Serious Eats
Animal Rights Is Not the Same as Animal Welfare
Photographs by Robyn Lee
Kim Severson's piece on the mainstreaming of the animal rights movement and its effect on what we eat is as nuanced, balanced, and thoughtful an article as I have ever read on the subject. The bottom line is this: Consumers who can afford it want the animals their meat and dairy products come from to be raised responsibly with a minimum of suffering by farmers who care about both the animals they are raising and the land they are raising the animals on.
As Chicago-based chef Charlie Trotter said in the story, "Animal welfare has become more important because American gastronomic customers increasingly want to do right by the animals they eat."
That's good business and good eating. To the extent that the animal rights idealogues can and have helped us reach that goal these activists should be applauded. But the gap, the chasm, between animal rights zealots and caring carnivores (and the responsible farmers and ranchers raising our meat) remains very wide, indeed. Animal rights can sometimes be the province of thoughtless extremists; animal welfare is most often good for the soul and the stomach.
Now that I've gotten off my soapbox, read on for some of the story's best lines.
Severson on the beginning of an animal rights activist's career: "Back then, Mr. Baur was living in a school bus near a tofu factory in Pennsylvania and selling vegetarian hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts to support his animal rescue operation." Was the school bus a hybrid?
Bruce Friedrich, vice president of international grassroots campaigns for PETA: "When Cameron Diaz learns that pigs are smarter than 3-year-olds and she's like, 'Oh my God, I'm eating my niece,' that has an impact." And the pigs don't have the advantage of three days a week at pre-school.
Severson on the uneasy truce between animal rights groups and chefs: "Although animal rights groups might agree that farm animals need to be treated with more care, one side wants to put those animals on the grill and the other wants to simply hang out with them."
Glossy magazine VegNews printed a publisher's note taking the international gastronomic group Slow Food to task for not including more vegetarians. The story carried the headline "The Developmentally Disabled Food Movement" and called the organization's leaders "human-centric food snobs." What exactly is a "human-centric food snob"?