Foodist: The Hypocrisy of Free Range Meat

The Atlantic is at it again.

February/March thinking person’s publications, including The Atlantic, Salon.com and even the Chicago Tribune took foodies and locavores to task for, well, “pomposity” and “sermonizing.” It was a tough month for the local food movement crowd. This month in The Atlantic, James McWilliams, an Associate Professor of history at Texas State University, San Marcos, and author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, talks turkey about the consumption of free range meat. In short, McWilliams argues that animals raised humanely, then slaughtered, are just as dead and consumed as animals raised using less humane methods. Free range meat is not natural.

McWilliams writes:

It’s the strangest thing. Whenever I’m on a panel discussing meat production I seem to be strategically pitted against someone who produces meat through sustainable and more humane (“free range”) methods. What’s so strange is the response I get when I bring up the following conundrum: even if an animal is raised under favorable conditions, we still kill the creature for our benefit and, in so doing, confront a serious ethical dilemma nonetheless.

It’s at this point when the animal farmer addresses me with a condescending expression that says “Yes, James, life can be very harsh,” doing everything but patting me on the head and giving me a lollipop. Then the really odd thing happens: the farmer stakes out a moral high ground on the basis that slaughtering animals is “natural.” The audience smiles knowingly and nods in agreement.

Free range farming is like pornography, McWilliams argues. He suggests that “the appeal to ‘nature’ in free range farming, like most pornography, is essentially disingenuous.”

This precious text comes from the Whole Foods Market web site Meat & Poultry section:

We still do meat and poultry the old-fashioned way, when people cared where their meat came from, how it was raised and how it was processed…We offer organic meats, raised humanely and processed with a measure of compassion, custom cut to your specifications when you want it.

Go to Zingerman’s and have a taste of the $200 per pound ($15 per ounce) free range, acorn-fed Jamón ibérico (cured Spanish pork). If that’s too rich for your blood, you can stop in at Hiller’s for some free range beef, or even Sparrow Market at Kerrytown, where they stock free range poultry.

James McWilliams writes that with free range farmers, and for those buying the products of free range farming, “killing the animal is transformed from an avoidable tragedy into a badge of honor….It’s difficult to imagine any other issue where such a basic sense of right and wrong is so thoroughly perverted. But when it comes to slaughtering animals, even animals raised under the strictest welfare standards, a twisted ethical logic prevails. Killing a sentient being becomes a common good celebrated by food writers and environmentalists in glossy and well-respected publications.”

The University of Michigan Health System recommends free range meat. On the Health System’s food pyramid web site, we read, “We recommend organic, free-range, and grass-fed lean meat products because the animals are raised in more natural conditions and may be more nutritious than meat from conventionally raised animals.”

James McWilliams argues that free range meat is not the least bit natural. Free range farming is contrived. There are fences, automatic feeders, castrations, and of course, slaughter for one purpose: human consumption. In a sense, like fat free water and “organic” maple syrup, free range is just another marketing ploy. Thus, buying free range meat is a distinction to distract us from the guilt. “Natural food” becomes the virtuous, ethically superior choice. This was the same issue Atlantic writer B.R. Myers brought up when he wrote, “The Moral Crusade Against Foodies.” Myers writes:

Even if gourmets’ rejection of factory farms and fast food is largely motivated by their traditional elitism, it has left them, for the first time in the history of their community, feeling more moral, spiritual even, than the man on the street. Food writing reflects the change. Since the late 1990s, the guilty smirkiness that once marked its default style has been losing ever more ground to pomposity and sermonizing. References to cooks as “gods,” to restaurants as “temples,” to biting into “heaven,” etc., used to be meant as jokes, even if the compulsive recourse to religious language always betrayed a certain guilt about the stomach-driven life. Now the equation of eating with worship is often made with a straight face.

Then we have the reality that the free range farming industry is not regulated. Free range regulations require that the animal must be able to move or “roam free.” This does not stipulate what size the area should be. The farmer could be keeping a dozen pigs in an area could be the size of a patio and the meat would still be classified under the regulation of free range meat production.

B.R. Myers goes on to wonder why eating animals slaughtered locally should be a basis for claiming the culinary moral high ground:

But food writing has long specialized in the barefaced inversion of common sense, common language. Restaurant reviews are notorious for touting $100 lunches as great value for money. The doublespeak now comes in more pious tones, especially when foodies feign concern for animals. Crowding around to watch the slaughter of a pig—even getting in its face just before the shot—is described by Bethany Jean Clement (in an article in Best Food Writing 2009) as “solemn” and “respectful” behavior. Pollan writes about going with a friend to watch a goat get killed. “Mike says the experience made him want to honor our goat by wasting as little of it as possible.” It’s teachable fun for the whole foodie family. The full strangeness of this culture sinks in when one reads affectionate accounts (again in Best Food Writing 2009) of children clamoring to kill their own cow—or wanting to see a pig shot, then ripped open with a chain saw: “YEEEEAAAAH!”

James McWilliams, like B.R. Myers, sums up the discussion succinctly when he writes:

The underlying impulse driving farmers to take the moral high ground on the issue of animal slaughter is a vague but powerful sense that the slaughter is justifiable not only because the animal lived a life of freedom under natural conditions, but because the act itself is “natural.” But what if, as I’m arguing here, the free-range experience is nothing but a more humane way to force animals into serving our culinary wants? What if the appeal to “nature” does little more than allow us to forget the reality of enslavement, to take solace in the appeal of false freedom?

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Tom is allowed to roam the countryside freely, unfettered. In fact, his owner brags about the humane treatment of his “critters,” including Tom, to a slave trader interested in making a purchase. Tom’s is the epitome of false freedom, and as McWilliams writes, it is this false freedom that allows Tom’s owners to forget the reality of the man’s enslavement. Despite his master’s humane treatment of him, and despite his free range upbringing, the inevitable happens and Tom is sold down the river. James McWilliams would tell you that the free range chicken you bought for $18 is no more the result of natural farming, than was Uncle Tom’s humane treatment representative of anything except the cruel reality of his bondage.