Opposition to Localvorism

The new issues of the Journal of Critical Animal Studies is out. The whole thing is worth reading, but I want to suggest reading the article "'Green' Eggs and Ham?" (pdf). The article is written by Vasile Stanescu (full disclosure, we're brothers), and is rigorous examination of the politics and principles of the localvore movement. Moreover, it is also something of an expose of the secret conservative nature of the intellectual founders of localvorism. I highly suggest this for anyone interested in localvorism, vegetarianism and veganism, and current food issues.

Factory Farming and Health Care

This interview with Michael Pollan from The Daily Show reminded me of a post I meant to write before the holidays, following up on my last post about health care reform, but never got around to it. In it Pollan makes the argument that the reforms of the bill will make it so that insurance companies become more interested in your health, because future profits will come from that, not from figuring out more ways to deny you care or not even let you have insurance in the first place. In this, Pollan foresees a possible near future where big agriculture (mostly big corn) is taken on by big health insurance. And if you look at the lobbying of these organizations, it is pretty profound. The farm lobby donated $65 million during the 2008 election cycle, health care came in at $167 million, the second largest lobby organization around (the largest you ask? Why, that'd be finance with an easy win at $475 million). Now Pollan is mostly talking about things like high fructose corn syrup, which is certainly bad for you, but cheap sweetners have nothing on cheap animal products for our collective health.

One almost doesn't know where to begin. Well, at minimum diets high in animal products are the number one causes behind heart diseases, cancers, and strokes. It is also estimated that there are 76 million cases of food borne illnesses a year in America, almost all of which are caused by factory farming. Furthermore working in a slaughterhouse is still the number one profession for on job injuries, including the number one cause of chronic injuries. None of this covers the severe and often chronic conditions that the pollutions from factory farms give to the people that work on them and live around them. To give one example, children raised next to factory farms have asthma rates exceeding 50 percent, and children raised near factory farms are still twice as likely to get asthma as other children. Meanwhile factory farms basically serve as laboratories for ever deadlier flus and bacteria infections while at the same time destroying the ability of medicines to effectively treat those viruses and infections through use of antibiotics for non-medicinal purposes.

Health care costs are rising faster than the GDP in most countries, particularly fast in the US. There are lots of reasons for this; pay for service systems, an increased technological medicine, the costs of medical schools and the high costs of physician payments, the intense costs of end of life care, etc; but one of the reasons is we are simply sicker. You can not give a fuck about the lives and well-being of other animals, and still realize that we absolutely have to take a stand against factory farming. There are absurdly high costs to cheap meat and cheap animal products. People are getting sick, people are dying, we are destroying the planet, and bankrupting the country so someone can get a cheeseburger for two bucks (or however much they cost). We could do more for health care and national health care cost control than the most liberal utopian single-payer system if tomorrow we banned factory farms. Hell, even if we just effectively regulated them and stopped the government subsidies.

The health care bill that is coming out means that some of those externalized costs by factory farms get paid collectively. It means that not only insurance companies, but to some degree all of us become slightly more invested in the health and well-being of each other. In a rational world that would probably mean we turn against factory farming, but in the world we live in it will probably mean more broadsides against cheap sugar rather than against cheap meat (not that it's an either/or situation).

Coda on my last post on biopolitics in Pollan and Haraway

My last post was rather harsh in many ways. And I stand beside the analysis, completely. However, it is sometimes hard advancing critiques against people who are partial allies. Donna Haraway obviously feels a great deal of emotional confusion over her flesh eating practices. What is odd to me is that she feels we all should feel equally confused, and call that confusion political practice. I have trouble buying that.
Michael Pollan's justifications for meat eating rubs me to wrong way because he not only is trying to make meat-eating practices ethically okay, but also ethically superior to vegan/vegetarian practices. That requires some obvious push back. Also, I have frequently meet people who are former vegetarians and cite Pollan's work as the intellectual justification for their switching to flesh eating. That also bothers me. However, Pollan's work has re-invigorated arguments over the treatment of animals, government subsidies towards CAFOs, et cetera. And just as there are former vegetarians who now eat flesh, there are people who try to avoid factory farmed animal flesh who wouldn't otherwise. And I believe that the factory farm is a unique evil (even if that word is out of fashion). So, if there are people who wish to fight the factory farm I welcome them, even if I don't understand or share Haraway's moral confusion or Pollan's strange psycho-sexual desire for flesh eating*. I recognize that in the hard work of coalition building, they are allies more than opponents.

* I know that calling Pollan's arguments psycho-sexual may seem a little off, but I present this strange paragraph from "An Animal's Place"

Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed.

The biopolitics of Michael Pollan and Donna Haraway

Most of you, by now, have seen this blog, which asks the question, Michael Pollan or Michel Foucault?

This reminded me of some work on Michael Pollan I had been doing, most of the arguments having never made it on here (with this one exception). This time, however, I want us to turn toward a rather strange and discomforting shift in Michael Pollan's justification for meat eating. Once again I will focus on the condensed "An Animal's Place", mostly for cutting and pasting purposes, but also because shorter works can sometimes bring out contradictions more clearly than longer pieces. However, every move that Pollan makes in this essay is replicated in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

In "An Animal's Place," Pollan begins by advancing a rather strong critique of the factory farm. What has caused and allowed to continue the atrocities of the factory farm, according to Pollan, is a specific breakdown in the relationship between humans and animals. Let me quote Pollan:

Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ''Why Look at Animals?'' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away.

What broke down between humans and animals is a face to face relationship (and here, I would like to wet your appetite for a future post on the ethics of Levinas, the problem of faciality in Deleuze and Guattari, and the question of this face to face relationship with animals), and if we want to have a way to eat animals ethically, we have to restore this face to face relationship. After this claim, Pollan's article spends several paragraphs explaining, primarily Peter Singer's, arguments for vegetarianism. After that we have Pollan's response as to why eating animals is ethically okay, even more, ethically superior to vegetarianism. The first reason is the rather bizarre political origin myth that Pollan lays out that I discussed in my previous post. This leads to his second, and more forceful point of the ethical superiority of eating animal flesh from non-factory farms. Again, let me quote Pollan:

Yet here's the rub: the animal rightist is not concerned with species, only individuals. Tom Regan, author of ''The Case for Animal Rights,'' bluntly asserts that because ''species are not individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.'' Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals have interests. But surely a species can have interests -- in its survival, say -- just as a nation or community or a corporation can. The animal rights movement's exclusive concern with individual animals makes perfect sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but does it make any sense in nature?

First, let us put aside the question if nations, communities, and corporations make any sense in nature, as well. So, the problem with animal rights/animal liberation, according to Pollan, is that these doctrines turn us toward the individual or specific animal, and away from the animal as a species. This is a curious move, for not only does it seem to replace the face to face relationship that Pollan claimed as so central before (now the face of an individual pig must be replaced with the face of The Pig, pig in general), but it changes entirely the level by which we are to understand and answer ethical and political question. These questions have now been deplaced to the level of the population, to the level of the species. Michael Pollan goes on to contend that without humans eating animals, many domesticated species would die out. So, at the level of the population, we now have a moral imperative to eat and kill animals so that the population does not die. We have to kill in order to make life live (to steal a phrase from Michael Dillon and Julian Reid). It is the same as the old Vietnam military logic of having to destroy a village in order to save it. However, one might be willing to let Pollan off the hook. He isn't a trained philosopher, and he probably couldn't care less about the question of the biopolitical. Let us turn our attention, now, to someone who should know better.

Donna Haraway's book When Species Meet is a strange and frustrating book for anyone who is serious about questions of animal ethics. It also contains several remarkable similarities to Pollan's An Omnivore's Dilemma (my brother likes to point out that the books end in exactly the same way, with a bunch of professors roasting a pig in California). It is exactly to this pig roast I would now like to turn. Before turning there, I guess I should stay that until her recent turn to discuss animals, Donna Haraway was an essential and keystone philosopher for much of my early theory days. I even sent her a fanboy email once. And her earlier writing on animals still remains radical and exemplary. I still find her writing and style intoxicating. Even so, let us look at her position on flesh eating in the "parting bites" of WSM. She describes how her friend Gary Lease is a hunter who is incredibly concerned with hunting in ecologically sustainable ways. She further describes "[h]is approach is resolutely tuned to ecological discourses, and he seems tone deaf to the demands individual animals might make as ventriloquized in rights idioms" (pp. 296-297). Again, we see how a certain idea of ecology, an inherently biopolitical, makes us tone deaf to specific beings and is replaced simply by the population. Furthermore, it is a little weird to see Haraway accuse other of ventriloquy trick, considering in an earlier chapter she wrote from a first person perspective of a chicken, a chicken who is okay with being slaughtered, I might add. In her desire for a cosmopolitical moment, we are given to believe that the most important aspects of cosmopolitics is what occurs in the conversations of the professors and students at the dinner party where the roasted pig was served. Displaced at the very moment she insists that eating is centralized, is that eating itself is always a cosmopolitical moment. And while one may have a discussion that does not place one is a field of commitment, the act of eating always a partisan act. And if want to avoid the god-trick of transcendence, as see often argues, we have to understand that non-neutrality is the guarantee of non-transcendence. Only god gets to be neutral. The cosmopolitical moment does not occur when we set aside partisanship (and she so often seems to imply), but can only occur through partisanship. Lastly, the biopolitical movement by which we displace the singular animal for the animal-as-population has extreme importance for any possible cosmopolitics. It forfeits our ability to bring animals into this conversation. It forever exiles animals from agents in cosmopolitics, and rather rigs the game as a discussion among humans, while nearby the corpse of a being that should be central in this cosmopolitical discussion is slowly having its flesh burnt to (humanist) perfection(ism). What you chose to do in that moment matters. It isn't merely a random sentence in the a middle of a paragraph (she eats the flesh), but is the central premise by which the rest of the conversation can possibly occur. Any move that decentralizes your action is a biopolitical god-trick, no matter how many times you say it isn't.

Michael Pollan as early modern political philosopher

In Michael Pollan's "An Animal's Place" (an essay written for the NY Times Magazine, and in many ways the intellectual scaffolding for his best-selling The Omnivores Dilemma ), he advances a variety of arguments concerning the ethics of eating animals. The whole essay is very interesting, and I want to make a broader post about his work sometime later, but right now I want to focus simply on the following passage:

For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character -- its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle speaks of each creature's ''characteristic form of life.'' For domesticated species, the good life, if we can call it that, cannot be achieved apart from humans -- apart from our farms and, therefore, our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where animal rightists betray a profound ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of enslavement or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship, to project a human idea of power onto what is, in fact, an instance of mutualism between species. Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago.

Rather, domestication happened when a small handful of especially opportunistic species discovered through Darwinian trial and error that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection, in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk and eggs and -- yes -- their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the relationship: animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves (evolution tends to edit out unneeded traits), and the humans gave up their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled life of agriculturists. (Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as a tolerance for lactose as adults.)

From the animals' point of view, the bargain with humanity has been a great success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have languished. (There are 10,000 wolves in North America, 50,000,000 dogs.) Nor does their loss of autonomy seem to trouble these creatures. It is wrong, the rightists say, to treat animals as ''means'' rather than ''ends,'' yet the happiness of a working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving as a ''means.'' Liberation is the last thing such a creature wants. To say of one of Joel Salatin's caged chickens that ''the life of freedom is to be preferred'' betrays an ignorance about chicken preferences -- which on this farm are heavily focused on not getting their heads bitten off by weasels.

Now this is an extraordinary argument. Notice that not only does he claim to have access to the internal mind, hell, the essence of the animal, but he goes much further than just claiming he knows what is best. In accordance with the naturalism that pervades his entire argument, he makes the depoliticizing and deethical move of making the argument that all of this is "natural" and "evolutionary." Which, explicitly, means something that is "rather than political." This by itself would be problematic. And indeed, for now, let us also bracket his absurd and incorrect hypothesis on how evolution even works (though we will surely have to return to all of this). What I want to focus on is the rest of his description, his description of the moment of domestication (which is explicitly declared apolitical), which has a familiar form to readers of Hobbes, Locke, Kant, or Rousseau. His description follows the form of a state of nature story, of the compact/contract theory. The animals surrender some of their rights in exchange for the protections from the humans. It is a moment of declared 'mutualism,' of the creation of an 'alliance.' So this moment which is naturalized and depoliticized is also at the same time the most classical formulation of the political story. We are left then, with a very weird maneuvor. An apolitical political story. A contract that is never a contract but merely nature. Aristotilian ontology meets pseudo-evolutionary metaphysics (or maybe vice versa), the state of nature never disappears, the moment of artifice (and again, what else is domestication?) that defines the change from state of nature to civil society is repressed by Pollan. This is probably one of the scariest things about his pseudo-evolutionary metaphysics, the utter suppression of any political or ethical moment.
However, now might be the time to suspend that bracket before. His idea that "evolution tends to edit out unneeded traits" is an absurdity (at least through natural selection, and it has to be natural in order for this to be natural and not artifice, right?). Evolution maximizes positive traits, it just doesn't give a damn about useless traits (hello wisdom teeth). They are not selected for, but nor are they selected against. The domestication of animals almost certainly involved human intervention into evolution. Choosing to reproduce the animals that had the traits that made them the most domesticated while killing animals that continued to had wild traits. Pollan says that, "It is certainly not a regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago.," rather it is the opposite. Now, that doesn't mean you can't defend domestication, but rather the defense of domestication cannot exclude human (and even non-human) artifice. You cannot exclude the political and the ethical. Pollan's creation story becomes a totalitarian nightmare, which is where biologism so often ends up.