WHAT IF FACTORY FARMED MEAT WAS THE ONLY OPTION?
A reader posed a question to me yesterday: "If you only had the option of factory farmed meat, would you still eat it?" Although I don't read all the chatter generated by my blog, I love to get feedback and Wendy, who handles all of this for me, screens and sends me salient comments and questions. So keep them coming.
Now, the question of the day. Teresa and I have often commented that if we couldn't get meat and poultry like ours, we would eat very little meat. Not none, but very little. Having never gone through this, I have no idea what "very little" means to me. For sure, it's easier in the summer than winter.
When summer vegetables are in season, I can go multi-day stretches without any meat. But pretty soon I begin craving real protein, including milk and cheese. I know the answer is that I would eat some factory farmed meat since even today sometimes it's too socially obtuse to not participate. Since I'm not true blue today, I'm sure I wouldn't be true blue if I had no options.
If I just walked away from the question at this point, though, I wouldn't be fair to its ramifications. The first regards echelons of badness. By far and away the worst factory meat to eat is poultry. From an animal welfare and nutrition-destroying standpoint, industrial chicken and turkey is definitely the worst. I refuse to eat factory poultry and haven't violated that prohibition for years except maybe once or twice in extreme social situations.
Next worst is pork. It's close to poultry but not quite as bad because the skin is removed. When poultry is processed in factory plants, the fecal particulate on the feathers and skin gets pounded into the carcass by mechanical feather picking fingers. At least pork has a skin that comes off and the de-hairing machines are not as aggressive. They use the weight of the pig and gravity to remove the hair; whereas with the poultry, it's on shackles; with no gravity, the fingers must be more aggressive.
That brings us to beef. It's the safest because the skin comes off in one piece, like a blanket. No defeathering, no dehairing, no scalding. It's a relatively clean process. And all beef animals enjoyed at least two-thirds of their life out on pasture. Even in the worst cases, only one-third of their lives are in a dingy feedlot. So at least they had a relatively natural diet for most of their life and enjoyed growing up with mama. Factory poultry and pork do not even enjoy that much natural habitat; it's zero.
In my echelon of badness, a conventional factory farmed steak is far superior to anything pork or poultry. For the record, I only eat fish if I'm within 100 miles of the ocean. If everyone would do this, the oceans' fisheries would recover. Last year when I was in Norway I ate wild caught salmon by the pound; wow, was that good and a real treat.
The second nuance of my answers concerns alternatives. My preferred answer to the question is this: "Instead of asking what if, why don't we commit ourselves to making sure plenty of alternatives to factory farming exist?" In other words, we only have so much time to talk about things, to explore issues. I'd rather use my time exploring how to make sure this question never gets asked than trying to answer the question because the reality is that alternatives do exist. Nobody has to eat factory farmed meat and poultry.
In shameless self-promotion, I remind everyone that right now, today, you can go on PolyfaceYum and order from us and we'll ship it to your doorstep. In fact, now we have an app you can use straight from you smart phone. If everyone who cares about this topic would commit to supporting the alternative, we would never have to pose this question. Wouldn't that be an exciting world?
What are you doing to insure thriving alternatives to factory farmed meats?