Rethinking meat

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And so you know when you're just really sick like that, you don't want to eat the last food that you had. So I was just too disgusted to eat meat after that. So I stopped. And I became-- essentially, I became a vegetarian by accident. But even if it was an accident, eating vegetarian was a real lifestyle change. Melanie ate lots of meat, and she was especially fond of meat lovers pizza. So she had to figure out new things to cook and new ways to top pizzas. She started poking around in books for recipes and tips. And in this exploration, I inevitably stumbled upon information about animal agriculture. And what I learned just shocked and horrified me. She couldn't believe the level of animal suffering. She couldn't believe the conditions for human workers. I couldn't believe what was happening to the environment. And this was back in the '80s, right? So the consciousness wasn't even near what it is now. But still, it was just horrific. Melanie wanted everyone to know what she was learning. So she would sit down for meals with her friends and family. And these were compassionate people who were fired up about social justice. She thought they'd be a receptive audience. What shocked me in some ways even more than what I was learning was that nobody I talked to was willing to hear what I had to say. I mean, the response was almost always something like, don't tell me that you'll ruin my meal. Something was going on so that they would just shut down. Like, just stop thinking and feeling when it came to this issue of eating animals. Again, these were people who were compassionate and empathetic except when farmed animals were concerned. So as Melanie tried her best to tell people about the problems with eating animals, I just became very curious. And my question was, why do good people turn away from bad practices? Why do caring people turn away from atrocities? One PhD and six books later, Melanie's got a pretty good answer. From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Future Perfect. I'm Cigal Samuel. All season long, we've basically been taking the same journey that Melanie took when she first started exploring vegetarianism. We've talked about me packing workers, losing fingers as they work at dizzying speeds and about how factory farming is a danger to everybody's health. We've talked about communities breathing in the fumes from open pits of hog waste and about the deforestation of the Amazon. And we've talked about pigs and chickens living in conditions we'd never accept for our pets. To me, the case against eating factory-farmed animals is strong. And yet, even though people like Melanie have been raising awareness for decades, factory farms still supply most of the world's meat and almost all of the meat in the US. So for our final episode of this season, Melanie Joy helps us understand why we're so determined to ignore the problems with our meat. And she explains why she thinks that might change soon. But before we look forward, let's go back. Back to when Melanie was in rolling in grad school to figure out why the heck her family didn't want to hear about the problems with the meat they were eating. She got to an answer by reading up on issues that weren't connected to animals. Yes, she was studying the psychology of meat eating. But she found that the way to do that was to step back and look at the bigger picture. The psychology of violence and nonviolence. And I realized that this issue that I was dealing with when it came to farmed animals was really not terribly different than other issues where we were talking about other global atrocities. Basically, humans have lots of natural empathy. We like to like others. But when we get caught up in big societal systems like sexism or racism or classism, Melanie says they get in the way of that empathy. And Melanie was finding that eating animals also involves an empathy killing ism. She calls it carnism. It might seem kind of weird to say that eating animals is at all similar to sexism or racism. And Melanie definitely acknowledges that there are important differences. But she says that all these isms do share a thought pattern that plays out in our brains in similar ways. So when we look at all systems of oppression, classism, racism, sexism, and so forth, they all reflect and reinforce the very same mentality. This belief that certain individuals or groups are more worthy of moral consideration of being treated with respect, essentially, than others. I want to lay out exactly how this pattern of thoughts and justifications works. So let's take a clear cut example. One we're familiar with. 1950s style sexism. Women right before the second wave of feminism, women were essentially relegated to the realm of domestic servitude. I was your day. Pretty quiet. I did the washing this morning and cleaned the house. The primary identity of women and value came from fulfilling the roles of mother-- I took junior to the dentist. Wife ended the shopping. Keeper of the domestic domain, essentially. I put up 16 jobs of Jan this afternoon. I'm sorry, stuff was late. This particular description mostly applies to middle-class white women. But women of color and women in lower socioeconomic classes were also limited to the domestic sphere in a lot of ways. They were just doing housework in other people's homes as well as their own. Now, to defend this blatant sexism, people went through a lot of mental gymnastics. There were these, what I call the three ends of justification, normal, natural, and necessary. This is the pattern I was talking about earlier. Melanie says we use these three ends to justify all systems of oppression. So in this example, it's normal for women to seek nothing other than domestic bliss. If she's a wife, then chances are she'll be a mother. Everyone's doing it. It's a social norm. If she's a mother, then chances are she should be, or will be a caretaker of the child or children. It's natural. If she's to be a caretaker of children, how is she to give over this function to other people? And, of course, it's necessary. If she's out of the house, somebody else has got to be in the house for her. This is the third end of the three ends of justification. It's necessary. What does poor dear old dad do when he gets home and he's hungry or thirsty or he doesn't have his laundry? It's necessary we need somebody to be taking care of household labor for the economy, for the function of society. Somebody must take care of the children. Someone needed to do the laundry and the dishes. Someone needed to cook the food and jar all the jabs. Believing in these three ends does not necessarily mean that in this case men didn't care about their wives, just like it doesn't mean that humans don't care about farmed animals. What it means is that we feel justified in maintaining their subordinate position. And when they-- in the case of women, when they speak out about it, we feel justified in devaluing their perceptions. As she looked into the body of research being done, Melanie saw this basic three-end model playing out over and over again in oppression over historical periods. Sudo-scientific research was used to paint poor people and immigrants as naturally inferior. People talked about slavery as a necessary evil. And just like Melanie saw the three ends used to justify all the suppression, she sees the three ends used to justify carnism. I mean, first of all, eating animals is a social norm. And the idea that it's normal is reinforced constantly in how we talk about meat. Take the paleo diet, for example. The paleo diet, the modern day version of what our Stone Age ancestors ate. The marketing is all about how paleo is normal, because we've been eating meat for millions of years. But the other ends make an appearance, too. If I could sum up the paleo way in a word, it would be natural. It's true that we've been eating animals for millennia. However, it's also true that our very earliest ancestors were fruit eaters. And for millennia, only a tiny percentage of our diet has has. come from animals. And of course we've been raping and killing infants and murdering for just as long as we've been eating animals, but we don't use the longevity as, you know, a justification for them today. Also, if you've ever contemplated becoming a vegetarian, you've probably heard about how it's going to be so hard to stay healthy and get protein. It's just one of a couple of the ways we justify meat as necessary. Of course there's a tremendous amount of literature debunking this myth today, but that is probably the core myth of necessity. The other is that we just can't feed the world and all the many people now on it without meat. Yeah, well, I mean, the United Nations would disagree. In fact, the opposite is true. So, you know, we know that animal agriculture is a key driver, for example, of climate change, deforestation, of desertification, of fresh water depletion issues that affect all of us, but in particular affect people in the developing world. What's necessary is to eat fewer if any animals at all. Necessary if we hope to halt the progress of climate change in any appreciable way. Necessary if we hope to have healthy bodies and certainly necessary if we hope to have a humane world for animals. So in her three ends, Melanie had an answer to the question that had bothered her at her dinner table. Her family shut down conversations about the problems with eating animals because they inherited this tangle of compelling myths and stories that justified eating animals. But Melanie has hope that we can untangle ourselves and we'll hear why after the break. [Music] This is "Avertiser Content" brought to you by Stonyfield Organic. Our cows, them going out to pasture, they love it. They're so excited to go out every day. They wait-rated the door. In fact, we milk them and we just open up the laneway and let them just go right out to pasture. I'm Rhonda Miller-Goodrich and I'm a dairy farmer in Cabot Vermont. Our farm is Molly Brook Farm. We're an organic dairy farm and we are a supplier to Stonyfield. Molly Brook Farm has been in my husband's family since 1835. We started our organic transition in 2015. We had 53 acres of corn ground and of course we had to use herbicides and pesticides and the soil was dead. Really for all intense purposes. We stopped growing corn and stopped using herbicides and pesticides and we seeded that down to perennial grasses. After that we began to see biodiversity in that soil again. To be organic certified, our cows need to be in pasture at least 120 days. I think the organic practices really benefit our animals. You know, having good feed, good water, a nice light area, that's what's important to us and that's what's important to Stonyfield. Visit Stonyfield.com to find Stonyfield organic yogurt near you. Welcome back. Before the break we looked at how people justified 1950s American sexism and we applied those lessons to meat eating today. But there's another lesson we can learn here. If we want to figure out how we can move away from meat eating now, we can look at how people started moving away from sexism back then. A lot of people put a lot of effort into making sure that the second wave of American feminism made waves. But Melanie Joy argues that non-human actors also made a difference. We can't downplay the role of technology in enabling a real shift back in the early 1960s. Talk about emancipation. Take the family wash for instance. No more clothes lying. No more dark basement. Boy, here's real emancipation from old fashioned George. We have the the advent of the dishwasher, the electric washing machine for example, the birth control pill. So if we think of the three-end justification for 1950s style sexism as natural, normal and above all necessary, what happened was you know that it became increasingly difficult to argue for the necessity of women to remain in this position of domestic servitude. Just set a dial? From walk away. That's the kind of emancipation any woman can understand. And so when we no longer can justify a behavior as necessary, then that behavior takes on a moral dimension or an ethical dimension. It didn't have in quite the same way before. And so what's really interesting is that technological changes really helped pave the way for society to become more open to engaging with the issue of feminism, the issue of equal rights for women because there was no longer as strong an investment in maintaining women in positions of domestic servitude. Emancipation by eye could use a little. Which is not to say that sexism is solved or that technology moved the needle all by itself. But technological change might have made society a little more willing to take ideas from feminists like Florence Kennedy or Gloria Steinem. And it might now make society more receptive to the Melanie Joyce of the world, sitting at the dinner table and trying to tell people about all the problems with their meat. The new technology that might help us tackle karnism is meat alternatives. Of course, we have had meat alternatives for a long time. In China, they've had sophisticated meat substitutes dating back to the Middle Ages when they served these elaborate banquets of fake duck and imitation pork. But in the last decade, we've stepped things up a notch. The plant burger that bleeds like real meat. High-tech food from Silicon Valley. It looks like beef, but isn't. First, there are companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. They've got billions of dollars in investment to create plant-based patties that do a better job of mimicking meat than your traditional bean burger. The makers of the Impossible Burger isolated a chemical called "heam," for example, from soy roots. Heam is what makes your blood look red, and it's part of what makes meat so meaty. It's what makes their patties bleed so convincingly. And more and more restaurants have been convinced. Already, the company launched a partnership with Burger King to serve the Impossible Whopper in 7,000 locations nationwide by the end of the year. In early 2020, plant-based meat sales increased 264%. And there's more on the horizon. "Coming up, real meat grown in the lab could cultured burgers do away with the need for mass livestock farming." Researchers have also been given billions of dollars to try and grow meat from animal cells in a lab. That way, instead of killing a sentient creature, they could just take some animal muscle cells, apply them to a little scaffold, and let them multiply and grow until ta-da, real meat with less of that morally fraught aftertaste. If we look at the trajectory of veganism, and we compare this with the trajectory of feminism, for example, and other social justice movements, we can see that it's heading in the same direction. "Do you think that in, let's say, 50 years, it'll be just as unthinkable for us to eat meat from factory farms as it is now to subject women to the kinds of conditions that they were living under 100 years ago?" "I don't know if it's going to happen within 50 years, but I do think that that will eventually happen." I think it's useful to be a little skeptical here. After all, Americans eat 200 pounds of meat a year on average. And as countries like China and India develop economically, trendlines suggest that they're adding more animal protein to their diets, not less. But it's true, thanks to new technologies like plant-based and lab-grown meat, this is the easiest it's ever been to change our carnivorous habits. It's the easiest it's ever been to really sit with a horrors of factory farms and decide, "I don't want to contribute to the animal suffering. I don't want to contribute to the human suffering. I don't want to contribute to the environmental destruction, and it's not really necessary for me to do so." [Music] All right, Ms. Bates. We'd like to try to find out how determined the career girl you are. This episode was produced and co-reported by Bird Pinkerton and edited by Amy Drostowska to very determined career girls. Our hosts are Dylan Matthews and me, Sigal Sanyul. Now if you'd please answer these questions and here is your first question. Jillian Weinberger is the senior producer of this show and Jared Paul mixes it. Liliana Mitchellina fact checked this episode and Liz Nelson is the executive producer for Vox Podcasts. Would you give up your career if the right man proposed? No I wouldn't. My career means too much to me. Not even if you're a dream prince charming with a man? Would you ever give up your dream burger? Even if it was a dream prince charming of a patty? That's the question Melanie Joy asks in her books, which we've linked two in the show notes. I want to thank Viveka Morris from the Yale Law, Ethics and Animals program who advised us. Do you ever read love stories miss Bates? Well occasionally. Music in this episode from APM, Pottington Bear and Chris Zabrisky. We also used a clip courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC collection. Do you ever picture yourself in the situation the heroin finds yourself in? Yes I do sometimes. And you have thought about yourself in the character of a wife. We're grateful to Lauren Cads for her social media work and to Kate Daly for all her help. Thank you miss Bates. Now we'll find out how determined a career girl or a judge's rate you Dr. Roslo. This podcast is made possible thanks to support from animal charity evaluators. They research and promote the most effective ways to help animals. If you liked this podcast we're going to be covering this topic a lot more and in fact we're hiring an editor to help us do that. We've got a link to future perfects, future of meat page in the show notes if you want to find out more. With 100 as the maximum possible rating, we rate miss Bates at 62. She says she would not give up her career for marriage, yet she has a definite journey for romance. And we'd love it if you would give this podcast five stars in spite of our yearning for romance. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce and more. So why not you? That's odo.com.