Meat and Sustainability

    My favorite musical theatre show is Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The plot revolves around a man who takes on a new identity and tries to murder the judge who transported him on false charges and raped his wife many years ago. Along the way, someone from his past recognizes him, and Sweeney kills him to avoid being blackmailed. He and his partner in crime, Mrs. Lovett, must then decide what to do with the body. Sweeney says he will bury it somewhere when it is dark. Mrs. Lovett has a better idea. She begins singing:

Seems a downright shame.
Seems an awful waste.
Such a nice plump frame,
what’s his name has - had - has!
Nor it can’t be traced.
Business needs a lift,
debts to be erased.
Think of it as thrift,
as a gift,
if you get my drift.
I mean,
with the price of meat,
what it is,
when you get it,
if you get it...

    Mrs. Lovett is, of course, suggesting that they use the body as meat in her meat pie shop. Which is exactly what they do. For the majority of the second act, Sweeney, a barber, slits the throats of men who simply wanted a shave, and Mrs. Lovett uses their flesh for her now-successful business.
    Sweeney Todd is a very dark, twisted show and is by no means a model of ideal business strategies. Obviously, we find it wrong to eat other humans. Even in nature, many species refuse to eat their own kind. There is something natural inside of us that says it’s wrong. But what if that weren’t the case? What if we didn’t find it wrong? Think of how sustainable that would be!
    In my opinion, overpopulation is the cause of the majority of our environmental and social problems. There are so many of us that, in order to support us all, we have to use destructive practices like factory farming. We have to mass-produce vegetables and fruits, spraying them all with toxic pesticides. Who does the manual labor, picking these vegetables and managing and slaughtering these animals? Only the people willing to do such an undesirable job - migrant workers. The managers don’t respect their rights, so they are treated horribly and forced to work around all the fatally dangerous pesticides. The chemicals run off into fields and rivers, destroying fragile ecosystems. There are so many of us, using resources and cutting down trees and putting more and more carbon into the atmosphere. When we reproduce at such a high rate, there is no doubt that we are destroying the earth and creating a series of social injustices. If there were less of us, we could use less resources and start moving towards a sustainable way of living. But there are just so many of us that it is just impossible to feed all of us sustainably.
    Why shouldn’t we use human meat? Yes, there is something naturally wrong about it, but our society is so corrupt in the first place that we might as well do something wrong that brings about good results. I’m not saying we should ignore the interests of dead people and eat their bodies. But what if some of us decided that we wanted our deaths to be as sustainable as possible? We already harvest the organs of dead people who indicated that they wanted their organs to be donated. What if some people wanted to be eaten after they died? Not necessarily by humans. Naturally, many species do not eat their own kind, and we are one of those species. Is it wrong for another species to eat us, then? I think Cora’s Diamond’s argument should be a little more specific. She writes that, if it’s true that something has interests if and only if it can suffer, then amputated limbs and dead people don’t have interests and can be eaten. Then she writes that it is wrong to eat dead people and amputated limbs. I’m skeptical, though, of the use of moral judgements in logical arguments. “Because it’s wrong” is never a strong argument. I think this part of the argument should be “We consider it wrong to eat amputated limbs and dead people.” Then, the conclusion should be that we should also consider it wrong to eat the dead bodies of animals. It’s only fair. Of course, I think the flaw of that argument is that other animals who won’t eat their own kind do eat other animals. The distinction is that we shouldn’t say we can eat other animals and not other humans because we are humans and it’s just wrong to eat humans because we’re better than other animals. If anything, we should say that we can eat other animals and not humans because we are humans and nature tells us that we should not eat from our own species. But there’s nothing wrong with another species eating us. We’re just lucky because we happen to have no predators, except for perhaps crocodiles and large cats that would eat us if we were foolish enough to enter their territory. For the purposes of sustainability, why shouldn’t we feed our dead bodies to animals who will eat them? Or maybe grind it up and put it into dog food? It’s unnatural, people would say. But we’re unnatural. Our whole civilization is unnatural. The goal used to be survival, now it’s happiness. We use technology and medicine to prolong our lives and alter our bodies considerably. We are so separated from nature and the rest of the animals in the world that we don’t call ourselves animals anymore. We say we’re better because we can think in terms of morality. Then let’s put that morality into practice. If we don’t live natural lives, then we don’t get to do what is “natural” - eating other animals. Because we know the huge environmental impact factory farming has, as well as the immense suffering it inflicts on the animals, we should stop doing it. Some people say that being human means that they get to be in charge of animals and they have the right to treat them however they want. That is clearly an abuse of our intelligence and ability to reason morally. Fairness and sustainability should be a moral priority because it will prevent us from inflicting pain and destruction.
    So, if we think it’s okay to kill animals for food, so be it. Our supposed morality should tell us that it is wrong to kill animals cruelly and abuse them in life, at the very least. Yet we still use these practices. We say we’re better because we have morals, but we ignore those morals and abuse everything around us. If we’re going to ignore these morals in such a huge way, why should we consider ourselves better than other animals? We don’t deserve this life-preserving technology. We should have to live in the wild just like the rest of the animal kingdom. If what makes us different is something that we don’t practice, then we really are no different.

Emerson and Nature

Ralph Waldo Emerson, a widely known writer from the Transcendentalist movement, wrote extensively about nature. One of his poems, The Rhodora, examines the purpose for beauty in nature:

On being asked, whence is the flower.

    In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
    I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
    Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
    To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
    The purple petals fallen in the pool
    Made the black water with their beauty gay;
    Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
    And court the flower that cheapens his array.
    Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
    This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
    Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
    Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
    Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
    I never thought to ask; I never knew;
    But in my simple ignorance suppose
    The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.


The narrator is questioning why such a beautiful flower is “wasted on the earth and sky” where no one can see it. The brook is “desert” - there are no eyes there to appreciate the beauty. So what is the point of the rhodora, or any other beautiful thing in nature, if not to be seen by something? He then writes that “beauty is its own excuse for Being.” He capitalizes “Being” because he is making the existence of beauty and nature sacred. He decides that God put humans and the rest of nature here on earth for the same reason. The poem suggests that the reason is that everything in nature has its own worth in and of itself; it is beautiful and good without needing anything to approve of it.
    Another of Emerson’s poems that deals with nature is Each and All.

Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown,
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The heifer that lows in the upland farm,
Far-heard, lows not thine ear to charm;
The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse, and lists with delight,
Whilst his files sweep round yon Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone.
I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky; —
He sang to my ear, — they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
The lover watched his graceful maid,
As 'mid the virgin train she stayed,
Nor knew her beauty's best attire
Was woven still by the snow-white choir.
At last she came to his hermitage,
Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage; —
The gay enchantment was undone,
A gentle wife, but fairy none.
Then I said, "I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth:" —
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine-cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard,
The rolling river, the morning bird; —
Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

The poem describes various aspects of nature - the cow that moos for its own reasons, not for anyone else’s pleasure. The narrator adores a sparrow’s song and brings the bird home and puts it in a cage. But its beauty is not the same in the woods; the whole thing is necessary, bird song and trees and sky and everything else. He describes the way pieces of nature cannot exist completely by themselves because they are so integrated with one another. He then writes about the intoxicating beauty of nature, but in a long list because it is the whole thing that is truly beautiful. he then “yielded himself to the perfect whole.” Yielded because people so often try to control nature when it is something that needs to be appreciated and respected, not taken advantage of.  The perfect whole because nature is perfect when it is together and in harmony. When it is disrupted, it is less than what it is in its rightful place.
    These poems still ring true for many. Although today’s society takes advantages of animals in many ways, refusing to respect them in their rightful place in nature. Emerson would not approve of the ways animals are treated today. The Rhodora emphasizes the beauty of each individual thing in nature, but Each and All enforces the importance of the connection everything has to everything else. When we subject animals to the cruelty they experience in factory farms, we are treating them as though they do not have worth in and of themselves. We are just treating them as things we can use to satisfy our desires. When we take them out of nature, we are disrupting the connection nature has, and we are making them seem less beautiful and worthwhile than they really are. A bird in the wild is free and happy and majestic. A bird trapped in a factory farm, barely alive and in constant pain, looks ugly and horrifying. Of course we don’t see the beauty in these animals because we treat them as things. We make them ugly. No wonder people have no problem killing these animals. If we all took time to consider nature in its proper place, we might not abuse them so much.