I’m hesitant to point this out—the last thing I want to do is raise your standards for food writing—but I spent last night (when I should have been writing my column) pouring over the summer issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. For the poor souls not familiar with Lewis Lapham’s post-Harpers project, each issue is built around a broad theme (Celebrity; Religion; Medicine), then filled with the editors’ favorite pieces on the chosen subject, ranging from Homer to David Foster Wallace. There’s a huge range of forms and genres represented, and the final product ends up being something more than the sum of its parts. It’s the kind of magazine you want to keep on your shelf forever.
The new issue—Food—has me particularly excited. Among the more contemporary writers represented are Paul Roberts, Ruth Reichl, Greil Marcus, Hunter S. Thompson, Patton Oswalt, and Anthony Bourdain, but there’s plenty of Nabokov, Barthes, Zola, and Proust for good measure. One of the more striking pieces, to me, was Scott Korb’s “It’s What’s For Dinner,” a personal essay on food writing and the ethics of eating meat, and his struggle to take “real pleasure in food again”. The piece begins: “Most honest discussions that bring together food and animals are really, at bottom, about suffering and killing and death…”
No wonder I’m procrastinating.
Korb’s is a mostly thoughtful essay, but after impliedly warning against anthropomorphizing animals (e.g. to believe they fear death), Korb validates Pollan’s Darwinian take on things:
“Domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered…that they were more likely to survive and prosper in alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk, eggs, and—yes—their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the new relationship: The animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves in the wild…And the humans traded their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled lives of agriculturalists.”
Pollan uses the language of contracts to imply a bargained-for exchange, including “parties” and “relationship.” The idea that some species in effect bargained might make some sense in an evolutionary construct, but as an ethical argument, it essentially anthropomorphizes animals as arms-length contract partners. Viewed in that light, humans owe no duty to animals – after all, we had a deal!
While natural selection certainly marches forward for all species, including humans, dressing up the keeping and butchering of animals in the terms of an everyday contract obscures the real ethical issues, and gives unearned/psuedoscientific cover to the “it’s the natural order” crowd.