I am frequently asked how I became a vegetarian and involved in the animal rights movement.   My "conversion" began  around 1983---yes that far back-- when Richard Schwartz sent me a manuscript, Judaism and Vegetarianism for publication.  Surprised that anyone would send me a manuscript on that subject---I was a confirmed pastrami, salami, hot dogs Brooklyn gourmet---  kosher, of course.  However, my editorial responsibility obliged me to  read at least the first chapter.  I did and my fate was sealed:  I read a description of factory farming, of the battery hen, of the crated veal---terms unknown to me then, and  experienced what the Jewish philosopher Leon Kass has called “the ethics of revulsion,” in  a wave of nausea and incredulity.  Surely the author couldn’t mean “kosher meat!”  I called the supervisor of my kosher meat market and read the fateful passages to him, expecting that he would deny what Schwartz wrote.  His response changed my life,  instantly and precipitously.  “Mrs.  Kalechofsky, all meat prepared for the commercial meat market, come from animals raised the same way.  We just kill the animal differently.”  I read the pages to my husband.  Astonished---we were both  carnivores by cultural acclimation,  the idea of never eating meat again was strange to us---but  I could not eat the meat of a tortured animal.  And neither could he.  Where  would we find the meat of animals that weren’t tortured?
    I published Richard Schwartz’ book, and went on to  answer the question of what to eat when you refuse to eat the meat of tortured animals.  I learned enough about the subject to write several books and many articles of my own,  and to give dozens of talks. Everywhere I met with the same incredulity from Jewish audiences that I first experienced.   “Surely this is not kosher meat!”  Most Jewish children believe that kashrut is the sign of purity and mercy.  If we confused the meaning of ritual purity with mercy,  there were the stories of how Rabbi Judah the Prince wept at the thought of having to kill a calf, and at how shochets were chastised when their knives were not sharp enough to cut through the trachea of a cow very quickly.  Tsa’ar ba’alei chaim---do no harm to any creature.  It’s a biblical exhortation which has been  affirmed by rabbis in every century for two and half millenia.  Embedded in Jewish texts, in proverbs, in legends, in biblical stories for Jewish children--- it has almost no application in the modern world.  I will accept as axiomatic that this piety was operative in a lost world where Jews---and everyone else---were closer to nature, where animal life, their rutting, their birth pangs, the love of cow for calf, the insatiable anxiety of mother bird for newborn, could be observed and felt by anyone who had eyes in his head to see and ears to  hear the moaning of a cow who had lost her calf. Maimonides wrote that the emotions of the mother animal for her young is no different from the emotions of the human mother for her young.   How had this piety been eroded? What killed off this Jewish sensibility? How had this knowledge disappeared, so that Jewish butchers could accept   the meat of animals who are shackled and hoisted, who have their back legs tied  in the slaughterhouse  in spite of halachic prohibitions against such treatment, could accept the meat of calves that had been taken from their mothers within forty-eight hours of birth, in violation of the halachic stipulation that no animal should be taken from its mother in under eight days. Little enough time for maternal nurturing,  but better than two days and in some cases one day, so that a calf can be born into this world barely knowing the milk of his mother, barely knowing the smell of grass or the warmth of sun,  be put almost from birth  into a dark crate the size of a large desk and  be buried there  for the next sixteen weeks of his life until he is led to slaughter.  How could  Harry Harlow do his sadistic experiments on the deprivation of mother love in chimpanzees (University of Wisconsin).  Was the world mad?  Did we no longer know at all what animal life was, so that every moving creature on the face of the earth could become an object of scientific experimentation or industrialized farming.
    What began as revulsion set me on a course of education for the next twenty years.  Dr. Dallas Pratt’s book, Alternative Experiments to Painful Experiments on Animals, discovered accidentally in my local library, opened  an abyss of other animal cruelty.  Single lines can pierce the heart like a bullet.  In his book, Dr. Pratt wrote such a line that again, like Schwartz’ book, sealed my fate: “To accept the pain of the animal without knowing what the animal endures is moral sloth.”  I stood accused.  I had not thought of myself as a “moral sloth.”  But the knowledge requires a descent into the demonic, into the fury of bureaucracies and lobbies,  the quagmire of statistics, that the public, even my friends,  resist knowing,  because the material is unimaginably painful.
    Against my better judgment---I am a novelist used to working independently---averse to organizational work---I founded Jews for Animal Rights (JAR).  No sooner had I “opened shop” than mail  arrived, accusing me of misanthropy, of protecting the reputation of ritual slaughter, of being a front for shechitah , asking me how I could be in favor of abortion as an animal rights person, and finally, a letter from a Palestinian asking how I could care more about dogs than about the Palestinian refugees.  I told the “pro-lifer”  that animal rights was pro-life and that I am not “in favor of abortion” anymore than I am “in favor” of any operation that might be necessary.  I told the Palestinian that “victim” was not a blanket category, that “victims” come in all kinds of degrees especially degrees of self-responsibility; that the Palestinians had power, whether they recognized it or not: Arafat  had been welcome in more countries of the world than Israel had embassies in,  his voice was welcome at the U.N. when Israel’s was not and, most importantly, they had the power of the press and of world opinion, and the power to negotiate terms out of their powerlessness. The animals never do.  Mary Midgley, the British philosopher,   in  Animals and Why They Matter,  wrote that we are confronted by the  real difference between power and powerlessness in the child battered by an adult and the  animal hunted, caged, experimented on by a human,  and we know it by our instant revulsion, unmitigated by history or arguments of cause and effect.  Charles Patterson, in Eternal Treblinka, argues that the model for fascism is originally seen  in the relationship between animal and human.  The argument goes back to Aristotle who accepted the model of the hierarchy of dominion and power in nature as a suitable  basis for human morality.
    The insidious evil that attends animal cruelty is the secretiveness that shrouds it in the laboratories and on the farms,  which prevents public discussion of the issues.  There are laws that regulate what happens in a slaughterhouse (inadequate laws often inadequately enforced), but none that apply to farm animals.  A farmer can kick his cow to death, and  is beyond the law because animals are considered his property.  Science protects the horrors of what happens in the experimental laboratories with a halo over the heads of scientists.
    Are you opposed to war, to weapons of mass destruction, to chemical and biological bombs.  You should know that  about thirty percent of animal experimentation is for war purposes.  Strip away the other ludicrous experiments on “mother love,”drug addiction, psychological experiments,  AIDS, aggression, cosmetic and toiletry products, there is left  a bare seven or eight percent of animal experiments which has yielded anything of benefit for human health.  Yet the National Institutes of Health  spends about fourteen billion dollars a year on animal experiments while the cost of human health increases every year as Americans now become the most obese people in history.  Connect the dots.  They join  our gross meat eating habits with experiments into obesity in rats, diabetes in rabbits, cancer in mice, and more and more pharmaceuticals.  We become sick from the Standard American Diet (SAD), and the NIH does more experiments to find out what to do about our illnesses.  Our diet is now as dangerous to our health as tobacco once was. In 1995, in an article in Self,  Michael Jacobson, director of The Center for Science in the Public Interest, pointed out that approximately 400,000 people die every year of diet related causes, the same number as “cigarette smoking--yet the government’s response does not go much beyond ineffectual public service announcements and pamphlets.” Our current response to “bird flu” is to stock vaccinations, but not a word is said about reforming the chicken industries whose disease ridden crowded egg hatcheries are a cesspool of diseases barely controlled by the constant use of antibiotics.  Research is politically correct, as Robert Proctor pointed out in The Cancer Wars: it will trump environmental change anytime.
    Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) estimates that as much as $240 billion is spent on diseases stemming from our meat habit, not to mention the $33 billion on weight loss programs.  “Obesity has been linked to heart disease, colon cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, infertility and strokes.” (p. 242)  More tragically today, children as young as six are  now dying from heart  attacks caused by obesity. 
    The fast-food habit, whether of meat or chicken nuggets, has changed the culture of the United States in the past century more than any other force, and it has  affected our immigration policies, affected worsening worker conditions, and has caused severe environmental problems.   There is an even more inconvenient truth than the one Al Gore depicts in his admirable movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and that is that meat is at the bottom of many modern evils.  It is what I have called elsewhere, “the hole in the doughnut,” what we leave out when we talk about immigration policies or health care  problems, or workers’ equity, or pollution.
    Agriculture today partakes of every problem which industrialization brought to the modern world: the need for a vast and often overworked and underpaid working force,  pollution, the soul-lessness of specialization modeled on the Ford assembly line,  so that one worker does the same boring repetitious job, like electrocuting chickens for hours  a day. 
    Modern agriculture developed two hundred years ago under the spur of industrialization. Half of all our industrial energy and labor is spent in the agricultural area.  What Charlie Chaplin depicted in Modern Times is true of the modern slaughter house and meatpacking plant.  Male turkeys are milked (masturbated?) for their sperm by the hour so that the female turkey can be artificially impregnated. (See, Peter Singer and Jim Mason, The Way We Eat, Why Our Food Choices Matter, Rodale, 2006, p. 28 for a description of this process).  Two workers can run a hen house of 25,000 hens where hens stand on wire cages so small they cannot spread their wings.   Everything is automated, the air, the water,  the temperature, the collection of  eggs. The ammonia buildup is often so terrific that the men have to wear hazmat suits when they venture in.   The smell seeps out of the hen houses and affects surrounding neighborhoods.  But the workers do not even own the hens.  The hens are owned  by  huge corporation.  In the 1980s there were so many active mergers  that there are now only   eight giant chicken processors who control “about two thirds of the American market.”  The chicken growers themselves are usually powerless, trapped by debt and  onerous contracts written by the large processors.  The end product of chicken nuggets is produced by an industrial work system that rests almost on serf labor.  A giant processor  supplies the chicken grower with day old chicks who spend their lives on the growers’ property, but the chicks belong to the  corporation. This is the house that chicken nuggets built:  The company “supplies the feed, veterinary services and technical support....It hires the trucks that drop  off the baby chicks and returns seven weeks later to pick up full-grown chickens ready for slaughter.....The chicken grower provides the land, the labor, the poultry houses, and the fuel.  Most growers must borrow money to build the houses, which costs about $150,000 each.” (Schooner, p. 141)  The average chicken grower starts in debt, rarely can catch up, earns about $12,000 a year,  and has trouble borrowing money from a bank.  The survival rate of a chicken grower is about three years.  “The back roads of rural Arkansas are now littered with abandoned poultry houses.” (Ibid)
    What is true of the chicken business is true of the beef industry.   Huge corporations or ranches  and farms owned by doctors, lawyers and stockholders run  the ranches and the small ranchers struggle for their independence and often lose.  “The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the United States is now about three times higher than the national average.”(Schlosser, p. 146) 
      It is one hundred years since Upton Sinclair wrote  The Jungle,  about the terrible working conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses and meat packing plants.  Nothing has changed but the nature of the immigrant worker.  In Sinclair’s time it was the Pole, the Russian, and the Lithuanian.  Today it is the Mexican,  documented and undocumented. Steve Striffler in Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food (Yale University Press, 2005),  describes how immigration from Mexico and the chicken business grew up together, and developed an interdependent alliance.  “Poultry companies routinely hire undocumented workers  and...the INS regularly looks the other way.”  Schlosser states that slaughterhouses and meat packing plants were deliberately founded out “in nowhere” land in the midwest, far away from the  east and the presence of unions,  that they deliberately developed the work load with mind numbing repetition which would require the least skilled worker.  While the hourly rate is often about $9.00 (far above the $5.00 a day most Mexican workers earn in Mexico), few workers last a year at the job and consequently lose access to health care and a vacation, which requires that they be at the job for a year.   The turnover rate, rarely good for businesses,  is excellent in the meat business and is factored into the cost of hiring a worker  to avoid paying for his health care or for vacation time, which require that he be at the job for at least a year.  (One firm, Montfort, in the 1980s had an annual turnover rate of about 400%.)  Many--or most-- cannot last that long, and  in an industry with one of the highest  injury rates, health care is hard to come by.   Schlosser ranks meatpacking as “the most dangerous job in the United States” (p. 172) with an injury rate three times higher than in any other kind of factory.   It is not unusual for a worker to find himself after eleven months in a meatpacking plant with fingers missing or a hand mangled from a machine, without a job, in a small midwestern town where he cannot speak the language, living  with two other families in the basement of someone else’s house.  The most  egregious lapses in social and economic justice for working people prevail in the meat industry.  Our addiction to oil has bred a dangerous foreign policy; our addiction to meat has bred poverty and despair among one of America’s largest working forces. 
    The 1980s brought disastrous changes in the meat industry so that today reform is difficult, if not impossible.  Under the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations, cattlemen’s associations and food industries became entrenched with powerful lobbies.   Ronald Reagan deregulated the slaughtering houses, which led to an increase in “the kill line,”the rate at which animals are killed as they come down the assembly line: as this rate increases the human injury rate keeps pace as knives flash and fingers become numb under repetition. “The Reagan and Bush administrations cut spending on public health measures and staffed the U.S. Department of Agriculture with officials far more interested in government deregulations than in food safety.” Reagan’s first secretary of agriculture was a hog businessman.  “His second was the president of the American Meat institute.”  Bush 1 appointed to the office of the USDA’s Food Marketing and Inspection Service  the president of the National Cattleman’s Association.  The speed of the kill line increased, the number of inspectors decreased while the budget for OSHA was cut by 20% in 1981. (Schlosser, p. 205ff).
    As  working conditions worsened in the slaughterhouses and the meatpacking industries,  the rate of contamination and food borne diseases rose.  Yet  microbial testing for new pathogens was blocked by the meatpacking industry,  even though the National Academy of Sciences issued repeated warnings throughout the 1980s  that the nation’s public health infrastructure was in serious disarray, that meat inspection methods were “hopelessly’ outdated, that health inspectors were poorly trained, that contaminated meat was being sold in restaurants and in stores.  Then came the “Jack-in-the Box” outbreak of E:coli 0157:H7,  when half a million Americans--mostly children became sick, thousands were hospitalized and hundreds died.  The era of “re-calls” had begun.
    E:coli contamination is a pathogen of such deadly effect that often children die of it in the most painful manner (For fuller discussion of E:coli 157:H7 and other food contaminants see Roberta Kalechofsky, Vegetarian Judaism, p. 69ff) and those who survive usually suffer from kidney disease all their lives.  A new vocabulary entered our lives, and a new source of fear contingent on meat.   In addition to the cancers of the stomach, colon, breast, in addition to diabetes, heart problems, obesity, stroke, high blood pressure, there could now be added the fearful E:coli 0157:H7,  the insidious salmonella which affects as  many as thirty percent of chickens,  the even worse Jacob-Creutzfeld disease (the human counterpart to Mad Cow disease), campylobacter, the rise of antibiotic resistant diseases,  and a host of other forms of food poisoning which run the gamut from a severe belly ache to affecting the nervous system to endless weeks in an intensive care unit--to death.  According to Eric Schlosser (p. 195) 200,000 people are sickened by food borne diseases everyday, 900 are hospitalized and 14 die. And still  the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) warn that food poisoning may be under-reported because most food poisoning cases begin  looking like a bout of flu and are misdiagnosed or never reported.
    Our fast food habit, our lust for  fast-cooked processed meat and chicken has transformed American culture, our working conditions, our eating conditions, our deteriorating health, our increasing health care costs. In 1970, Americans spent six billion dollars on fast food. In 2,000 they spent more than one hundred and ten billion dollars.  Our deteriorating health and health care costs keep pace with this statistic. The situation, as Steve Shriffler, writes, could be the plot of a Stephen King thriller (P. 155).
"All the ingredients for a devilish tale are there: epidemics of Salmonella stalking unsuspecting consumers; slaughterhouse workers toiling in ghoulish conditions: stomach-wrenching mountains of manure and chicken carcasses; and brutally overcrowded factory farms. "
   
Trouble is, none of this is fictional.  Yet it is devilishly easy to end this nightmare: just close your mouth and say no to meat.




























Copyright (c) Roberta Kalechofsky, 2006