Of Calves and Carnivores

Though I’ve been a meat eater most of my life, I’ve always been squeamish about meat preparation. I prefer not to touch bacon until it’s been burned to a crisp. Thanksgiving morning finds me shaking a thirty-pound bird over the sink so I don’t have to stick my hand in the carcass and pull out the nasty bits. I prefer cuts of meat that have been euphemized so that I don’t have to consider where they came from—chicken tenders sound tastier than breasts, chicken drummies more desirable than thighs. While Andrew Zimmern travels the globe partaking of delicacies derived from brains and tongue, I would drive many miles out of my way not to.

So I have to say I was out of my comfort zone when a calf wrapped its tongue around my wrist and up my forearm.

“These guys are very interested in the world—they like to check out everything,” my host, Catherine Friend, says about the four Jersey–Holstein–mix calves that seem intent on joining us for a nature walk on her farm in the Zumbro River valley, about an hour southeast of the Twin Cities. The calves are three months old, and their heads reach only to my hip. They’re the same height as my four-year-old, who’s the reason I’m here in the first place.

A few weeks before the visit, this particular son surprised me by asking where hamburgers come from. When I told him, he wasn’t just appalled—he refused to believe it. “No way!” he said. It’s true, I told him, adding that milk, cheese, butter, bologna, and those frozen Ikea meatballs he likes are among the foods that come from that single four-legged source. “You mean McDonald’s?” he said, not able to comprehend the terrible truth.

He’s hardly alone in his blissful ignorance about the food that’s on our table. “It took me years, and a farm, to finally link a livestock animal’s life with my own,” says Friend, the author of several books for children and adults. In her latest book, The Compassionate Carnivore, she argues that pasture walks such as the one we’re on now would be an excellent way to promote health—both for humans and the animals who give their lives for our dining pleasure.

An unabashed animal lover, Friend is also an unapologetic animal eater who admits to having survived graduate school on a steady diet of fried SPAM. She is also a “sustainable farmer” who, along with her partner, is responsible for the care and feeding of the thirty-five ewes and more than seventy spring lambs gamboling in a lovely grove of box elder trees nearby. In spite of her obvious affection for the sheep—she calls out their assigned numbers as if they are first names and compares the animals’ sturdy shoulders to those of “little football players’’—later this year, when they reach their full weight of about 120 pounds, she fully intends to send them to the slaughterhouse. “This is what we do for a living,” she explains. “We’re shepherds.”

The subtitle of her new book—How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat—seems intended to reassure rather than enrage the estimated 93 to 98 percent of Americans who make meat a regular part of their diet. Americans eat more meat than anybody on earth, packing away approximately 200 pounds per person in 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which forecasts that we’ll add another 20 pounds of it annually by 2016.

The vast majority of the animals that come to our table are raised on large-scale factory operations and are not afforded the same creature comforts you’ll find at Friend’s farm, where about four dozen chickens wander freely, snacking on bugs and dozing in the sun. Ninety-eight percent of the eggs we eat come from chickens crammed several to a small cage, while 95 percent of the hogs raised in this country spend their entire life cycle indoors, according to the USDA.

In addition to ethical concerns about raising animals this way, the health and environmental consequences of factory farming are beginning to make even the most dedicated meat eaters a little queasy. What does it mean to our own health when, as the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States are used to treat healthy livestock? What do we make of the 2006 United Nations report revealing that our growing appetite for meat is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions? And just how mad are those mad cows anyway?