Don't Give a Cow

Over the years, I have experienced much frustration and sadness over the growth in popularity of nonprofit organizations that send live animals to impoverished countries all around the world. This growing phenomenon is headed by the high-profile Heifer Project International, which – I believe – is doing a great disservice to the people it wishes to help, to the environment, to the public who is persuaded and mislead by celebrity sponsors, to the children who are desensitized to animal suffering, and to the animals themselves. Heifer Project is so successful at making people think they’re actually helping animals that I know of several animal activists whose family members donated to Heifer on their behalf, thinking they were doing something for animals. They thought, because these activists “loved animals” they would appreciate having a goat bought in their name and sent to a needy family somewhere around the world. Luckily, that hasn’t happened to me, but for awhile I was receiving their “catalog” – this is actually a full-color, very well-produced “catalog” of animals and children. You choose an animal – a goat, a llama, a cow, a chicken - or what they call an entire “ark” of animals and your donation is translated into live animals being transported to a family to be used. This, in my opinion, essentially amounts to nothing more than a slave trade – an animal slave trade.

Now, let me just say that I’m often perplexed by the claim that animal advocates are anti-human. You’ve probably heard that before or maybe you’ve made that claim yourself. What perplexes me about that accusation is that it implies that compassion for one species means lack of compassion for another; as if our capacity for mercy and kindness is limited. When we deem certain human groups unequal, we call it racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism. When we make this claim about non-human animals, we justify it – their inequality, that is – on the grounds of tradition, science, or religion. But there is a name for this – it’s called speciesism. The claim – that animal advocates are anti-human – seems really odd to me because though we are reminded every day that humans steal, lie, cheat, kill, rape, and hurt each other, I’ve never heard any of these people called “anti-human.” It seems to me that the accusation would better suit someone who actually acts against humans, which is something we see and hear about every day in the news, on the street, and in our own homes. Ironically, those who commit the worst crimes against humans are derisively called “animals.”

This societal premise leaves animal advocates reluctant to publicly object to such groups as Heifer Project International, lest they be accused of caring more about humans than animals. Heifer’s mission is “to end hunger and poverty and to care for the earth.” Their mission statement does not say that they give animals to people around the globe to use, breed, sell, and consume their milk, eggs, flesh, hair, fur, feathers, and skin. Instead, Heifer, whose $75 million revenue increases every holiday season, dupes individuals and seemingly progressive celebrities, such as Susan Sarandon, Frances Moore Lappe, and Jimmy Carter, into supporting what is essentially an animal slave trade.

Aside from the obvious problems this model creates: such as environmental problems economic problems, (raising animals for human consumption is expensive and inefficient) health problems (globalizing our preventable diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes hardly seems charitable; and despite the fact that two-thirds of non-Caucasians on the planet are lactose intolerant and cannot digest dairy, Heifer is spending millions on dairy programs in countries like Zimbabwe. The last thing a hungry child in Africa needs is the milk of a cow. Aside from these problems, and I’m skimming over only a few, Heifer perpetuates a speciesist paradigm, viewing animals as mere commodities with no regard for their own inherent value.

Heifer says “sharing the offspring of gift animals with others in need” is “fundamental” to its approach; however, a mother’s relationship with her offspring is sacred and not unique to humans—we even call ourselves “mother hens” when we fuss over our own children. We admire the fierceness with which a mother bear protects her cubs. Manipulating a female’s reproductive cycle is offensive enough (as with egg-laying hens and lactating cows), but to take away her offspring is – to my mind – the ultimate blow.

If you’ve never seen their catalog, it’s absolutely amazing. It reminds me of those depictions of happy slaves smiling and laughing while working in the fields, depictions designed to shape public opinion and squelch any potential uprising among the slaves themselves. The Heifer Project’s glossy “catalog,” sent to millions of homes every year for “holiday shopping,” egregiously exploits children’s affection for animals and manipulates our own sensibilities, as they depict beautiful gorgeous children hugging these animals. And if you look at this catalog, you’ll notice that they’re all babies. These are gorgeous photos – with smiling celebrities proudly hugging beautiful animals – these animals are all babies, an egregious manipulation of our own appreciation for life, our appreciation of youth, our enthusiasm for babies – all babies. Everyone goes crazy when they see a baby chick or a baby goat – for god’s sake, they’re perfect.

But this carefully crafted public relations campaign succeeds in helping us forget that these catalog “products” are living, feeling beings who will be used up and killed. Sure, they say that this animal or that animal is valuable for “meat.,” so it’s not like people aren’t aware of that, but as with any effective marketing campaign, the real truth is concealed. There are no pictures of slaughter, or of females yearning for their young, or of the animals’ living conditions. It’s not just Heifer; they lead the pack, but there are other nonprofit organizations that also solicit donations to send animals to people all around the world, including Oxfam, Send a Cow, and Christian Aid. Now, this isn’t an all or nothing situation. I’m not suggesting we don’t help the hungry; what I’m suggesting is to do it in such a way that benefits EVERYONE and that doesn’t exploit ANYONE.

There are many other programs dedicated to providing solutions to hunger without exploiting animals. Trees for Life (treesforlife.org) and the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation (http://www.ftpf.org/) enable you to buy a fruit tree in someone’s name, providing a food source to communities in developing countries. Every time you buy a gift from the Women’s Bean Project (womensbeanproject.org), you help a woman break the cycle of poverty and unemployment by supporting their programs that provide skills and training to women. One of Plenty International’s (plenty.org) programs includes training villages in soy bean agriculture and production as a way to improve nutrition, soil quality, and food security. Through Sustainable Harvest International, whose website is http://www.sustainableharvest.org/, you can contribute to planting trees in Central America, which has lost more than half of its rainforests in the last 50 years, and of course we know that much of this occurs to provide grazing land for cattle, who will be slaughtered and exported, so that Americans can have cheap meat. Finally, Animal Aid, a UK charity, http://www.animalaid.org.uk/, is supporting a tree-planting initiative in Kenya, which will provide fruit-bearing trees for local families. The aim is to help 100 families to plant 20 trees each, which will bear oranges, avocados, mangoes, and macadamia nuts, with a few additional trees for timber and firewood.

If we claim to be a compassionate society—a compassionate species—don’t we have a duty to foster solutions that do not harm others? The great humanitarian Albert Schweitzer certainly thought so when he wrote, “The thinking [person] must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.”

Eating Animals

To the animals, it’s all the same. They want to live. If they have wings, they want to fly. If they have legs, they want to walk. If they have voices, they want to communicate. If they have offspring, they want to mother them. To humans who perceive animals as inferior, their lives are here for us to end, their wings and legs are ours to eat, their voices are ours to silence or ignore, and their reproductive cycles are ours to manipulate and use. It’s not the animals but our perception of the animals that enables us to do all sorts of horrific things to them. As with any kind of prejudice, first you have to lower the societal status of the group or individual before you can actually oppress them, and we do this with animals across the board: in the language we use that denigrates them (calling people pigs, calling animals dirty), in the rights and natural behaviors we deny them, in the place we’ve carved out for them in society, making them tools for research, clowns for our enjoyment, delicacies for our palates, and victims of our desires. This dynamic is so ingrained. We learn it at such a young age, and we’re considered quite radical if we question it at all. And we think all the world thinks and acts as we do.

We never stop to consider that our perceptions and treatment of non-human animals is culturally based. Period. Our cultural and personal and familial habits inform so much of what we do on a daily basis. It’s why any talk of the "necessity" of eating animal flesh is balderdash. It has nothing to do with our biologic makeup and everything to do with our cultural foundation, taste habits, and, frankly, our arrogance, the arrogance of the human species. But let's talk about cultural habits for now.

As westerners, most of us were raised eating the dismembered and scorched bodies – otherwise known as meat – of pigs, cows, calves, chickens, fishes, ducks, lambs, and turkeys. Despite the fact that these animals suffered and were killed to satisfy our appetites, many of us draw an arbitrary line and turn our noses up at the people who eat other animals that may not have been on our own dinner plates: animals such as deer, rabbit, or buffalo. People get upset at the thought of eating precious bunny rabbits, as they munch on the leg of what was once a precious calf or baby chick. With even greater indignance we’re shocked at the (also western) cultures who eat horses and goats, and our stomachs turn at the idea of eating frog’s legs, chicken’s feet, cow’s tongues, and monkey’s brains. And with what can be characterized as approval of our own speciesism, we scorn those who eat cats and dogs.

“Can you believe that?” Some people have said to me. “That’s just so upsetting – cats and dogs? I mean really!.” Is something I often hear. And I attempt to mirror the hypocrisy of their remark by saying: “You know what I heard? I heard people eat the shoulders of pigs and the wings of birds! Can you believe that?” OK it doesn’t have the same shock value, but it would if that person lived in a place where that was unheard of. In the workshops I teach, do an exercise that works quite effectively to get this across. I give the group a handout that talks about the growing number of farms raising dogs for their milk, about how this is a growing trend that’s popular in different parts of the world. People get outraged. They get really upset to hear about the female dogs in confinement, chained up, made and kept pregnant so they will keep lactating, taking away the babies so humans can have the dogs’ milk, etc. After everyone records their reactions, I reveal that the article was really about goat’s milk before I replaced all the references to goats with the word “dog.” It’s at that moment that everyone feels the impact of their reactions. They begin to question why they reacted so strongly when they thought it was about dogs and that they don’t think twice about drinking cow’s milk (and now goat’s milk and sheep’s milk, which are being touted as necessary health food for humans). It’s a powerful exercise, and it’s hard to do, because it’s so hard to look at the world through a different lens. But it’s what we need to do to see the absurdity of our choices.

In writing these podcasts and the essays for my newsletter (also called Food for Thought, which you can subscribe to at compassionatecooks.com), it’s always a struggle finding the words and the photos that will be effective enough without turning people off. The photos of dogs and cats raised for their flesh in parts of Asia (particularly Korea and China) are so horrific for people, because they’ve never seen dogs and cats in such gruesome circumstances. It’s the way most of us react when we first see the animals we kill and eat in this country, but it’s a little more upsetting I think, because most people haven’t had personal relationships with pigs, cattle, chickens, turkeys, etc. I can understand having a strong reaction. I really can. But I also think it’s important we recognize that the deep roots of our desensitization enable us to allow animals here to be imprisoned, confined, denied, abused, and tortured so that we can satisfy a palate preference, whether that preference is for the legs and wings of chickens, the backsides of pigs, or the sides of cows. – it comes down to the cultural habit that has been ingrained in us. The dogs and cats, the goats and horses – they’re all cultural habits of other countries. Just as some cultures or religions choose vegetarian – it’s all cultural. It has nothing to do with biology. If we can remember that, perhaps we wouldn’t be so quick to judge other cultures but would instead rise up to oppose what we do in our own.

On the other hand, I don’t believe culture, tradition, or religion are adequate excuses for cruelty. Dr. Albert Schweitzer, the great humanitarian wrote, “The thinking [person] must oppose all cruel customs no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another.” I couldn’t agree more or have said it more eloquently. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should. Just because we’ve always done something doesn’t mean it’s the best thing or the right thing to do. And when we know better, we can choose better.

To the animals, it’s all the same. Whether they meow, snort, bark, winny, moo, quack, gobble, hop, fly, swim, or run, they all feel pain, loss, and fear. A Korean dog wants to live and resists death as much as an American duck. To the animals kept and killed for human pleasure, it’s all the same.— the loneliness, the pain, the screams, the darkness, the torment, the fear, the cold, the heat, the untreated illnesses, the longing, the frustration, the boredom, the desire to flee, the desire to live. When we can recognize that we share all of this with non-human animals, perhaps we’d reconsider the choices we make on a daily basis. Consider this – they’re all habits, and habits were meant to be broken. It takes three weeks to break old and form new habits. There’s no reason – only excuses – not to at least try.

Join the Rhetoric Revolution!

Honestly, I don't support censorship, but there are simply some words that you will never hear me use and that I won't allow in my classes. At the slightest utterance, many a student has had gold stars ripped from their lapels, while the remaining impression of the star-shaped glue signifies their fall from their teacher's good graces. These are words that make vegetarian options seem déclassé, that make meat and dairy products seem normal, and that cause even the most open-minded of citizens to cast derisive looks in the direction of certain "vegetarian" foods.When properly used, they cause no real harm, but when paired in certain phrases, their meaning becomes downright destructive. I'm calling for no mere boycott of these seemingly innocent words, dear reader. What I am calling for is really a Revolution. A Rhetoric Revolution. All I ask is that you lay down your meatdairyeggocentric language and pick up instead one that celebrates rather than denigrates our many veg choices.

So what are these words that have inspired such a radical call to action? The culprits are none other than fake, mock, imitation, and substitute. Some mildly less offensive albeit not altogether appetizing-sounding variations include "analog," "alternative," and "replacement" Join us on our quest to help families, friends, and neighbors embrace our veggie ways by eschewing that derogatory diction and choosing instead a more pleasurable prose.

Instead of "fake milk," "cheese substitute," "imitation butter,"or "fake ice cream," try non-dairy OR dairy-free milk/cheese/butter/ice cream OR call them by what food/ingredients they're based on: Remember hearing about the dairy industry suing soy milk companies on the basis that nobody else should be able to use the word "milk"? You may remember seeing "soy beverage" used more often for awhile. Well, the dairy industry does not own the word, and thought I refer to cow's milk, goat's milk, sheep's milk, hyena milk, lion's milk, and all other mammary lactation fluids as such, I also use that moniker for soy, oat, almond, hazelnut, rice, nut, and coconut milk/ice cream/cheese/butter. I don't even like calling non-dairy butters such as Earth Balance "margarines," because that means something very specific.

Instead of "mock meat" or "fake sausage/ (insert any meat here)," try meatless, vegetarian/vegan, plant-based OR call them by what they're based on: soy, wheat, nut, vegetable/veggie, etc. When referring to burgers or sandwich slices, etc., I refer to them by what they are. They're not "fake" or "imitation" - they're made from real food that has a name.Instead of "egg substitute," try eggless or egg-free. And keep in mind that products such as Egg Beaters contain eggs. If you are looking for reactions in baked goods similar to what chicken's eggs provide, try Ener-G Egg Replacer. (Sometimes you don't even need to replace eggs at all and can eliminate them all together, but that's another essay.)

You get the idea by now, and perhaps you're ready to join me! And just remember, make WHOLE FOODS the foundation of your diet. Meatless meats (the word "meat" comes from Old English mete, and originally referred to to food, distinguising it from drink) provide tasty options, but they are indeed processed foods. It doesn't mean you have to shun them completely; it just means they're meant to be convenience foods - not the staple of your diet. Same goes for any processed food.

Keep it positive. Keep it true. And if you want to keep your gold star, you know what to do. :)