Ask the Critic: Going green, doing (and eating) good
I spent the weekend in Austin, much of it arguing the politics of food with very intelligent writers who fall everywhere along the eating spectrum -- from Jonathan Safran Foer, who is a born-again vegetarian, and James McWilliams, who also goes the green route, to Novella Carpenter, who raises and slaughters her own bunnies and turkeys for food, and Corby Kummer, who just plain knows more about food, the history of food, the making of food and writing about food than anyone else out there. 
I, of course, was the jerk on the panel who would gladly eat a plate of bacon that he found on the street, but all this talking about vegetarianism and cruelty-free animal practices and whether or not broccoli can scream got me thinking: Where can a person eat in this town and really, truly feel as though he's making a morally correct and ethically positive (or at least neutral) choice?
Honest to jesus, I don't know the answer to this one -- mostly because, until very recently, I just didn't care. I mean, I like to do good as much as the next guy. And like the next guy, I mostly like to do good provided that doing it doesn't take me too far out of my way or inconvenience me too terribly. I am, at heart, a lazy moralist. But when it comes to food? Well, now we're getting a bit more personal. Food is both my life and my business. It is the one thing I know better than anything else in the world.
But when it comes to making good choices -- eating well and eating decently, in a way that's not overtly cruel or stupid or wasteful and isn't deliberately damaging to the earth -- I am just as lost as everyone else because, as I have learned from talking to many people and reading many books and listening to many dire warnings of economic, social, environmental and spiritual collapse, there really is no one good answer. Can I eat all natural, grass-fed beef? Sure, provided I don't care that the phrase "all natural" has been rendered legally and semantically meaningless by the maneuverings of politicians and lawyers, or that the grass the grass-fed cows are eating has been fertilized in a way that's destroying the earth. Well, then, what about humanely-raised pigs? Absolutely, so long as I can square it with my delicate soul that no matter how "humanely" they lived, the pigs probably spent their lives in confinement, were fed inappropriate diets and, ultimately, the little bacon-factories were likely dispatched on a killing floor with little or no concern for their welfare at the ends of their lives.
So since I'm living in an Aurora townhouse with no room to raise my own pigs, cattle, fish and vegetables, am too busy/tired/lazy/irresponsible to find some land somewhere and go all back-to-nature as a subsistence farmer, and am not about to give up the joys and pleasures of pork belly, pho, tacos or sushi and go vegan this very moment, I'm essentially fucked. Every right answer, every right move, leads to another wrong one. Even vegetarianism comes complete with a minefield of ethical issues -- from localism and carbon footprints to GMO and food miles. Also, there's that whole NOT EATING MEAT thing, which is just right the fuck out.
Write Comment
Email to Friend
Print Article
