Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I’m Grant Reeher. Last week I spoke with a writer who had a new book out on the foods of upstate New York. Today, we stay with food, but we move very far from that in many respects. My guest is John Sanbonmatsu. He's a philosophy professor of Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and the author of a new book titled, “The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves”. Professor Sanbonmatsu, welcome to the program and congratulations on this new book.
John Sanbonmatsu: Thanks so much, I'm delighted to be here.
GR: Well, we're glad you could make the time. So, as our listeners are about to discover, this book is very provocative, I think it's fair to say and it has an intriguing title. So, “The Omnivore's Deception…”, break that down for me, what is the omnivore's deception?
JS: Sure. Well, my book is really about our exploitation of animals and the food economy. And the three modes of deception, really, that I talk about in the book are, well, first, the fact that the meat, eggs, dairy and fish industries hide from consumers, the incredible mass violence that undergirds this system to get food on our plate. The second mode of deception really is the, a kind of whole discourse that's been developed in the last 20 years for so-called humane meat. The enlightened omnivore, kind of dating back to Michael Pollan's book, “The Omnivore's Dilemma”, which we might talk about. And that is simply a myth, you can't have these animal products without causing enormous suffering to animals, no matter how small scale the agriculture is. And then the third mode of deception is simply self-deception. We engage in what the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith, which is to say we deceive ourselves and we want to believe we can have our meat and our conscience, too. And I make clear, I hope to my reader, that we can't.
GR: Well, you anticipated one of the questions I wanted to ask you when you talked about smaller scale, sort of, you know, local sourcing kind of things. Well, I'll ask you that right away, I mean, what is the problem with paying attention to the scale, if you’re an eater paying attention to the scale and the method of raising animals? You know, you focus on locally sourced, smaller, non-industrial scale animal growing operations, where's the problem there?
JS: Yeah. You know, it's thanks largely to animal advocates that the public is aware of what we call factory farming or intensive industrialized animal agriculture. And the animals in that system, which by the way, that's 99% of where our products come from, food animal products, 99%. And it's horrible, it's horrific the way animals are treated in that system. But what people don't realize is that the critique of our violence against the animals for use in food dates back 3000 years. They'd been ethical vegetarians during that whole period. You know, Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist wrote, he was an ethical vegetarian, he wrote an incredible critique about a slaughterhouse. So, really, my book is examining the underlying relations of domination and violence in all forms of animal agriculture, including smaller scale, which is, by the way, not scalable. You can't feed 10 billion human beings, you know, with pasture raised animals, we’d need several additional earths. But my focus, so I do talk about the environmental problems at lengths in my book, but really the focus is on the ethical question of what gives us the right to subject defenseless, sensitive beings to violence.
GR: Well, and you also talk about, I believe, some of the health implications for humans and the way that our diets are currently constructed. Just give us a quick overview, and others have written about this, obviously, what are the health problems with how we currently eat animals?
JS: Yeah, well, it's interesting. When I talk about these issues in class, because I teach ethics at the college level, you know, students, naturally, they think, well, we can't live without animal products, we can't live without the protein from animals and so forth. And what's ironic about that is that practically every scientific study, and I'm talking about studies in The Lancet and JAMA and you know, top medical journals, show that in a plant based diet is actually superior in like every category compared to an animal based one. I mean, in terms of lower rates of heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, even longevity, vegans live longer than so-called omnivores. And so there's just these sort of scientific facts. But leaving that aside there, I mean, there's just a whole slew of problems for us health-wise and epidemiologically. For example, 75% of all emerging diseases are zoonotic in origin. That means that the diseases that are afflicting our species and that have in the past have come from other animals. Most of those diseases historically have come from exploited animals, smallpox, cholera, Spanish flu, even AIDS. These all developed out of human food exploitation, exploitation of animals for food. So it's, and now of course we have the H5N1 virus, avian flu and the WHO, well, 20 years ago, excuse me, warned that if that thing becomes transmissible between and among humans, it could kill 150 million of us. So that's just an example of why it's even in our own interests, and again that's not the basis of my book but I do talk about this, it's in our interest to stop this too.
GR: And what about the impact on the environment? That's another concern that drives a lot of people to vegetarianism. You'll meet a lot of vegetarians that say, I am this way because I'm concerned about the environment. I have a colleague, I think, who's primarily driven by that.
JS: Yeah. You know, the first sentence of my book in my introduction, I talk about that, that, you know, occasionally you'll hear people say, well, I've cut back on meat or I tried vegetarianism once for the environment. And I'll tell you, I don't like that (laughter), I don't like that at all. As I explain, because it's like the person who says that they, in my experience, they often say, well, I don't do it for the animals, you know. It's like, well, if you care about the animals, you must be some kind of nutcase, right? The fact that we're killing, conservatively, 80 billion land animals every year, mostly birds and mammals, and up to 2.7 trillion marine animals every single year, each animal of which, you know, is an individual with thoughts and experiences, emotions and so forth. The idea that we should want to spare them a violent death at our hands, that just drives people crazy, right? So the environmental issue is crucial because what people don't understand is that this confluence, as I discuss it in the book, between capitalist development on the one hand and human supremacism or speciesism on the other, the confluence of these systems in the food economy is the greatest ecologically destructive force on the earth, right? So people are familiar with global warming. Well, global warming is not the biggest environmental problem on the Earth today. That would be mass species extinction, right? So, we're experiencing the greatest mass species extinction event in 65 million years. Global warming is part of that problem, but it isn't the only thing driving it. So we're talking about the death of all the animals on the earth. Birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, even invertebrates, like insects, scientists refer to it as the insect apocalypse. You know, honeybees are being devastated. Crustaceans, horseshoe crabs, who are on the earth hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs are being wiped out. This is the 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws, which I saw when it came out as a boy.
GR: So did I.
JS: Yeah. And I'll tell you, when I asked my students how many humans are killed by sharks every year, they always get that right, which is about ten to 20 globally. And when I asked them how many sharks are being killed by humans, they say, well, I don't know, 2000, 500? It's actually 100 million every single year. And all of that violence is put out of sight and out of mind. But it's literally tearing up the web of life on our planet. So, yeah, I could go on and on about it, but it's, it's something that people have got to start paying attention to because we're dooming our own species because of this system.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with the philosophy professor, John Sanbonmatsu. And we're discussing his new book, it's called, “The Omnivores Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves” and it argues for the total abolition of the animal economy. So let's get to what I think is probably the heart of your argument and where your passion most lies and that is the moral concerns. And you've already spoken to them in several different ways, but the moral concerns about raising an animal to kill and eat it. How would you crystallize that that argument that you want to make?
JS: Well, you know, there's, any system of power or dominance has to be continually reinforced. It's not like it's one and done. You know, you don't just set up a system for, whether it's human slavery or, you know, racism, a kind of racial hierarchy or gender hierarchy. You don't just set that up and then it just goes on, on its own, it has to be continually reinforced. So all of us are raised from birth to, with the idea that there are these classes of animals who simply don't matter and it doesn't matter morally how many of them we kill. It just, they're irrelevant, you know what I mean? Which is why, as I said, we can kill billions and indeed trillions of animals every year without it even disturbing anybody. But here's the thing, most people listening to your show probably have lived with a cat or dog. I mean, that's statistically the case. And if you live with a cat or dog, you know that they are unique individuals. They have personalities and temperaments and emotions. They have different relationships with different people. You know, they have different quirks, they have a kind of biography and you can see them go through the stages of life that we do, the playful kitten and then the kind of, you know, the limping elder cat who you know, tolerates the juvenile you've just introduced into the house and so on. So we know that our cats and dogs are individuals whose lives matter and who deserve our respect and are worthy of our love. Well, let me tell you, everyone should be disturbed by the fact that chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, oxen all these animals that we think of as stupid, irrational, dirty, they are no different than our cats and dogs at all. I mean, scientifically, ecologically there's just a ton of research on this. Scientific American has published articles on chicken intelligence, there's empathy in pigs and so forth. So if you think that every time you sit down to a meal, you are eating the body of some, you know, richly endowed creature like a cat or dog with sentience, with subjectivity, then you might begin to understand why this is a moral issue of the first order.
GR: And at the risk of sorting out my animals, anthropomorphically, I can readily see the appeal of the argument that you're making for cattle, sheep, pigs and chicken. But what about something like fish? I have a friend who's very tuned in to the kind of concerns you're talking about. He describes himself as a pescatarian. So what's the problem with fish?
JS: Yeah, it's funny. You know, I remember like, many years ago, I'd go to someone's wedding or something, and the caterer would put chicken in front of me after having heard I'm an ethical vegetarian and think, well, if you eat chicken, though, right? So the idea that chickens are animals would not compute. And similarly, I've met a number of people over the years who call themselves vegetarians but they eat fish. It's very bizarre because the signs that we're finding with fish, it's just fascinating. Fish do better at some forms of cognitive reasoning than primates, including the great apes, including humans. They have memories, they have emotions. Now, the thing is, as mammals, we're just not equipped well to perceive the feelings or thoughts of fish, right? Because they don't have the facial muscles that we have. So we think of them as silent, gaping, animate objects, I guess, right? I mean, I went fishing as a kid and you bring the, oh, and now the fish is flapping on the dock. It doesn't occur to us, well, that fish is now suffocating to death and is experiencing the same trauma and stress hormones that we would as mammals if we were drowning. But that is the case. And this is just, now certainly there's still a lot we don't understand about fish cognition. And the fishing industry is always funding studies to prove that fish don't feel pain and so forth. But I mean, it's just a silly argument because evolutionarily, how can you have a sophisticated organism that's going to survive, like the Greenland shark lives up to 400 years, I mean, there are fish that live a really long time, who can't experience pain? So, yeah, so I think we've got to stop writing off entire classes of beings as worthless because they aren't worthless.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I’m talking with John Sanbonmatsu. He's a philosophy professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts and the author of a new book titled, “The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves” and we've been discussing his book. Well, you lay it out in the first half of the program, I think very well, your main arguments for why we need to eliminate the animal economy. Who are some of the main sort of voices out there that you are trying to correct or take issue with?
JS: Well, you know, I go after a number of different folks in a certain sense, but centrally I'm concerned to refute arguments developed by the very popular food writer Michael Pollan. In his book, for example, “The Omnivore's Dilemma”, that book had an enormous cultural influence over the way Americans view our relations with animals, particularly in food. It's still, just took a look the other day, it's like 20 years later, it's still in the top ten bestsellers on food policy, it's part of the state mandated curriculum in middle and high schools in different states around the country. I couldn’t possibly exaggerate the influence that book. And, you know, without taking too much time, Pollan's arguments ended up creating kind of intellectual scaffolding for this myth of the enlightened omnivore, you know, locavorism and so forth. All this idea that we can raise animals, quote, humanely, kill them with compassion and so forth. And so I show the problems with those arguments as well as similar arguments by Temple Grandin, another very popular apologist for the animal system, Barbara Kingsolver, the acclaimed writer. And if you examine their arguments, they're not only wrong, but they are intellectually dishonest and sadistic. There's this undertow of violence and sadism against animals in those works.
GR: So let me throw out some potential challenges or problems with this that I thought of and see what you have to say about them. And the first one is very Syracuse oriented, I don't expect you to be an expert on Syracuse, but we have in Syracuse a real overpopulation problem with deer. And it creates a whole lot of problems, creates problems on the roads, it creates problems in people's properties and the ticks and so on. If we stopped all hunting, for example, that would probably make those problems just worse. So how would we deal with an overpopulation of deer and Syracuse if John Sanbonmatsu was running the program?
JS: Yeah, well, first, I just want to note that the one species that is causing the greatest damage on this planet is actually us and no one talks about culling us. No one talks about culling real estate developers and capitalists and all the folks who are…
GR: Fair enough, fair enough.
JS: I mean, if you look at the ecosystem of Syracuse and you compare human impacts on the environment in terms of consumption of goods from China and blah, blah, blah, with what the deer are doing, it's, you know, no contest. So it's very interesting to me that communities, the first thing they do is reach for the gun. Like, okay, this, first of all, this is a problem for whom? It's for motorists? Well, don't forget the highways and the roadways were put through the living habitats, the living spaces and homes of all of thousands of different species and then they are supposed to get out of the way. So that's number one, there's structural violence against animals built in and the starting point is always, let's assume that all these animals lives are disposable, interchangeable, what do we do with this problem? That's number one. Now, in terms of the Syracuse issue, it's true. I don't know the specifics, but I've looked into this in other cases, there are alternatives, okay? First of all, one reason that deer and other populations are increasing is because humans have, through hunting, just killed all the predators, right? So there is no ecological balance to be restored. Secondly, there are nonviolent alternatives. There's birth control, there's relocation. And I'm not saying that those are easy alternatives either but in my having examined the planning process at the local level in some communities, there's a big hunting lobby and these folks want to kill the animals. And so they bring in experts from, you know, the NRA or hunting lobbies in order to promote their agenda. And the problem is that state wildlife officials are hunters. And, you know, it's run by these agencies are actually not ideologically neutral. They're run by the same constituency. So I think that if we start, in my book, I say, look, why don't we have a different mode of address with the other beings we share the planet with? Let's approach them nonviolently for a change. You know, we've tried this other approach which is to treat their lives as so much disposable garbage. Why don't we instead view them with respect and go from there? And so that's what I would say is like, what if we have a paradigm shift and we say, okay, those deer are as important to us as our own cats and dogs or even, you know, other humans and how can we live with them in harmony, you know, without violence? That's what I would say.
GR: Yeah. I just, not to sound snarky, but I'm thinking of when you mentioned predators, you know, if I were a deer, if that makes sense, I'm not sure I'd rather be killed by a pack of coyotes taking me down or a hunter killing me quickly, but I get your point. It's a different way to think about this. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is the philosophy professor John Sanbonmatsu. So I want to get to some how do we get there type of questions, because I've had many guests on this program who make arguments that are, you know, hard to imagine becoming completely successful politically, policy-wise. And as a political scientist, you know, I am sympathetic to much of what you are saying, but I also really can't see what you are arguing here getting much traction in contemporary America or the world. Do you have a political strategy attached to this argument that you could briefly put forward? Or is that is that sort of outside of your lane?
JS: You know, it's a fair question and a really important one. The short answer is, I don't have a concrete you know, I don't have a blueprint for social change. In my first book, “The Postmodern Prince” I talked about some of the obstacles to thinking about strategy and long term change on the political left. And there are a lot of reasons why it's hard to imagine an alternative to this system that we're living in. But, you know, as a philosopher and thinker, I'm really trying to first of all, you know, before we can get to the question of strategy, in a sense, we have to understand what the problem is, A, B, we have to understand and agree that this is a problem like morally. And so if we want to survive on this planet, let me put it this way, if we want to survive on this planet and if we want to be able to look ourselves in the mirror and not see a kind of monster there, then we have to rethink our relations with the other natural beings, you know, of the Earth. Certainly I'm promoting veganism but I'm not, I don't, but, you know, I've been a vegan for over 30 years and things and animals are being killed in greater and greater numbers. Per capita, meat consumption is up. There's been a whole kind of political reaction against animal advocacy, just as there's been political reaction against women's rights and civil rights. So the thing is, and you know this, that historically slavery existed, persisted for thousands of years in human culture. It was accepted almost everywhere. No one thought that that system would ever be ended. And then, of course, there was racial slavery, you know, European racial slavery that began, you know, five centuries ago. No one thought that would ever end and it has ended. And maybe now not to get into, you know, there still existing slavery, but at least not legally. Women into the 1970’s, that was the first time it became illegal, thanks to feminist efforts, illegal for men to rape their wives in the home, conjugal right was simply part of standard English law for a thousand years or more. So change is possible and I think that there's a way in which by, when we say, oh well it's impossible for everyone to give up the animal economy, it becomes a self-confirming prophecy, clearly. And so I wrote this book to try to intervene against that self-serving fatalism, that, which again I call self-deception where we say, oh, well, there's no real, we can't do anything about it, it's too big a problem. But the problems we face are really kind of out of hand, right? I mean, global warming and species extinction, not to mention fascism rising everywhere around the world and the liberal capitalist democracy waning. You know what I'm saying? So these, that's a cop out, though, to say, well, these are very big problems and what can we do?
GR: Well, we've got about 2 minutes left or so and I want to try to squeeze two questions in. So this will be kind of your lightning round, if you will, a couple of quick answers to these and they're both tough questions, so I apologize for that. But you already mentioned something about the political moment we're in that there's a lot of backlash against different things right now. And I'm wondering about whether given the layers of backlash that we're seeing, that what you are saying right now is going to be heard by a lot of people as kind of an instance of political correctness on steroids, is there a way that you've thought about diffusing that in terms of how people are going to hear this? Quickly, if you could.
JS: Yeah, I mean, people think that the question of animals and meat is at best a trivial one, right? Or at worst, it's political correctness on steroids. But this is, it's always been the case historically that any challenge to an established system of power and authority, you know, the people who are questioning it, whether it's slavery or women's subordination to men, are viewed as zealots and crazy people and so forth. And what I argue in my book is that this is the most important issue of our time, if you look at it. And I think that if people give my book a chance, they will, by the end of it, they'll agree with me. So, yeah, just ask people to keep an open mind and read the book.
GR: Okay, and my last question, just a few seconds left, I want to be very honest with you, I want to tell you something you probably already knew about me. I'm not going to do what you're telling me to do (laughter). I'm not going to become a vegan. I recognize the arguments for it, but it's probably not going to happen. But if I were to do just one thing short of that, what would it be? Would it be to avoid highly tortured processed animals of a certain kind of meat? What would be the one thing you'd want me to do?
JS: One thing I'd ask you to do is to recognize that what you're doing is wrong. The argument in the book is that you can't get humane meat or better sourced or, that's the whole point of the book. And if you can live with yourself knowing that what you're doing is causing horrific suffering and violence to helpless beings who deserve better, that, you know, that's a personal choice that you or I or whoever make. Not you, but, you know I'm saying, if we choose that.
GR: I get you.
JS: But that is the situation, it is all or nothing.
GR: Okay, well, I will tell you this, you have got me thinking about something I wasn't thinking about before. So that was John Sanbonmatsu and again, his new book is titled, “The Omnivore's Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals and Ourselves”. And it may not change your habits, but it will challenge them and it will certainly maybe change some of your assumptions. John, a very provocative book, to say the least and I can agree that (this is a) very important argument that you're making.
JS: Thanks for having me.
GR: You bet. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
