Jonathan Safran Foer: Meat is not essential. Why are we killing for it?
The magical thinking that imagines calling meat 'essential' in a time when schools, bypass surgeries and funerals are not, amounts to a sort of state-sponsored witchcraft.
JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: President Trump’s recent use of the Defense Production Act to order slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants to stay open is misunderstood if viewed only as the next tragic misstep in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. It marks the nadir of the increasingly broken meat industry. For years, we have knowingly destroyed our planet for the sake of a protein preference. Now, we are sending humans to their deaths.
Trump’s “order” was, in fact, the result of meat industry executives requesting his relief from legal liability for worker deaths. The number of slaughterhouse workers who have already died this year is on par with the number of U.S. service-members who have died annually fighting in Afghanistan over the last five years. Military personnel risking their lives to fight terrorism is one thing. How did the president arrive at the absurdity of requiring civilians to risk their lives for the sake of a particular food?
The answer lies in how we have let agribusiness effectively normalize worker exploitation, and the mercenary skill we sometimes employ to deny or forget our support for that industry’s actions… The industry has continued such cruel practices with relative impunity, because workers are too dependent on their jobs to effectively resist unscrupulous managers, and the public has continued to underwrite the abuse. But manslaughter is a new level of depravity. The magical thinking that imagines calling meat “essential” in a time when schools, bypass surgeries and funerals are not, amounts to a sort of state-sponsored witchcraft…
Companies such as Tyson Foods did it by inventing a business model that requires environmental destruction, worker exploitation, animal cruelty and conditions that create “novel” viruses. (Of the 16 strains of novel influenza viruses that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified as being of highest concern, all but two converted to human viruses in commercial poultry farms.) Letting the monstrous factory farm system fail would allow safer, most just and sustainable models of agriculture to gain a foothold. Yes, meat supplies would be lower, but food supplies would not be. We would have more than enough protein…
It would be arrogant to think our personal buying decisions alone are sufficient to end decades of normalized exploitation, but it is more arrogant to think our decisions mean nothing. We can begin by ceasing to pretend that public-health measures are “breaking” the food supply chain, and by holding the corporations that have hijacked it responsible. Your next meal is the moment to withdraw your support from the most cruel and destructive industry in America. SOURCE…
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