"Cold days are better for killing animals. Warmer months
demand time in the wheat fields. Plus, heat and sun quickly turn meat rancid.
On my family’s farm in rural Kansas, we did our butchering
in the fall and winter, when the work drew no flies.
On gray afternoons, I would get home from school — after an
hourlong bus ride on muddy roads — to see a large, pink carcass hanging near
the cinder block farmhouse where I lived with my grandparents.
Grandpa would have already shot a bullet through the
heifer’s brain, drained her blood, cut off her feet with a handsaw and begun to
peel away her skin. Then, having hooked two of her legs with a steel spreader
connected to the long arm of our tractor, he would have used hydraulic controls
to lift the heavy creature — who, not two hours prior, grazed in the pasture
and huddled against the north wind with her family — and sliced her underbelly
from anus to neck.
We would spend the evening in the butchering shed — a small
barn next to the house with a garage door, a bloodstained concrete floor and a
rosebush growing up its south wall. Grandpa did the carving. Grandma stood at
the grinder making hamburger. My job was to weigh the meat on a metal scale,
wrap it in white butcher paper and label it with a marker. More often than not,
friends and family pitched in and left with steaks for their deep freezers.
Grandpa saved the heart and liver, which he pickled in a jar in our icebox.
This was an average day for me, growing up. During those
formative years, witnessing death did not desensitize me to the plight of our
fellow animals. Rather, life on the farm in general strengthened my reverence
for the more-than-human world, which so plainly dictated our lives. While we
opened and closed the gates that trapped farm animals, we were often at their
mercy.
On winter mornings when we would have preferred a warm bed,
we crouched in the snow and pulled a breech calf into the world before sunrise.
We were aware each day, when we entered the pasture to check the water in the
stock tank, that even the smallest of the Charolais cattle could beat us in a
fight. We had friends who had been trampled or gored by bulls, and Grandpa told
the story of an area farmer who, years before, slipped on a patch of ice while
inside one of his pens, hit his head and was eaten by hogs.
On Sundays at the little Catholic church down the dirt road
from our house, we stared up at Jesus’ bleeding, hanging body and listened to
the sermons about man’s dominion over the earth. But in our bones we knew it
was the other way around.
Our humility was not just the result of doing hard,
undervalued work. It was also the result of being undervalued people.
Even as a child, I understood that families like mine, poor
rural farmers, were low in the pecking order. Television shows and movies
portrayed us as buffoons and hicks, always the butt of the joke. Our presumed
incivility, and even monstrousness, was suggested in conversations, often to
laughter, by humming the banjo tune from the 1972 film “Deliverance,” present
in many VHS collections during my 1980s childhood. “Squeal like a pig,” some
jokers continued — a reference to that film’s infamous rape scene.
We didn’t need those cues to know that society held us in
low esteem, though. All we had to do was look at our bank accounts.
We worked the land and killed animals so that others would
eat, so that we would afford propane for the winter, and so that the rich, rigged
industry we supplied grain to would become a little richer.
The profound humility instilled in me by my upbringing left
no room in my worldview for exceptionalism of any sort. It also left me
troubled by the ways that most humans calculate the value of things — animals,
plants, land, water, resources, even other people — according to hierarchies
that suit their own interests.
More than once, while wrapping meat, I sliced my finger on
the sharp edge of the butcher paper. There was nothing special about my blood.
It was red just like the pigs’ and the cows’. It was clear to me that there was
nothing special about me or my family, either, doing that most essential work
of feeding others. Nothing special but also nothing lesser.
From there, near the bottom of the proverbial social ladder
— where women drove tractors and people of all races lived in single-wide
trailers — I began to see through the many false narratives of supremacy that
govern our society. That men are better than women. That white people are
better than everyone else. That the rich are better than the poor. Even, yes,
that human beings are better than animals.
The experiences of my early life left me forever in mind of
the animals that society consumes and the workers who spend their lives among
them. It also left me rageful toward industries that devalue both. In some
ways, my professional mission to champion the exploited and expose the powerful
— as a journalist, an author and an advocate for social justice — can be traced
back to lessons I learned on the farm.
Unfortunately, farms like ours — and the ancient, intimate
tradition of husbandry into which I was born — have been disappearing for
decades, forced out of business by policies that favor large industrial
operations.
Today an estimated 99 percent of the meat in the United
States comes from factory farms, barbaric places that leverage the selfish,
amoral paradigm of human supremacy for immense capitalist gain. Industrialized
agriculture has made meat, eggs, milk, leather, cheese, wool and other animal
goods readily, cheaply available to the modern consumer but at a terrible cost
— both to the animals, who endure savage cruelty, and to the low-wage laborers,
many of whom are immigrants of color, who suffer injuries to body and spirit.
This likely isn’t news to you. The details of this dark
business, while partly obscured by ag-gag laws, are widely documented, yet they
remain underdiscussed.
The torturous treatment of animals at the hands of
multibillion-dollar monopolies is among the greatest horrors being committed on
this planet.
In comparison, our small farm was as humane as any
enterprise raising animals for slaughter might be. And while we lived in
poverty, according to many definitions, it was a fortune and privilege to grow
up with a big garden, with cows and pigs and chickens.
Subsistence through modest land ownership historically has
been refused to people of color, stolen from Indigenous peoples and made
economically unfeasible for poor folks of all stripes, who set off for cities
in order to survive.
Whereas most Americans today have no direct contact with the
animals they eat, I carried their manure on my boots. Thus, long before I
learned about the industry that delivers chicken tenders and bacon strips to
the masses, I had an aversion to factory-farmed products. The beef was too
gray. The chicken smelled wrong. The egg yolks were too pale.
Ironically, our culture associates eco-consciousness with
higher socioeconomic status, as though greater wealth denotes greater
character. But in my experience, environmental impacts are most keenly felt and
understood by the poor and unheard.
In fact, as I have climbed out of poverty and into a class
of highly educated, financially comfortable liberals, I have found that for all
their supposed interest in justice and claims of being on the right side of
history, most of my peers give little thought to animal suffering in their
eating decisions.
Of course, wealth and class play a role in what food and
products you can afford. Socioeconomic barriers to values-based eating choices
undeniably exist, particularly in urban areas cut off from healthy food
options. But one doesn’t have to afford expensive grass-finished beef or frozen
patties engineered from pea protein to make effective food decisions, and white
male chief executives didn’t invent plant-based living. Bougie restaurants
serving charcuterie boards sure as hell didn’t invent local venison salami,
which we made from the deer we hunted.
To be certain, many middle-class and affluent consumers far
removed from agricultural work have learned about the problems of factory
farming, including its contribution to climate change, and altered their
habits. I applaud their important efforts. For some people, though, working
near the bottom of the class ladder provides not just knowledge but a knowing,
and that knowing deserves respect.
As a young adult, I lived in poverty and faced food
insecurity. These conditions limited my choices, but they did not negate my
affection for the earth. I grew up driving a farm truck with wheat kernels on
the floor of the cab and an “Eat beef” license plate on the front bumper. I
knew people maimed by farm machinery and disabled by agricultural chemicals.
Regarding the conditions of farm animals and farmworkers, I had no option but
to understand.
For me, there is no taste of meat without bodily memory —
the heat of a newborn calf in my cold arms, the smell of the mother’s cascading
excrement, the danger of her heavy hooves. I could see the cows on our farm
from my upstairs bedroom window and the pigs and chickens from our front door.
My early proximity to animals did not cause my empathy for
them, I suspect, so much as it starkly revealed it. To be sure, similar experiences
did not make animal rights activists out of most of the people in my farming
community. But in general, I observed more environmentally conscious behaviors
among the rural working poor than in other socioeconomic spaces I’ve inhabited.
Maybe it was because minimizing waste and reusing and
repairing old things were economic necessities. Or perhaps it was because
carbon-spewing air travel was an unaffordable luxury. Or maybe it was because
they had no choice but to look into a cow’s eyes before they killed her.
I do not wish to valorize the working class or demonize
those who are better off. Both groups vote in droves for politicians who cater
to massive agricultural corporations, the fossil fuel lobby and other powerful
entities that destroy our planet.
But guilt for crimes committed against other species and
against the earth is not equally shared. Wealthy corporations and the
governments beholden to them, choosing profit over sustainability and moral
decency, created and fortified the food systems with which the average
individual has little choice but to engage.
Navigating those systems today, while living again in rural
Kansas after years in cities, I now eat eggs from my neighbor’s hens and, about
once a month, chicken, beef or bison raised and slaughtered down the road. At
other times, living without access to such food or means to afford it, I went
without eating animal products for years at a time. I haven’t consumed dairy in
more than a decade, but for those who do, the particular devastation of family
dairies makes local milk and cheese much harder to come by.
Still, I am part of the problem. I ate fast-food hamburgers
well into my 20s, and my home almost certainly contains products that were
tested on animals. My cat eats canned meat from factory farm byproducts, and
I’m wearing mass-produced leather sneakers as I type this.
I am sympathetic to the argument that any consumption of
animal products is unethical and unnecessary. Realistically, however, the
urgent problem for our time is not whether they will be consumed but how.
While it is important that consumers from all socioeconomic
backgrounds care about the earth and its creatures, ultimately only policy has
the power to restrain the agriculture industry’s worst abuses. I am heartened
by long-term legal efforts to extend personhood to other animal species and,
more immediately, by the New Jersey senator and famous vegan Cory Booker’s new
legislation to make slaughterhouse practices more humane. In a more perfect
world, future farm bills would somehow rebuild the nearly four million small
farms lost to urbanization and industrialization since the 1930s, allowing
future generations the closeness to animals that engenders awareness.
My family, squeezed out like so many others, had to sell our
fifth-generation farm more than 20 years ago. I was a first-generation college
student by then, working toward a more comfortable life.
No education, however, would surpass the one I received in
the butchering shed, where I held a bleeding muscle with my bare hands and
placed it on the scale. Today, when I look at that scale — now an antique on
display in my kitchen — I give thanks for those who worked and those who died
so that I may eat.
Sarah Smarsh is the author of “Heartland: A Memoir of
Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.”"
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