food and the life cycle
because "food and death" sounds... bleak af
I’ve been wanting to write about this for awhile, but I wasn’t sure when the right time was. The subject can be….more than a little heavy, and very emotionally charged. I realized that while there’s never really a “good” time, there may be an “appropriate” time- December.
Both literally and symbolically, this is a time of darkness and hibernation. Trees have shed their leaves and appear “dead”, very few fresh fruits and veg are hardy enough to grow in the cold soil. Winter is the traditional time of turning inward that precedes the seasonal “rebirth” associated with spring, when baby animals are born and plants start to emerge from their slumber to soak up the returning sunshine. Autumn and winter quite literally embody the death and dying parts of the natural life cycle, inevitable and inescapable to us all. But if the topic of death, especially the death of animals, isn’t something you’re particularly excited to read about, I give you my full support to skip this post. I won’t take it personally! I will however provide trigger warnings where appropriate :)
When I was 16, I had the amazing opportunity to attend a summer camp in Vermont on a working farm- my auntie Lisa (not by blood but by lifelong friendship with my mom) had been sending her kids for years, and she essentially paid for me to go, something I will be forever grateful for, as she knew it would be a life-changing experience for me. And it was. As a city kid, I had never really made the connection between the farms and land that grow food with the food that ended up at my local supermarket. I remember actually saying to someone “I didn’t know places like this existed.”
Among the many projects we did on the farm was raising chicks. They were in a little wire enclosure with no bottom, so they could graze on grass, worms and bugs, their natural diet. Every day we moved the enclosure a few yards, the chicks cheeping and trotting to catch up, so they could feed on another patch of grass. Throughout the summer we had the pleasure of watching them grow up before our very eyes, healthy, happy and strong.
At the end of the summer, we had an opportunity- by volunteer only- to “harvest” the chickens for dinner one night. Meaning, to kill them. After a lot of thought I decided to participate. After all, I ate chicken pretty regularly- I felt like it was something of a responsibility to participate firsthand in the process that had brought food to my plate so many times. I’m a huge animal lover and I come from a long line of animal lovers, including actual animal rights activists in my immediate family (my wonderful aunt JP); my mom is vegetarian, and very rarely cooked even chicken or salmon for us. So this was a very big deal for me.
*Big TW: killing of animals for food*
I won’t go into gruesome detail, but it was an extremely emotional and in some ways a very spiritual experience. When the day came I tenderly held the little hen- one that I myself had helped raise- stroking her feathers while waiting for our turn at the chopping block, and I will never ever forget the haunting, mournful cry she made as we approached it. She very clearly knew what was happening, but she didn’t struggle. After the actual deed was done I cried as she convulsed in my arms, quite literally feeling the life drain out of her body.
Two days later, we had a celebratory dinner that consisted entirely of food we had grown and harvested on the farm. Including chicken. I remember so vividly looking at my plate, gripped with a wave of complex emotions- gratitude, melancholy, that solemn feeling accompanying a loss of innocence. The whole process was a seminal experience that I have often about in the 20 years, since and I look back on it as a rite of passage of sorts.
Americans, like most Westerners, are extremely death-averse. We are deeply uncomfortable with it. With the exception of our collective love affair with true crime content- a form of media that still allows us to separate ourselves from any real violence or death, through a screen or headphones- death remains something of a taboo subject. We keep the old and aging hidden in nursing homes, and death more or less invisible behind the veil of funeral homes. Death is also associated with grief, one of the most painful, difficult and complex emotional processes that humans experience. And, as anyone who has suffered a loss can attest to, a lot of people also feel uneasy about grief. I’ve had more than a few friends report that while grieving a loss, they found out who their true friends were- some people are so awkward about how to approach grief that they simply go dark, inadvertently walking away from the friendship for fear of handling the situation poorly.
And is it any wonder? Pervasive Christian notions of heaven and hell, the threat of spending the afterlife with the devil in the bowels of eternal hellfire, is a terrifying (and for many, effective) incentive to stay strictly within the rigid rules of conduct laid out for us. However, the western view of death and dying is is in stark contrast to other historical traditions; ancient Egyptians took great pains to preserve and adorn their dead, preparing them to cross the river Styx, while reincarnation is the somewhat comforting system of belief in Buddhism.
If you want a deeper dive into Western attitudes toward death, here’s a fascinating YouTube channel called Ask A Mortician run by actual mortician Caitlin Doughty, who founded an organization called The Order Of The Good Death dedicated to reforming the funeral industry and working toward what she calls “death acceptance”. Here is another interesting (and surprisingly beautiful) piece by Refinery 29 following a day in the life of a young female mortician in Kentucky.
I’ve spent a great deal of time ruminating on how divorced we are as a society from the food systems that make sure our grocery store shelves are full, and from the death that that ensures the world is fed. The neat, sanitized plastic packages of steak or pork chops bear no resemblance to the animals from which they came. It’s so easy to forget the the many messy, unceremonious steps in the significant and lengthy process that brought these neatly trimmed cuts of meat to the clean and bright shelves of the meat department.
*TW: factory farming*
There is lot of well-established discourse about the many destructive and cruel practices in the factory farming industry, also known as CAFOs. Animals kept in deplorable conditions, eating the American trifecta of corn, wheat and soy which their digestive systems aren’t designed to process, and generally treated like consumables rather than living, feeling beings. The dairy industry requires female animals to be separated from their babies and kept perpetually pregnant to facilitate constant milk production (one of the roots of an intersectional movement known as ecofeminism, which has been extensively written about by scholar Greta Gaard and others). Not to mention the razing of the land needed to keep this industry profitable, the terrible labor conditions of the workers, or the carbon emissions and water consumption associated with CAFOs- it’s a system that is not sustainable on any level.
But it’s not just industrial meat production that necessitates the death of animals. Global food systems, including staple crop agriculture, is the primary driver of global biodiversity loss. In the USA, the extensive use of pesticides (derived in part from fossil fuels, which is extremely problematic on multiple levels) kills not just insects, but also the millions of microorganisms and mycelium networks that live in the soil, keeping it healthy and vital. This loss of nutrients requires the intensive use of harsh chemical fertilizers to artificially create the conditions needed for plant life.
This isn’t even mentioning the vast destruction of prairie, forest and wetlands that have occurred over many years to accommodate monocultures of corn, wheat and soy- plants that would generally be considered vegan and cruelty-free, and are omnipresent in popular vegan food products like fake meat and dairy. The reality is that farming these crops at scale has decimated ecosystems that would otherwise support animals such as rodents, reptiles, amphibians, and even coyote, deer, elk and mountain lions.
It’s my personal opinion that this is something the animal rights movement tends to avoid or even overlook. I’ve heard it said that humans have selective compassion for animals- we favor the ones that we see on idyllic roadside farms or anthropomorphized in movies, the ones we consider “cute”, those that have relatively humanoid faces- eyes, ears, nose, mouth. It feels natural to mourn the death of a pig or a cow the way we would mourn a dog or a cat. It’s a little harder to extend the same compassion to animals we find less relatable and desirable: snakes, spiders, frogs, worms, centipedes, insects.
The animals we eat have mostly been selectively bred over the generations specifically for human consumption, and it’s noble and deeply compassionate to want to remove them from the suffering and terrifying death they experience in our food system. But since when is one life form more worthy of protection than another? Are humans judge, jury and executioner when it comes to who deserves to live and die in our food system?
When the land is undisturbed, these “undesirable” animals work in tandem to keep the ecosystem functioning. Their footsteps aerate the soil, improving drainage and creating space for plants to grow (the natural process that tilling mimics). The natural food chain prevents the overpopulation of any individual species with the cycle of prey and predation. Animals keep the flora trimmed back and flourishing by consuming it and passing the seeds (yup, by pooping). Animals fertilize the soil naturally- yup, again by pooping, but also by dying; as their decomposing remains return vital nutrients to the soil- the nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus that is otherwise applied mechanically in their absence. As the soil regenerates, the plants have the necessary nourishment to thrive, thus feeding the animals…. continuing the life cycle ad infititum.
Even in a backyard, gardeners are constantly competing with other organisms for the food they grow- competition for food and survival is a feature, not a bug, of the natural world. Insects, deer, rabbits and small rodents are a constant threat to the success of homegrown fruits and veg, as any home gardener will tell you. As for other food sources for these creatures, where do they find them? We continue to shrink their habitats to build more housing, roads and freeways; as their environment changes, systems are thrown out of balance with overpopulation of certain species, the footholds of invasive plants and human-driven climate change. As for the cultivated plants themselves, even they have a life cycle of birth, growth and death that ends with our harvest.
Cliché as it sounds, death truly is part of life. And if you zoom out, the honest truth is that there is no such thing as food without death. Yes, even if you’re vegetarian or vegan.
However.
While there is no food without death, there is such a thing as food without cruelty. Harm reduction is not only possible but (in my opinion) the true goal to strive for, rather than elimination of death. Regenerative farming projects operate in stark contrast to the industrial monoculture and meat/dairy production that is inherently destructive to both the ecosystems and the dignity of the animals held hostage by them. In regenerative agriculture, healthy, thriving animals serve a vital purpose on the farm. There are far fewer system inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides, resulting in more sustainable closed systems resembling permaculture, and distribution to local stores, markets and restaurants means fewer carbon emissions than the vast long-haul trucking network employed by large industrial operations.
Ruminants (cattle, goats, sheep) eat the grass they’re designed to eat, fertilizing and aerating the soil; chickens provide pest mitigation in the form of worms, insects and grubs (their natural diet). These animals live outdoors, with space to roam and engage in their natural behaviors. And when they are slaughtered for food, it’s at the end of a life cycle more closely resembling the one they would participate in the wild. Many smaller operations are more likely to use every part of the animal for food, in the form of sausages, bones for broth, chitterlings, paté, even offal for fertilizer- and healthy animals provide much higher quality products. Meanwhile, the offal from factory-farmed animals is often fed back to the animals, which is what created the spread of mad cow disease in the 90s; they’re also more likely to contain antibiotic residue, one of the drivers of antibiotic resistance not just in the animals themselves, but in the humans who consume them.
My advice and personal practice is to buy exclusively local and grass fed animal products, heirloom if possible. I always say the only thing worth being a food snob about is animal products. The kicker, of course, is the expense of these products- which honestly and unfortunately reflects the true price of food. Small farms receive only 2% of the total government agricultural subsidies distributed annually, preventing them from competing with the much lower prices of industrial farmed foods (I wrote about all this in my piece on corn, which you can find here). The good news is that SNAP benefits (food stamps) are accepted at most farmers markets nowadays, although money doesn’t go as far when paying farmers market prices.
Additionally, smaller scale regenerative farming- while historically sufficient to feed local communities- just isn’t capable of feeding all the people who need to be fed. Many experts maintain that the world produces enough food to feed all 8 billion of us, and more (if we didn’t waste and trash about 40% of it); however, one study estimated that we may have reached food-based carrying capacity back when we had only 2.5 billion. At the same time, the truth is that our conglomerate of massive industrial farms is able to provide more calories per person. However, the same study estimates our food-based carrying capacity could potentially equal 10 billion. The problem is, a global population of 10 billion isn’t terribly far away.
If you read this post with the hope of hearing some solution, you’ll be disappointed (lol sorry). I have no idea what the solution is, and my guess is that anyone who claims to is sorely mistaken. The best thing we can do is educate ourselves so we can make informed decisions, and vote with our wallets- supporting sustainable, local operations whenever possible. From a policy standpoint, shifting the balance of farm subsidies to more equitable distribution by easing the financial and logistical barriers that prevent small farms from participating.
Lastly, I think we can really sit with our relationship with death. Like it or not, we are still human animals who participate in the planet’s life cycle no matter how much we rail against it. The cycle of birth, service, death, and sustaining future life can be viewed as something both bittersweet and worthy of reverence- something that helps us feel connected to the planet and each other. After all, we have so much more in common than that which divides us.