Hunting, Eating and Vegetarianism

REFLECTIVE ESSAY (FSEM 146: HUNTING, EATING AND VEGETARIANISM)

Submitted by: Muhammad Bin Awais’ 21

Submitted to: Prof. Ian Helfant

Topic 1: Cerulli’s journey of exploration into the implications of his diet leads to his decision to renounce veganism and eventually hunt.  While this “solution” may not work for many of us, his journey demonstrates that one’s dietary choices in the developed world have significant ethical, moral, and environmental implications, and grappling with them requires serious introspection.  Referring to Cerulli, any of our other readings or Moodle materials, class/Moodle discussion, and – if you’d like -- other sources and perspectives that you have encountered, explore aspects of this complexity and your current thinking about how to confront it in your own life.

“The Mindful Carnivore” charts Tovar Cerulli’s difficult, yet enlightening journey from hunting to veganism and back and all the choices he had to make along the way. In doing so, Cerulli invites us to reconsider the way we think of animals and how the food reaches our plate.

A theme that cuts across “The Mindful Carnivore” is Nature. Cerulli, through his vivid and candid descriptions, shares with us his love for all that is natural, whether that’s related to him or to the animals around him. It is his natural curiosity that propels him to explore “every foot of the perimeter” (Cerulli,6). It is his fascination with the idea that predation and hunting are natural phenomena that lead him to view himself as “only one predator among many” (Cerulli, 7) and regard the natural food chains and their hierarchy as merely nature. Whether it was antlions feasting on ants, trout hunting minnows or himself catching fish and frogs, he seemed indifferent. He writes, “To me, killing fish wasn’t so different from picking wild blueberries. Both were edible parts of my world, free for the catching and gathering.” (Cerulli,10) But only if there was a purpose. This is, I believe, the seedling to the realization that he himself puts together at the end of the book as, “If my existence was going to take a toll on other beings, I would rather exact that toll consciously, respectfully, swiftly- and for the specific purpose of eating. I could make a deeper peace with intentional harm, with the kill I had prepared for and chosen.” (Cerulli, 257). This is the main lesson I take away from the book.  And it is this very sense of mindfulness and responsibility that we rediscover in “The Pleasures of Eating”: “The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating the meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak ……. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes” (Berry, 233-234) This implies that the consumption of such foodstuffs offers two-fold benefits– to the animal, an easy and dignified life and death and to the consumer, a conscience at ease with itself.

However, as much as I agree that a flawed agricultural system has led to “the rise of factory farms and the industrialization of our food, to the epidemic of our obesity and prevalence of food poisoning in America” (Pollan, 62), I feel that Cerulli and Pachirat carry it a bit too far by insinuating that meat-eating is the cause of much deeper-rooted social ills. Cerulli cites Sylvester Graham, “Graham contended that animalistic behavior was at the root of all evils and that a plant-based diet was vital to alleviating poverty and abolishing slavery.” (Cerulli,22) and Pachirat cleverly juxtaposes the narration of the killing of cattle with an incident of alleged racial injustice, suggesting that both stem from the same mentality (Pachirat, 2). Following this logic would mean, quite wrongly, that eliminating meat from our diets would eliminate these problems too when even in our contemporary world, there are vegetarian communities afflicted by them. I believe that the way Cerulli and Pachirat elevate what is a strictly personal matter to the societal level is flawed and the actual matter is infinitely more complex than what they present it as.

But at the same time, I cannot turn my eyes away from the millions for whom organic chicken and grass-fed beef are simply out of financial reach. While broiler operations and CAFOs violate animal rights and pose environmental hazards, they increase productivity and efficiency, bringing down costs and increasing the volume of the products. Organic vegetables and animals take longer to grow and organic farms take up more land to produce the same amount of food as is gained from a commercial and fertilizer/pesticide-ridden farm in the same length of time.  Coming from Pakistan, I understand this issue all too well. It is impossible for many people in my country to stretch their grocery budget any further (they don’t enjoy any other luxuries that they could cut down on) to squeeze in grass-fed beef and organic vegetables). Since, these goods cannot be subsidized any further, doing away with CAFOs, broilers and fertilizers would deprive the public of a cheap and abundant source of protein, minerals and vitamins, making them worse off than they would be if they continued consuming commercially produced meat and vegetables. And Cerulli acknowledges how tricky this question is when he says, “His dilemma-let rodents eat the vegetables or kill rodents so his family could eat the vegetables- wasn’t one I wanted to face.” (Cerulli, 35) Nutritional deficiencies are something countries with a booming youth, like Pakistan, simply cannot afford during their growth phase. This is perhaps the same dilemma that Pollan talks about when he says, “Such is the protean, paradoxical nature of the corn in that pile, that getting rid of it could contribute to obesity and to hunger both.” (Pollan, 62) I find shades of the same spirit in Cerulli when he contemplates the aftereffects of using a Bt insecticide on his cabbage (Cerulli, pg.38) and when Richard realizes that even when he digs up land for his garden, he is “killing creatures with every shovelful of dirt he turned.” (Cerulli, 219).