain problem, one way or the other.  If you do it as a hobby, it is irrelevant. 

There is no good answer, and that is the problem.  You are to some extent bound by the human condition of what you must do, and what you enjoy.  You are to some extent haunted by the human capacity for empathy and compassion.  You are complex, and there is no reason at all why your food should be any less so.

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Steak can be used as an interesting metaphor for attitudes on life.  After all, animal ecology is based on everything eating something else.  All ecology is based on the premise that every organism dies.  Once those basic facts are accepted, morality becomes constrained into the same problems life itself faces.  Is it better to have more, short lived mechanisms, or fewer longer lived ones?  Is general happiness a function of how many are enjoying life, or of the average happiness in all those alive, or only the highest peaks of happiness in an unexceptional existence?

Not to mention how to measure or give happiness.  What is a good life for a chicken?  Is a short, safe, crowded existence followed by quick unexpected death (much like people in Manhattan) what a chicken would rather have, or running around hungry searching for grain, worried about foxes?  And if we could, should we insert a gene that makes a chicken want to be killed and eaten by people?

Some people get squeamish and argue we should kill nothing.  Yet everything does die, and everything does go back into the food, one way or another.  Soylent Green where people are made into protein is not a whole lot different from the Marseillaise, where enemy soldiers are to be bled into the fields for fertilizer (of course, everything sounds more civilized in French.)

The core problems, like all the important ones humans face, cannot really be solved logically.  The world contains too many contradictions, too many subtleties.  Where there are many people involved, especially folks allowed to think freely, that means there will be thousands of different conclusions from the same chaotic premises, all based on logic, all faultless given what the proponent has selected as the most important starting points from an infinity of possibilities. 

We must each decide for ourselves.  That part is easy.  But should we also decide for others, claim this is permissible and that is not because I say so?  Is force acceptable in attaining such ends?  Yes, plain old steak can provide an awful lot of meditation if time is available.

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Wilbur had been saved, thanks to the spider web overhead.  People brought their cell phones to the fair and took pictures.  One of them caught Wilbur walking around trying to read the message, and posted it on you tube where it went viral.  Wilbur was famous.

He got booked at other county fairs, on the late night talk shows, and had a few newspaper features.  But, of course, without Charlotte, he was just another pig, and interest gradually died out and the public became interested in something else equally important.  Eventually he was back at the farm, a little older, just a regular old pig.

Before he was made into bacon, an entrepreneur who was trying to start the “Porker Hall of Fame” in Mason City bought him  as one of the attractions.  Naturally, that enterprise went bust after a few years, but out of a kind of nostalgia, the owner had him slaughtered and mounted as a remembrance in his living room, where he gathered dust for decades.

Eventually, it was just another piece of old furniture bric-a-brac when the couple died, their children had no desire for such a weird conversation piece in their house, and it ended up, and most things eventually do, discarded and buried.

Which moral is it here?  That fame is fleeting and illusory?  That nobody can really escape their destiny?  That no matter what a bright shining moment is worth having?  Or something else?  It’s entirely up to you, gentle reader.

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Steak, yes or no.  I guess that would be a fun debate topic, but the main point I want to make is that this is not an easily debatable subject.  There is a certain amount of logic involved, but there are also a lot of necessary contradictory assumptions.  And always exceptions to any truly rational and moral person.

Not all questions have easy answers.  Especially not ones doing with what is right, what is better, what should be done.  The scientific quest for easy reduction of everything to easy reproducible answers is one of the most dangerous illusions we believe.