Turkey Day

A piece in the Atlantic, “Heritage Turkeys: Worth the Cost?”, recently raised the following question: why pay $7 a pound or more for a naturally raised heritage turkey, when supermarkets offer commodity turkeys for $1.50 a pound? Although much of the article reads as a PR release about how great their old-school methods of turkey-raising are, there was one passage that caught my attention:

“First, in many ways the commodity turkey is artificially cheap. In the immediate sense, industrial methods do lower production costs. These include intensive crowding in metal confinement buildings; minimal human care, made possible by total confinement and mechanized feed and water systems; and reliance on cheap feeds (often including slaughterhouse wastes and a panoply of pharmaceuticals). Government subsidies and lax enforcement of environmental laws also enable (and cheapen) industrial food production. The result of this system is water, air, and soil polluted by agricultural waste; meat with high levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria; and animal suffering on an unprecedented scale. Although these costs don't show up on our grocery receipts, they are real and, ultimately, we all pay them.”

That last sentence pretty much sums it up: the real costs of cheap turkey (and the same goes for other meats and dairy) aren’t paid at the cash register. These costs are paid in a variety of ways, and by a variety of people. Yes, the people who buy this meat pay some of the costs: they’re eating turkey that has been pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, and the phrase ‘you are what you eat’ goes for turkeys as well as people. Aside from the health costs associated with ingesting these chemicals are the risks related to consuming meat that comes from animals living in extremely poor living conditions: They’re given their drug cocktails to combat the effects of being packed together, unable to move and standing around in their own waste. Giving them large doses of antibiotics may take care of most of the bacteria, but this only clears the way for more drug-resistant strains. Yum.

Aside from the hidden costs to those who are actually buying the meat are the costs that are externalized. These are the costs that other people are forced to pay by virtue of the fact that this meat is being produced. Some of these costs are fairly direct (e.g., tax dollars going toward government subsidies for cheap-meat production), while others are more roundabout. Industrially raised pigs may be the worst of the meats, notorious for the toxic pig-manure lagoons that they produce. Animal feces loaded with chemicals and bacteria is shoveled out the door into nature, where it wreaks havoc on local ecosystems. This waste is beyond the scale that natural systems can cope with, and we all end up living in a degraded environment, or paying to clean it up, as a result.

That’s my rant on meat, so what’s the solution? Well, there are two options. The first is to stop eating it. I know, everybody says, “But I love it too much.” That reason doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, does it? If I really love pushing little kids, it doesn’t make it ok for me to do—I have to balance my desires with the harm that I inflict on others. I don’t eat meat, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes crave it. In particular, I love lamb: delicious, delicious baby sheep… But before I start drooling, this brings me to option number two: only buy meat and dairy that are ethically sourced (or more ethically sourced than alternatives), and eat less of them. If you “have to” have meat, do your best to make sure you’re inflicting as few externalized costs on other people as possible when you enjoy it. This is the track that I go with dairy. I tried going vegan for a while, but it took an unsustainable amount of effort, and I wasn’t successful in making sure that I got enough protein and other nutrients (it is possible to go vegan and be healthy, but I couldn’t hack it—props to people who do). I now eat a limited amount of dairy that comes from an organic farm. When I’m out, I eat at places that I know use organic dairy when I have that option. I could ride a hard line and only eat organic dairy when I’m out, as well, but I haven’t made that step yet. In our diets, as in life, there’s always room for improvement.

Like many actions we take daily, eating meat and dairy has costs—both for ourselves and for others—that we don’t see on our price tags. Thinking about what these costs are is something that I try to do regularly, and I’d encourage everyone out there to do the same. I started this post talking about turkeys, but even if it’s too late for you to change your Thanksgiving plans, at least give some thought to the food you’ll be eating in the new year.