Pollan

This was an interesting (and sometimes disturbing) reading. It seemed a bit long, but it didn’t take me that long to get through it because it seemed to keep my attention and made me want to read on. The first thing that stood out to me was how the meat industry is so secretive about what exactly happens on the kill floor. Mostly this is because people will probably stop eating as much meat and I agree with them. I love meat, but if I knew more about what goes on, I would probably stop eating it as much. This secretiveness was also present in the film “King Corn” when they weren’t allowed to see how they make corn syrup. I also thought it was interesting that he said we may someday see eating meat as barbaric as owning slaves or treating women as inferior. I can’t believe this will be true, but I guess we shall see. Sort of on the same note, I thought it was interesting that Pollan suggested it may be possible that someday we will view speciesism as evil as racism. I also can’t believe this could be true.

I particularly liked the quote from Ben Franklin in which he said that “the advantage of being a reasonable creature is that you can find a reason for everything you do.” I thought it was a funny way of putting it and yet it made a lot of sense. I agreed with Pollan when he was talking about “marginal cases” and said that we make them part of our moral community because “we have all been and probably will be marginal cases ourselves.” This makes sense to me and I would say that is probably a big reason why we do that. Pollan says that one reason we eat meat is because it is more convenient and I would completely agree with this statement. I personally eat meat a lot because it is just easier than trying to make something else. I also would say that there might be more vegetarians if it were easier to be one.

Later in the piece Pollan mentions beef cattle eating a diet that makes them sick. This was also mentioned in the film. They said in the film that cattle are fed so much corn for so many days that they have to be slaughtered or else they will get sick. This to me is very sad. Toward the end of the piece, I thought it was interesting when Pollan was talking about how difficult it would be to build a sustainable agriculture without animals. By talking about this he made the case that eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do. I didn’t expect to read that in this piece. I also didn’t expect to see the part about Jeremy Bentham saying that “the death they suffer in our hands may be speedier and less painful than the one which would await them in the inevitable course of nature. “ I expected this piece to be preaching to me about how I should never eat meat again and it didn’t really do that. I guess that is why I didn’t mind reading it.