Eating Meat and Food Sovereignty: What Exactly Should We Eat
Image source / lnzhxz.com
A while ago, a PNN report titled "Why Do I Raise Pigs but Not Eat Pork?" sparked heated discussion among netizens:
A pig farmer in northern Taiwan - Mr. Luo, who had carried on the family business of raising pigs for many years - was in the middle of the routine process of selling pigs to a meat trader and rounding them up for the slaughterhouse when he noticed one particular pig. Unlike the usual piglets that struggle and scream, this one protested silently, without a sound, and met Mr. Luo's eyes... That night he could not sleep. In the middle of the night he sped to the slaughterhouse, hoping to buy the pig back, but all he saw was a pig's trotter... This experience shook him deeply, and Mr. Luo came to a profound realization: "Animals are sentient beings." He resolutely decided to stop being a pig farmer who made a living by selling pigs, and also switched to a fully vegan diet. He now gets by doing odd jobs, and kept his last batch of pigs as pets to continue raising them.
Having left the pig-farming industry, Mr. Luo spoke earnestly and revealed many secrets of the pig-farming trade: including various drug methods for controlling pigs, the fat and lean content of pork, and different cuts, as well as the drawbacks of feeding pigs swill, and so on. This triggered a fierce debate online - alarmed consumers criticized pig farmers for having no conscience and using drugs harmful to human health just to make money; some operators jumped in to defend themselves, arguing that the report tarred everyone with the same brush, damaged the image of pig farmers, and caused public panic; still other netizens spoke up to encourage everyone to eat vegetarian, to protect themselves, love animals, and be kinder to the Earth...
As netizens argued back and forth, were the pig farmers actually wrong? Is eating meat actually safe? This is the great question of food safety, and even experts find it hard to give a correct answer.
Suppose we can temporarily set aside our fear and think carefully from another angle. What this report actually reflects is that in the environment of modern concentrated livestock farming, it is not only the animals that suffer; the livestock farmers who raise animals to make a living are also under tremendous psychological pressure.
Small pig farmers like Mr. Luo, with fewer than 200 head, still make up more than half of Taiwan's pig farmers (50.96%, source: Council of Agriculture animal husbandry statistics / pig head count survey / end of November, year 99 of the Republic of China era). Because of their smaller scale and lack of modern pig-farming equipment, most of them must collect kitchen waste from place to place every day, mix it with feed such as soybeans and corn, and feed the pigs and clean the pig sheds by hand. When the raising period is up or the weight is sufficient, they ask a meat trader to come appraise and haul the pigs, and they themselves still have to help "catch" them and send them off on their final journey.
For small pig farmers, "catching pigs" may be the most tense and physically exhausting moment of the entire raising process. Pigs raised to full weight are mostly 100 to 200 kg. In their panic they let out piercing screams, run wildly through the pig shed, and use all their strength in a final struggle... Usually there is not much modern equipment, so they must drive the pigs by manpower, cover the pig's head with a cloth bag, or tie the pig's legs with rope and flip it over... It is completely the primitive state of "human versus beast combat"!! In the traditional countryside of the past, the job of "catching piglets" would leave several strong men drenched in sweat!
In that light, it is no wonder that a pig that did not struggle or scream but quietly looked at him would have such a powerful impact on Mr. Luo. He decided to refuse to endure any longer the "pressure of killing" that this industry treats as routine, and would rather make a living doing odd jobs than return to the business of raising pigs for money.
As office workers, we stare at screens every day, pound keyboards, and rack our brains to earn money, as if the other lives on Earth have nothing to do with us. At most we swat mosquitoes and cockroaches, or trade stocks and futures and speculate on grain in another corner of the world, thinking: surely no person or animal will starve to death because of this? The fact is that under the modern livestock industry's layered division of labor, secrecy, and protection of interests, it is already hard for us to imagine how our daily lives affect other living beings, or even manipulate their life and death...?
But when lunchtime comes and we start agonizing over whether to eat pork chop or chicken leg today, we discover that we still cannot escape the "food chain." As one kind of living being, we must feed on other living beings, and even vegetarians are no exception.
In the tribe, the relationship between people and pigs is one of food dependence, so after slaughtering a pig, gratitude is expressed through ritual. Image source / Small Place News Network
In agricultural society, every household raised its own pigs and chickens, and only occasionally could people eat "meat." Our parents may not be unfamiliar with slaughtering pigs and chickens. Although watching it felt cruel, frightening, and sad, when it was cooked into fragrant braised pork or chicken legs, because of the need for protein and the longing for something they could eat only once in a long while, they still drooled. Now, although we can eat meat every day, modern livestock products are convenient to obtain, cleanly packaged, and then expertly cooked by restaurant operators. With one bite, we completely forget the killing process of raising, slaughtering, cutting, and processing the animals. In order to make the livestock industry flourish and sell even greater quantities of meat, any scene that might make us unable to eat has been concealed in the process of modernizing livestock farming.
Mr. Luo's story reminds us once again: when we devour juicy, tender pork ribs, it is livestock farmers, pig and chicken farmers, slaughterhouse workers, and butchers who have handled everything for us. Not only do they drip sweat in the fields and earn hard, blood-and-sweat money; if "killing" brings any discomfort or even karmic burden, they bear that too. Around us, there are not a few people who cannot bear to see killing. They say: if I see a life die for me, I cannot eat it.
It is precisely for this reason that the founder of Facebook recently began supporting a movement: if you eat it, you kill it yourself. If you want to eat meat, then you have to endure the "killing process" yourself, and that way you will not be able to eat too much anyway!
American food researcher and writer Michael Pollan, in his magnum opus "The Omnivore's Dilemma," also encountered the problem of "meat-eating ethics" while tracing food back to its sources, and in the end he tried hunting a wild boar himself, then cooking and eating it. This shows that after the extreme development of food industrialization, people are hoping to regain "food sovereignty" and begin to face all kinds of contradictions in the food production process, rather than leaving everything entirely to corporate food suppliers. Perhaps it is still too difficult for us to actually kill an animal ourselves to eat it (we do not even dare to kill a fish!), but we can begin with "understanding." Once we understand, we can then make choices:
To eat meat or to eat vegetarian?