Morality On Your Plate
October 31, 2009 - by Molly MannFrom community gardens to school lunches to the organic
produce aisle at the grocery store, it seems that the best place to make a
political statement these days is on your plate; what you eat defines what you
believe.
But have some groups taken this commitment to morally
superior eating too far? Can dinner just be dinner again?
Consider, for example, the New York Times "Dining" article from this past Wednesday about D.I.Y. butchering. Alex Williams, the reporter, documents a growing trend in New York dining: "self-conscious carnivores" who seek to justify their meat-eating by learning to slaughter and butcher their food, especially pigs, and
"honor" the animal. They believe that by sparing the animals the horror
of a factory-farmed death and getting closer to the natural predator-prey
relationship, they somehow reach a higher degree of humaneness with their
eating habits.
Others take this idea a little further. They won't actually
kill an animal just to serve themselves dinner, but rather feed off of what's
already there. Urban freegans (anti-consumerist dumpster-divers) and rural road kill diners -- though from different ends of the political spectrum, usually -- subscribe to the same belief that you
shouldn't waste what's already there. Breeding animals for slaughter just
creates more waste; if you're going to eat meat, there's no need to take a new
life just to fill your stomach.
These are certainly extreme examples of groups who've pushed
food politics to the edge. I admire them for their wholehearted commitment to
their ideals and agree that the only effective change for the planet and
society is lifestyle change, but my beliefs about food are of Michael Pollan's
simpler stamp: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
