Farm to Fable: The Fictions of Our Animal-Consuming Culture
by Robert Grillo
Vegan Publishers (2016). $13.50 paperback; $5.99 eBook (PDF/epub/mobi formats)
Reviewed by Karen Davis, Ph.D.
Farm to Fable: The Fictions of Our Animal-Consuming Culture examines the foundations that support humanity’s systematic assault on the identities, bodies and feelings of animals in order to consume them. We may agree with the author, Robert Grillo, director of Free from Harm, that the majority of people are “in denial,” and that once the truth breaks through the barriers of denial, most people will see the animals for who they truly are and come to view meat, milk and eggs unfavorably. Suffused with the sense that “once I was blind, but now I see,” they will end their participation in the greatest invisible horror show on earth.
Robert Grillo with his dove Elba.
(Facebook photo)
“Consumers are complicit”
I say participation because animal product consumers are complicit, to varying degrees, in the manufacture of the “food fictions” Grillo analyzes. The consumer is not a blank slate on which the animal food production system imprints a false set of beliefs and practices. Taken together, the psychological, societal, cultural, historical, appetitive and commercial forces involved in animal product consumption form a constellation that can balk the animal advocate’s effort to break through with “why this issue matters to us and building a convincing case for why it should matter to others.”
As for the invisibility of the animals: here on the rural Eastern Shore of Virginia where I live, for example, you cannot not see the truckloads of chickens going up and down the roads to slaughter every day, but as one person told me after meeting a chicken rescued from the poultry industry at our sanctuary – a person who has her own pet chickens – you just accept, she said, that the chickens in the trucks are for food so you don’t think about them.
Karen Davis, PhD.
(Facebook photo)
Cinderella’s glass slipper
Throughout history there have been vegetarians and vegans, but we are at a point in Western culture where the entire enterprise of animal farming has begun to affect social consciousness as a problem. There is no way to fit the foot of Anastasia or Drizella into Cinderella’s glass slipper. No way to produce zillions of land and water animals annually for human consumption without the industrial model; no way to industrialize animals humanely or sustainably.
Some folks are starting to grasp this fact, and if it matters to them they will likely become vegetarians or vegans, or else they will look for ways to have it both ways by opting for green-washing, “the fiction that raising animals for food, even when compared to raising plants for food, can be done sustainably,” and humane-washing, “animal agriculture’s key strategy to intercept the conversation and deflect it away from veganism and retain consumers by using a sophisticated set of marketing fictions.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Greenwashing
Grillo in discussing green-washing and other fictions recounts the claims embedded in each and refutes them one by one. For example, there is not enough arable land and water on the planet to sustain the number of small farms and free-ranging animals that would have to exist in order to supply meat, milk and eggs to seven billion-plus human beings.
It isn’t only the Temple Grandin brand of humane factory-farming fiction, or the Michael Pollan brand of humane Do-It-Yourself fiction that Grillo deconstructs; conventional animal welfare societies contribute to the delusion that we can devour animals endlessly, abundantly, sustainably, and humanely without “factory farming,” a consummate falsehood.
Robert Grillo with chicken.
(Facebook photo)
Seductive advertising
Farm to Fable reaches beyond the fabrications of mainstream consumerism and seductive advertising to how movies and TV shows portray nonhuman animals and the characters’ attitudes toward them. As well, Grillo examines clichés that infiltrate the animal advocacy movement, undermining our confidence and identifying us with fictions we need to combat. We become neurotically fearful of being and appearing “too morally pure,” “too judgmental,” “too privileged,” “too emotional,” and other No No’s that distinguish the justice for animals movement, particularly for farmed animals, from other social justice movements.
For example, animal advocates have been criticized that our concern for animals is a privileged white people’s “first-world concern,” but as Grillo points out, “Many other social justice issues have their roots in the first world too, like justice for sweatshop laborers, battered women, and date rape victims; gay rights and gay marriage; hate crime; bullying; and equal pay for women. But notice how advocates for these causes are never criticized as ‘first world.’ On the contrary, they are often lauded for their brave work to expose and fight against these injustices.”
Rosa, Robert Grillo’s chicken.
(Facebook photo)
“Leveraging Truth to Fight Fictions”
Farm to Fable concludes with a chapter on “Leveraging Truth to Fight Fictions.” I believe every animal advocate can benefit from this chapter. If you are a passionate advocate who winces when a colleague challenges: “Do you want results or do you want to be right?” this book is for you and for all of us. We may disagree with some of Robert Grillo’s views, but we need to be conscious of our reasons for what we think and do in order to act constructively for animals, whose only hope of relief from us as a species is with those of us who are fighting for them.
A question I have is whether we can realistically lump together farmers who raise and slaughter animals, and have done so for generations, with consumers who know farmed animals only as pieces of meat along with people who were once vegetarians or were not experienced in killing, but are now enthusiastic Do-It-Yourself slaughterers. Can we really lump together the majority of consumers of animal products as being “in denial”? This seems to me to be a handy but not very helpful explanation of what animals are up against, being too broad, basic and abstract to make sense of it all. — Karen Davis, President, United Poultry Concerns
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Karen Davis speaking at AR 2015 conference. (UPC photo)
Karen Davis, PhD. is president and founder of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization that promotes the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. Her books include Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry; More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality; and The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities.
Beth & Merritt Clifton
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Concerning what Karen Davis calls the “Temple Grandin brand of humane factory-farming fiction,” I believe Temple Grandin’s actual accomplishments as a student of animal behavior and designer of slaughterhouses and other livestock handling systems must be separated from the propagandistic purposes for which her work has been used. Even if Grandin’s improvements spare each animal sent to slaughter only a few minutes or even seconds of pain and terror, so many animals are slaughtered that those moments add up to tens of thousands of lifetimes over the course of a year, and millions over Grandin’s decades of work. This is no small contribution to reducing animal suffering. But neither does it add up in any way to an argument in favor of continuing to kill and eat animals. To reduce the suffering of each animal slaughtered is good, yet in no way offsets or rationalizes the suffering involved in the rest of that animal’s short, miserable life on a factory farm, in transit, etc.
Bashing Temple Grandin has become fashionable among many of the most militant and self-righteous vegans, but strikes me as being a lot like bashing Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), whose husband was Sidney Herbert (1810-1861), the two-time British Secretary of War, because in reducing the suffering of wounded soldiers, Nightingale did not accomplish much toward ending war, and in instituting many sanitary reforms of battlefield hospitals, significantly improved the efficacy of the British military.
I share Karen Davis’ skepticism of the notion that all meat-eaters, or even more than a small percentage of them, can be truly said to be “in denial” that meat comes from sentient beings. Indeed, I believe “denial” is a large factor in why most people eat animals, but the denial I see as most prevalent and most harmful is denial that the choice to eat animals is of moral consequence.
Again, an analogy to warfare comes to mind. Regardless of what “dehumanizing” terms one uses to describe the enemy, every soldier who wields a weapon, aware that the enemy may be fighting back with intelligence and skill, is thereby acutely conscious of the enemy’s sentience and likeness to himself, and of course of the enemy’s capacity for suffering. The question in that circumstance is not “Do they suffer,” but rather, “Does their suffering matter? Do I give a damn? Does something larger than just the realities of this confrontation, which may be kill-or-be-killed, entitle me to kill without consequence to myself?”
Feeling that animal suffering is not of personal moral consequence allows a person not only to eat animals, but to ignore the suffering even when seeing it and aware of it. In this regard, it is useful to understand that for most people throughout history, and for many people even today, witnessing slaughter is routine. Poultry are killed in kitchens, larger animals at curbside. Only those affluent enough to never enter a kitchen and never walk on a public sidewalk escape seeing it.
Finally, the argument that “our concern for animals is a privileged white people’s ‘first-world concern'” is just plain silly in view that traditions of vegetarianism, veganism, and concern for animal suffering originated first and have persisted longest in some of the least privileged cultures: for example, not only among the educated elites of India and China, but also among many of their rural poor.
And, in the end, it is the poor of the world who suffer most when the privileged elites of any color disproportionately consume resources to feed themselves meat, at cost in grain production, soil depletion, and water use which ensures that millions go hungry.
Thank you for your tireless work. And FYI, Robert’s bird Elba is a King pigeon, not a dove.
Anyone wishing for MY assessment of Temple Grandin (whom I know personally as well as from hearing her speak at conferences and reading her stuff), please read my review of her book Animals in Translation, including my discussion of her support for farmers sexually assaulting pigs (and presumably all farmed animals) for business purposes.
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior”
http://www.upc-online.org/Fall05/grandin.html
Thank you for publishing my Review of Farm to Fable. I encourage people to read it!
Karen Davis, President
United Poultry Concerns
Choose compassion. Choose vegan.
In the above comment, the phrase “sexually assaulting pigs” is to be understood as a metaphor for artificial insemination, described by Temple Grandin in a section of Animals in Translation called “How to Make a Pig Fall in Love,” not as a libelous allegation that Grandin favors bestiality.
Two things particularly concern and/or interest me at this point in time: Firstly, with all the genetic modification of all kinds of food in this time, we read frequently that supposedly “safe” vegan or vegetarian items may, or DO, contain non-vegan/vegetarian elements. Recently I read of vegetarian hot dogs containing human DNA. Your thoughts on this?
The other thing is something that may be a game-changer for not only those with ethical concerns, but also the rest of the world: the ability to grow “meat” without impacting any animals at all. It’s been stated that it is not practical at this point to mass-produce this, as it is only in the early stages of being produced in the lab. Your thoughts?
“Human DNA” can contaminate vegan hot dogs or just about any other product from incidental flakes of dandruff, wisps of hair, and droplets of sweat, spittle, or mucous, even after cooking at temperatures hot enough to kill any known pathogen. Obviously food product manufacturers strive mightily to keep contaminants out of their wares, since nothing kills sales and even entire industries faster than an association with a disgusting or disease-spreading contaminant, however accidental and incidental. Equally obviously, contaminants found in minute amounts in under 2% of something, as was the case in the October 2015 scare about “human DNA” turning up in one tester’s samples of vegan hot dogs, scarcely makes an argument that the product is not “vegan,” or is, as some alleged, actually “cannibalistic” in essence.
Concerning the prognosis for “cultured meat,” see Smart money bets on bio-cultured meat.
Three years ago I was a meat-eater. I had not been persuaded by aggressive use of graphic images from undercover video, and found many of the people within the animal rights and vegan cause judgmental, exuding an attitude of being holier than thou. I was completely turned off by their message and their methods. It was meeting Merritt three years ago, who did not judge me because I had previously had meat in my diet, or because I was a former owner of a dangerous dog, that caused me to change my dietary choices. I listened and learned from Merritt and connected the dots and chose to eat a vegetarian diet, gradually becoming repulsed by the thought of eating meat, but without harshly judging those who still do. Merritt did not make me feel ostracized because I had meat in my diet for most of my life, is proud of me, enjoys my cooking, and enjoys sharing my contributions to our local vegan potlucks. I thank my husband for this and for the compassion he has shown me.
So you still choose to needlessly exploit (inflict suffering and death on) innocent animals when you could easily choose not to? You’re still consuming their parts and secretions? Still funding the industries that hurt them?
Why choose that when you could choose to do less harm? It’s no sacrifice for us, but it’s their lives.
Please do what you know is right. There’s nothing and nobody forcing you to continue to choose to harm animals.
Coming after my wife Beth after she had explained how she gave up eating meat when we met in early 2014, and went on from there to become an excellent vegan cook, the above anonymous comment is so misplaced and misdirected, and exudes so much self-righteous hostility, that I nearly deleted it out-of-hand as very likely being some animal industry double agent’s attempt to pick a fight. Then, despite the author’s attempt to hide, we traced her identity, and realized that this is actually a chance to share some of the insights that have made our friends Jack Norris and Matt Ball two of the most successful evangelists for veganism ever, while many others do not even managed to preach successfully to the choir.
“Being vegan means one thing to me: an attempt to reduce the intense suffering of nonhuman animals,” Vegan Outreach cofounder and president Jack Norris explains at every appropriate opportunity. “It is not about personal purity, but rather reducing suffering.”
Adds Ball, another Vegan Outreach cofounder, who went on to become senior advisor for VegFund, co-founder and President of One Step for Animals, and director of engagement and outreach at Farm Sanctuary: “A friend of mine (and long-time vegan) once wrote to a member of the vegan police: ‘I grow weary of the term vegan. It seems to become just a label for moral superiority.'”
If a prominent animal advocate “were to eat a dish that contains hidden dairy,” or if a sanctuarian eats eggs laid by the hens she has rescued, Ball asked, “should our limited time and resources go to judging and labeling them?”
The whole of the Vegan Outreach, VegFund, and One Step for Animals programs, and most of the work of Farm Sanctuary, involve introducing more people to veganism, beginning by gently persuading them––mostly through positive example––to eat less meat or none. They don’t try to do this through a baptism of blaming and shaming, because they know through long experience that this approach is not only ineffective, but usually backfires.
“Few people have any interest in engaging a religious zealot bent on converting them,” Ball wrote. “Similarly, when animal rights advocates give the impression that they are trying to convert people, people resist the message. In general, people do not want to believe that they are supporting cruelty by eating animal products. They don’t want to give up convenience and their favorite foods, and they don’t want to separate themselves from their friends and family. So it is unlikely that people will even listen to our message––let alone think about changing–if they perceive vegans as joyless misanthropes.
“There often appears to be a contest among vegans for discovering new connections to animal exploitation,” Ball continued. “Of course links can be found everywhere if one looks hard enough. This attitude makes us appear fanatical and gives many people an excuse to ignore our message. It is imperative for us to realize that if our veganism is a statement for animal liberation,” Ball emphasized, “veganism cannot be an exclusive, ego-boosting club. Rather, we must become the mainstream. Fostering the impression that ‘it’s so hard to be vegan–animal products are in everything,’ and emphasizing [the presence of] animal products where the connection to animal suffering is tenuous, works against this by allowing most to ignore us and causing others to give up the whole process [of becoming vegan] out of frustration.”
Thank you, Karen Davis, for a first-rate, thoughtful review! Here is a link to my own review of Robert Grillo’s Farm to Fable: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3D4fegnMpTTcWZfRm1zUWlsSDA/view?usp=sharing. There are questions raised in my piece not raised by Karen Davis.
One factor that is helpful in avoiding judgementalism of those who still eat flesh is to distinguish between cultural evils and deliberate evils (or “original sin” and “actual sin”). Seen in this context, the difference isn’t hard to perceive–people are born into a culture pervaded by certain social evils–xenophobia, racism, sexism, speciesism; they come to consciousness participating in these evils without really perceiving them. I call such folk “quasi-innocent.” But when the harmfulness of the cultural evil is shown to them, especially by others whom they would ordinarily respect or even be bonded to, their responsibility for continuing to participate increases. It may still take some time for individual persons to make the brave decision to take a stand against the evil; it certain did for me. The more respect and compassion those of us who are aware of the evil show to them, the sooner they are likely to hear and heed. I find very helpful Carol J. Adams’ insight that those who resist are “blocked vegetarians.” (in Living Among Meat Eaters). That way of seeing them is inherently affirmative and hopeful, as well as practical.
One of the basic facts of life is that the majority of the world’s population likes to eat meat. This will not change any time soon, if ever. Livestock and poultry have become big business and business often means making maximum profit with no regard to the animals or birds concerned. This is where the abuse comes in. As the world’s population grows it will become more of a problem. There will always have to be compromise, but the bottom line is that animals should not have to suffer and should be able to indulge to a certain extent in their natural behaviour patterns, As far as humane slaughter is concerned, the knowledge is there, the means is there, but the problems is trying to get people to care enough to implement it. The relatively small number of animal activists worldwide will not be able to change things too much. It will have to be on a Government level through legislation. It will be a hard task but we must work on getting public opinion on our side. And never give up.
In view that more than half of the populations of the world’s two most populous nations (India and China) have eaten little or no meat for most of their respective histories, and that much of the rest of the world’s population have rarely eaten meat more than once or twice a week, it is anything but a “basic fact of life that the majority of the world’s population likes to eat meat.” Eating meat is a preference in which much of the world’s population engages, but many others do not; and as with any other preference, it is subject to change as result of cultural, ecological, economic, and technological influences.
It is not true that animals can be slaughtered humanely. There is no humane way to stick a knife into a creature’s throat – which in chickens and other animals is as full of pain receptors and other types of nerve endings as ours. Human beings do not ask to be “euthanized” (mercifully killed) by having their throats cut. They do not ask to be put out of their misery by being stuffed into a carbon dioxide or decompression chamber. There’s a reason for that! Furthermore, it is NOT POSSIBLE to Mass-Produce animals humanely. I cannot understand how people can believe otherwise, except that they are not informed about the details of converting living creatures into products. This includes not only the technical procedures involved, but also the psychology of the employees who handle the animals from birth through death. A culture of violence does not foster “humane treatment.” Every undercover investigation into every phase of farmed animal production demonstrates the inherent cruelty of the systems, to which the personal cruelty of the employees toward the animals must be added. Farmed animals will never be a priority for any government except as a business to be protected and advanced. As long as individuals contribute their own eating and buying behavior to the mass market, and business is profitable, there will not be any industry incentive to change. If people who care about animals won’t change their own consumer behavior, why should thriving businesses that don’t care about animals or “humane” treatment change theirs?