Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals

The Future of Food

Roanne van Voorst, Scott Emblen-Jarrett, Scott Emblen-Jarrett

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063005907
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Combining the ethical clarity of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals with the disquieting vision of Alan Weissman's bestseller The World Without Us, a thought-provoking, entertaining exploration of a future where animal consumption is a thing of the past. Though increasing numbers of people know that eating meat is detrimental to our planet's health, many still can't be convinced to give up eating meat. But how can we change behavior when common arguments and information aren't working?

Acclaimed anthropologist Roanne Van Voorst changes the dialogue. In Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals, she shifts the focus from the present looking forward to the future looking back—imagining a world in which most no longer use animals for food, clothing, or other items. By shifting the viewpoint, she offers a clear and compelling vision of what it means to live in a world without meat.

A massive shift is already taking place—everything van Voorst covers in this book has already been invented and is being used today by individuals and small organizations worldwide.

Hopeful and persuasive, Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals offers a tantalizing vision of what is not only possible but perhaps inevitable.

1

How Farmers Can Change the World

On the day that Swedish pig farmer Gustaf Söderfeldt sold all his animals, the grassy meadows around his farm seemed much larger than usual. It was unusually quiet. The stalls were empty. The air bore down heavily onto his shoulders, and he paced, confused, back and forth from his stalls to his pastures. Once he had come back, it was as if he had again forgotten what he was going to do. But he hadn’t. There was simply nothing to do. His mind was elsewhere, not ready to think about how his working days would soon be occupied.

It was 2017; he had two young children and little savings. He was worried about the future and only had a vague idea of how he would earn money to provide for his family. Yet even through all of this insecurity and doubt, he felt immensely relieved. “I could have cried. Out of joy, I mean, as I would never kill a pig again. I no longer had to.”

It wasn’t as if he really had a choice, however. He simply couldn’t do it anymore: leading groups of visitors around his organic pig farm and telling them about his “animal-friendly” treatment of pigs. They pointed at the large pasture where the pigs roamed during the day, and in his shop he received compliments about how well treated his animals were, and how this could clearly be tasted in the meat. “I treated my animals better than other farmers did, but that was only relative. In a sense, I lied to my customers, and I lied to myself. I said what I had to say in order to sell my produce, and also to keep feeling good about myself. But I knew what happened when I brought my animals to slaughter, and there was nothing cruelty-free about that.”

Gustaf tells me his story from an armchair in the corner of his greenhouse. He shifts back and forth a couple of times in his chair before he continues talking. “The first time that I helped kill a pig at the slaughterhouse, I felt proud. Manly, strong.” He is silent for a few seconds, as if debating whether to continue or not. He opens his mouth, then closes it again. Finally, he comes out with it: “It made me feel powerful.”

If he looks back on it now, is he ashamed? “Yes and no. Yes, I think it’s repulsive what I did to my pigs. It’s also terrible to think that I derived some sort of pleasure from it. In general I’m a gentle person—I didn’t know I had these kinds of feelings. Perhaps I don’t want to know my true self either. But shame isn’t the right word. You have to understand that during those early years as a pig farmer, I truly believed what I was doing was morally right. I believed this because I compared my own operation with how intensive livestock farming worked. In my mind, only bad farmers took part in that. It was bad for their animals, bad for people’s health with the contaminated meat they produced, and bad for the environment. I was their polar opposite in all aspects. I was the small-scale farmer, with a humane slaughter label on his meat. I was the good guy. So how else was I meant to feel about my decisions?”

Before he became a pig farmer, Gustaf was a city boy. He and his partner, Caroline, decided to move to the country when they were in their late twenties: they wanted peace and quiet, to be in nature more and to work with their hands. Becoming farmers seemed to be the most obvious way of making money out in the country, and all the farmers they knew kept animals. This was good news: both of them were animal lovers, and both of them were horrified by the overpacked factory farm stalls they occasionally saw on television, the crowded trucks filled with animals on the highway, and the antibiotic- and stress hormone–filled meat you found in supermarkets. “We wanted to do things differently. We wanted to keep happy animals, where we could care for them properly, and then kill them in a painless, stress-free way in order to make honestly produced meat from them.”

The Pioneers

They sold their house in the city, bought a plot of land in a small village, and used books and courses to learn how to be farmers. They bought a couple of pigs, some sheep, goats, chickens, and ducks, and it seemed like they had found a gap in the Swedish market. People living nearby were drawn to the farm to see these new farmers in action. They came for the animals wandering freely over the land, for the young owners with their idealistic vision, for the old-fashioned small-scale nature of the farm. More and more visitors began coming to the farm and asking for a guided tour, and people wanted to buy their “honestly produced” meat. The meat was expensive, much more expensive than what you could buy at a supermarket, or even at your local butcher. Yet people bought it. They paid extra not just for the taste but also to soothe their consciences. They were eating good meat after all, from good pig farmers. In no time there was so much demand for Gustaf and Caroline’s pork that they bought more pigs and opened a shop where they could sell their produce.

Their farming business bloomed. Gustaf, however, began developing a sense of hesitation.

“Over the years, something changed within me. More and more often I [would] look into the eyes of my pigs as I herded them into the truck to take them to the slaughterhouse, and I [would] realize they were terrified. They might have followed my commands when I shouted at them, because they were used to me being the boss and couldn’t do any differently. But they resisted in other ways. The way they looked at me. By walking backward when I wanted them to go forward, which meant I had to pull them forcefully over the ramp. By screaming: pigs can make a terrible loud noise when they are scared.”

As he led another group of customers around his farm a few hours after a trip to the slaughterhouse, Gustaf often thought about what would happen if he were to talk honestly about the noises his pigs made when they were at the slaughterhouse. “Spine-chilling shrieks,” he remembers. “High-pitched, shrill. Mortal terror. They knew as soon as we got there. Of course they knew, they could hear the screams of the other pigs as they waited their turn inside. And they could smell the blood. I smelled it too. You can’t escape that smell.”

Gustaf looked at his customers and wondered what would happen if he were honest and told them that his pigs would struggle when they got close to the place where they would be slaughtered. How the workers had to pin them down hard as a result. “Or I wondered how my customers would react if I told them I took the piglets away from their mothers shortly after they were born, because that’s just how it works in the meat industry, and how the mothers would then try to run after them, and how they panicked when I prevented them from doing that, because that’s what mothers do when they can no longer look after their children.”

He didn’t say anything in the end. “I knew I wouldn’t have any more customers left.” So he smiled, kept silent, and took compliments that made him more and more uncomfortable. Something wasn’t right in his life, but he didn’t see how he could do things differently. This is what being a farmer meant, this is what he and Caroline had wanted, this was their livelihood, and in any case they were doing it in an honorable way. Other farmers in the area left the dirty work of slaughter to cheaper, animal-unfriendly slaughterhouses. Gustaf did not. “I didn’t want to be like those city folks, who bought prepackaged, sliced, and unrecognizable manufactured meat products. They claim to be against animal abuse, but they don’t want to know what happened to the animal that’s now on their plate. I also didn’t want to be like those other farmers who let other people slaughter their animals. I wanted to take responsibility.”

So he brought his animals to the slaughterhouse himself. He shot the pins through their heads himself, or held the pigs down as someone else did it. “The first few times I did that, I got a kick from it. After that, I began to feel worse and worse. More numb . . . but I didn’t understand what was happening to me.”

The Crisis

Then came that afternoon when, after transporting the pigs, Gustaf walked into the kitchen to find Caroline with a drawn, pale face, a laptop open on the table in front of her. She told him that she had spent hours watching videos about veganism on YouTube. In these videos, activists explained why there was no such thing as humane meat. They suggested that young, healthy animals, like any other beings, don’t want to die, and so a forced, premature slaughter is always accompanied by a huge amount of stress. Even if they’ve been well looked after in the years leading up to it. Even if their death happens relatively quickly. Much the same way that a healthy, young human wants to stay alive and would freak out if you tried to kill them, even if you were going to do it as gently as possible. Caroline had clicked from one video to the next, and Gustaf now sat and joined her. They couldn’t stop. They spent the whole evening watching them.

“Everything they said fit with what I’d been feeling intuitively for a long time,” Gustaf remembered. “I suddenly realized our whole plan to become good pig farmers, to sell humanely slaughtered meat, was all based on a misconception. We had become successful farmers but not cruelty-free ones. Yes, we let our pigs roam freely, and we fed them plenty during their lives. But once they were big enough to make money, we scared them, and killed them, long before they would die in nature, the males after a few months, and the females after a few years, once they had had their piglets. We took their children from them; we hurt them, and ended their lives against their will. And we, ‘animal lovers,’ we made money from all of this!”

The shock of that realization was enormous. “I suddenly understood why I had begun to feel so numb inside. I wasn’t living according to my own values! I thought back to all those times at the slaughterhouse, and I was disgusted by my own actions. If you really wanted to be kind to animals, you wouldn’t breed them for meat production. You wouldn’t cause them stress by separating mothers from their children. You wouldn’t kill them when they could have lived for many more years.”

Almost that very same night, the couple decided they didn’t want to carry on. Both of them became vegan, sold their pigs, and used the money to develop and carry out a new business plan: from now on they would only grow and sell vegetables.

What Gustaf and Caroline didn’t know back then was that all around the world, other farmers had gone through a similar transition. All these farmers, whether in the US, Canada, the UK, Israel, or Germany, had experienced roughly the same psychological process that Gustaf had described in our conversation; from a conviction that they were being a “good” farmer, and therefore a good person, to a nagging feeling that what they were doing was not compatible with their deeper values, until they reached a painful, mostly terrifying conclusion: that for all these years, they had consciously and willingly inflicted suffering on animals, and that their behavior was immoral.

That is a bold, and for many people offensive, statement; yet once again this actually reflects what the farmers who have gone through this change felt. Just read what Bob Comis wrote on the blog for his “humane, pasture-raised-and-grass-fed” pig and sheep farm: “This morning, as I look out the window at a pasture quickly growing full of frolicking lambs, I am feeling very much that it might be wrong to eat meat, and that I might indeed be a very bad person for killing animals for a living.”

Former dairy farmer Michelle, from Israel, judged herself just as harshly. She had worked for a dairy company since the age of fifteen and married a dairy farmer. There are photos of her in which she—a young, blond, happy smiling girl—is bottle-feeding a calf. In an online interview, she shared that she now cannot look at those photos without getting emotional: “I still live in a state of denial that I used to be a farmer. Everything that has anything to do with dairy farms is very difficult for me. I am not talking about a one-hour visit to the farm . . . whoever is really inside knows what kind of place it is. It’s hell. There is terrible suffering there. Cows are beaten, we take the calves away from their mothers, they scream and scream, they resist being milked . . . so we tie their feet down. The screams of the mothers . . . I still hear the sound. It won’t go away.”

Her trauma seems to be reinforced by the fact that, now that she no longer works on the farm, she can hardly imagine that at one time she would whistle while doing the things that now cause her to weep when discussing them, as if the Michelle from before is a stranger: not just someone she no longer recognizes but someone who, thanks to the power of hindsight, she hates. “When I was a farmer, I burned out horns, which is painful for calves! I clipped nipples (after a calf is born in the dairy industry, any extra teats are cut off from the udders, as they pose an infection risk for when the cow is milked later on), also painful. I sent mothers and their babies to slaughter. I separated babies from their mothers. And somehow I saw nothing wrong with it.” This is not so unusual: everything that Michelle did happened fully in accordance with the dairy industry regulations.

Just like Gustaf, she describes the moment she stopped being a livestock farmer as an identity crisis. Developmental psychologist Erik Erikson described an identity crisis as a state that humans go through when they begin to question who they actually are, when the image you had about yourself no longer fits with the person you see in the mirror.

“It was a difficult period,” Gustaf says when I ask him about the moment in his life that he describes as an identity crisis. “I was a mess . . . about the company—we had to make so many practical decisions in such a short period of time—but above all about myself. Who had I been all these years?”

But even though he spent that period doubting everything, he still felt better than he did before. “It was as if something was released within me.” He points to his chest. “From the night we decided to stop pig farming, I better understood why I had felt so unhappy for all those years while we had been living out our fantasies of rural idyll. I killed my animals because I thought that it was part of being a farmer. Now I knew that this was destroying me inside. It’s not right, and it starts to eat away at you, and the only way you can carry on doing it was by burying your feelings. I had become numb, but that is what this job does to you, and now it felt like I had rediscovered my true nature. I wanted to do things better. I didn’t care if it would be financially difficult. As far as I was concerned, vegan farming was the only way forward.”

Michelle had the same kind of experience. “All the sorrow that I caused to them is forever engraved upon my heart. When I think of numbers, I have no idea how many mothers and babies I put on the trailer taking them to slaughter. How many mothers were left without their babies. And they screamed. If someone would touch my daughter or my son . . . I just don’t know what to say. Just the thought of it frightens me.”

Howard

In Montana, cattle farmer Howard Lyman stood washing his hands in his bathroom. He stared at his face in the mirror. He looked good, so he said himself. A few years prior he had become a vegetarian for health reasons, and started feeling so good that he had recently also scrapped dairy products from his diet. Since then he had felt even better.

Physically at least.

Mentally, things were not so great with him at all.

As a young man, Lyman had been taught by his parents that humans needed meat and dairy in order to stay healthy.

This made him proud of the profession his great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and now he himself had chosen. They were doing important social work by breeding cows, keeping them, and then selling them to the milk and dairy industries. America was hungry and needed to be fed, and his family business was helping to do this. He personally had 7,000 cows. “[Me and] the people I knew in animal production were good people just trying to do the best they knew how for what they envisioned were the right reasons. . . . [We] believed [we] were providing an absolute necessity: first-class protein. It was ingrained in them from the time they were kids: eat your meat. Drink your milk. Stay healthy.”

But he had stopped consuming both for some time already. He didn’t drink milk or eat any butter or cheese either. And yet he felt better and healthier than ever—a physical experience that didn’t sit right with his convictions. Could it be, thought Lyman, that other people also...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: Inventing a New Color
• 1. How Farmers Can Change the World
• 2. Why Good People Believe in Bad Stories
• Intermezzo: We Didn’t Know
• 3. From Pasty and Peeved to Sexy as Fuck
• 4. Giraffes for the Rich, Vegetables for the Poor, and Milk for All
• 5. Wanted: Man (20–40), Sporty, Sexy, Vegan
• 6. Plant Overdose
• Intermezzo: A School Trip to the Slaughterhouse
• 7. It’s the Law, Stupid!
• 8. Melting Ice, Bursting Levees
• Epilogue: The Beginning of the End
• Acknowledgments
• Want to Know More?
• Bibliography
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher