Timothy Stoner

FOOD, INC.

Posted on 16. Sep, 2009 by Tim Stoner in Blog, Movie Recommendations, Tim Recommends, art

I was recently deeply bothered by some images of animals to which I usually don’t have much emotional attachment: chickens and a large, black steer. The movie was the documentary, Food, Inc. The distressing bird footage was taken inside a chicken “run” where several thousand chickens were mashed against each other wing to wing. It is a “run” in name only for, like the halls of elementary school, there is no running allowed. And in this case, it is impossible.

The birds have morphed from chicks to hefty broilers in under three months without ever stepping into the sunlight or tasting the real food that God deposited for them in the soil. On a scientific diet intended for maximum weight in minimum time, as they grow their movements become more restricted. The coop is designed for efficiency, not for exercise. At the end of the growth cycle, the chickens have just barely enough room to turn around. Acceptable losses are factored in.

Every morning, scattered about the frenetic mass of white feathers and nodding heads and beaks are the carcasses of their over-stressed mates whose legs just could not hold up any longer under the weight of their super-plump frames. They are designed for size but their skeletal system just can’t keep up. So, they die by the hundreds.  But most survive, and this is acceptable, though hard on the farmer who must begin her day hauling out trampled chickens in both hands and throwing them into the compost pile. It’s no picnic for the survivors either. In the documentary, the farmer choked up when she described the difference between farming then and farming now. The demands by the fast-food giants had robbed her of joy in her work and made her, unaccountably, ashamed. You can see it in her eyes.

But it is the image of the steer that I just can’t shake. It is on its knees, crippled, trying its best to shuffle down the plank to the slaughter house. It is a large animal that has spent its whole life in a feed lot, standing in its excrement for months until it is processed along with hundreds of thousands of other beef cattle by expert knife-men who can slice a cow into bundles of packaged beef in a carefully calibrated matter of specified seconds. You can tell the animal is trying its best to comply with the humans forcing it to proceed quickly into the chute leading to a violent, brutal and terrifying end. It is submissive, though palpably afraid.

Though eating meat is clearly and expressly permitted, what I saw on the screen is not what God intended when He told Adam to imitate Him by “ruling” over the animal creation (Gen. 1:28). It was before the Fall that man was told to “rule” and it is preceded by a description which sets boundaries for and defines mankind: creatures created in God’s image and likeness. Man is created to be God’s reflective representatives in the world. As God exercises authority so must man. As God treats the creation He loves, so must man. God’s ruling is the standard which restricts and releases man’s. It is also that by which it is judged.

The command to “rule” is thus not permission for despotic control and heartless brutality, or a sanction to impose order by superior power upon an inefficient, or unproductive environment. Nor is authorization to do whatever the scientific method makes possible to increase efficient production of consumable meats for our carnivorous appetites. Just because it is more efficient to keep hundreds of thousands of chickens immobilized in metal boxes, breathing methane gas from their excrement, in the dark, their whole lives in order to manipulate their environment for maximum egg production does not make it morally right. That is not “ruling”, that is heartless and cruel oppression. And I would add—it is disrespectful and dishonors the creature and its Creator.

If they could speak I am sure these mute meat sources would turn around like Baalam’s donkey and ask us sorrowfully: “what did we ever do to you to treat us with such ruthless contempt and malice?” This is not an argument for a vegetarian diet. This is not a plea for eating more broccoli and less burgers. This is an attempt to consider whether the God who hates cruelty and oppression—who judges nations for their excess of violence—hates it when it is perpetrated on the animal kingdom as well.

Perhaps we are given a clue in those Scriptures which tell us that God judges the nations who were instruments of punishment on Israel but who also unnecessarily “added to their calamity” (Zech. 1:14-15). God calls Babylon His “war club” by which He shatters nations but He yet punishes her because she is a “destroying mountain who destroys the whole earth” (Jer. 51:29,25). Edom and Philistia are God’s tools to humble Israel but they will all be punished because they acted with an excess of “malice and ancient hostility” (Ez. 25:12-17). Killing is licit apparently, under certain circumstances, but God does not close His eyes to the methods and the motives of those wielding the swords. If you read the prophets it becomes clear that this anger is not provoked simply because “you messed with my chosen people”. God cares about the nations—all of them. He observes and cares about injustice in and upon all people groups. 

To argue that it is the Jewish sacrificial system that encourages and excuses our violent and callous treatment of animals is similar to arguing that allowing humans to be killed for murder (Gen. 9:6) justifies torture. The government is given the power of the sword Paul tells us, but that does not mean it is thereby being given the power of the pliers, electric shock, chemical injections and the boiling oil. Even the kosher laws, I am told, require as a preconditon the painless killing of the animals.

In other words, there are limits beyond which justice and mercy will not and cannot go even though it may extend so far as the taking of life. As God tells Noah, “everything that lives and moves will be food for you.” But, He tells the eight humans who survived the flood that His covenant of protection is for them as well as with every living creature that was with you—the birds (chickens) and the livestock (steers)” (Gen. 9:3,10-11).

So, it seems clear that the Mosaic code which requires slicing the throat of animals gises no justification for the methods the multinational food corporations are using to maximize their profit. Granted, my motive for wanting to break free of the monopolistic, meat production system is selfish. The chemicals that I knew about, and the ammonia baths to kill off e-coli bacteria, that I did not, have not been kind to my GI tract or those of members of my family. I’ve known for a good long while that it would be much healthier to sever all ties to the steroids and hormones in the packaged red meat at our one-stop shopping store. After the documentary it has become imperative. The body and the mind (and now also the heart) are in agreement.

As I was pondering this issue I ran across a poem by William Blake which surprised me. Though it overstates the case a bit, it still speaks to this point with provocative sensitivity: 

A dog starv’d at his master’s gate/predicts the ruin of the state/A horse misus’d/upon the road calls to heaven for human blood/Each outcry of the hunted hare/A fiber from the brain doth tear. 

A scene from another movie has stuck with me for a long time. In The Last of the Mohicans, the opening scene shows three American Indians racing through the forest. We soon realize that they are hunting a deer on foot. Finally when they manage to shoot it they approach and reverently cut its heart out. There is no raucous, uncouth joy at the blood that has been spilt. There are no high-fives in celebration of virility. Rather, the eldest intones an apology: “we are sorry to kill you, brother”. He then prays a prayer of thanksgiving for the life that has been given for the sustenance of their own.

What I sensed is respect, gratitude, mixed with a trace of sorrow: “we wish it did not have to be this way. . . but, for now, it is. We are thankful for your meat. We hope that your passing and your suffering matched the speed with which you ran”. Watching their faces I knew that they understood what we Westerners who relish and take such delight in the kill, do not. Life—all of it, is precious, not only the unborn human or that of the aged–and though we may be at the top of the food chain, we creatures are still inextricably conneccted.        

These images have collaborated to make me take seriously the ethics of meat production and my meat consumption. They have caused me to begin researching local meat providers who have granted dignity to these creatures God declared to be “good” and which we are still commanded to “rule over” graciously, as His image bearers. I’ll let you know what I find out. It may be one more component of being in the world and not of it.   

Tags: creation, cruelty, environment, food, Last of the Mohicans, meat, oppression, respect