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On Food for the Soul

The New York Times' Nicholas D. Kristof frustrates me. His passion and compassion for humans is immense, but he appears to have some kind of mental block with nonhuman animals. He comes so close to grasping the concept of justice based on sentience, but his thinking is all muddled by tradition and culture. The result is that on one level he knows that hurting sentient nonhumans isn't right, but if it's done in a certain respectful way (oxymoron, anyone?) it's not so bad.

I suppose speciesism/human exceptionalism is at the heart of the matter. He just doesn't believe that other beings lives might have a purpose all their own that is entirely unrelated to humans. He romanticizes his childhood usage of animals as if that was the right way to do it, and he longs for those days. He is mere steps away from wondering whether there is a right way to use another, but those steps are a chasm for him.

In "Food for the Soul," Kristof once again yearns for the farm of his childhood which, for him, had "soul." What that means is that it wasn't a factory-farm operation. The animals were still bred and raised for slaughter, but evidently in some kind of soulful way we don't really hear about. Essentially, industrialized farming=soulless, small family farm=soulful. I wish Kristof would remove his soul-colored glasses and take a gander at The Humane Myth or read about animals who are rescued from small family farms, many of whom end up at places like Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary, Maple Farm Animal Sanctuary, Eastern Shore Sanctuary and Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary.

Kristof writes of the "decent and varied lives" that small farms provide animals with. I'm not sure how that equals soul. Food for my soul involves nutrient-rich plants and grains and legumes that provide me with just about everything I need to be in fantastic health (let's not have the B12 discussion). Food for my soul does not involve grilled greyhound any more than it involves grilled chicken. It doesn't involve taking the life of someone who'd much rather not have her life taken. It doesn't involve forcing any sentient being to do anything or go anywhere or eat anything . . . or die . . . on my schedule and for my palate.

I don't know how any person's soul can be considered fed at the expense of another sentient being.

You can comment, along with the people who thought Kristof's sentiments were "beautiful," here. I'm on my way.

5 Comments Post a comment
  1. The comments section is closed now. I'm glad you got your comment in Mary. What i would have said pertains to his example of the Goose and the chicken. Kristof recognized that maternal love (soul)superceded the difference between one type of sentient life and another. We should identify with that. Our treatment of others that don't *look* like us should involve unconditional love. Not the 'psuedo-love' that small farmers use in the service of clearing (albeit masking)their conscience and 'seperating' themselves from factory farm motives, intentions and bottom line relations with animals.
    We view animals as food because we are looking out for our 'own', the same 'maternal' drive seen in the goose. We also try to establish our identities (and associations with nurturing) with *Larger Nature* (symbolized with the goose). Thus we try to follow/fit in with Larger Nature by going into the 'water'- (taking lives for food as part of Nature).

    Like the chicken, we *should* be having an identity crisis. We don't really belong in the water with Big Nature. We can learn to see the water's edge, not plunge in, find our own way, and redefine ourselves like the chicken did. We can 'move away from the barn' and eventually no longer associate with our 'step-sibling' sentient others. That is true sustenance of the maternal soul- seeing others unconditionally,letting them be themselves and having their own lives. We can find a our and our loved one's physical food elsewhere.

    August 23, 2009
  2. John your analysis is as expected both compelling and beautiful…

    I agree in the frustrations with Kristof-like individuals who romanticize about "the good old days on the farm"… My husband was raised on southern farm/fishing traditions – some indoctrinations run so deep, they are forbidden to ever be questioned.

    Yet, why is it that with all that is known about animal sentience and compassionate choices, intelligent and "good" people choose to remain enamoured in the "happy" yester-year?

    Could it possibly be that in facing these truths they fear they would have to re-evaluate too many things concerning their past? In a way, for some people… I think that questioning cultural heritage (or family traditions) is like questioning "gOd". And for these sorts I actually feel more pity than anger… because they are just never truly going to grow up – or "grow". And that's very sad.

    August 25, 2009
  3. I've been working with children and adolescents with 'difficult lives' for some time. When they were given wonderful homes, foster parents, teachers, and 'stuff', they still fought it much of the time. I learned that kids, no matter what their upbringing was like, will maintain loyalty to the parents (and thus their past). Being treated well by others raises a terrible conflict – of loyalty, of dread that one's own parents didn't care enough about them to give them a good life. Kids often wonder if it is their own fault. In order to avoid living in this terrible conflict, they *make* the wonderful others out to be monsters, justifying terrible treatment. This restores some kind of inner balance. Sometimes it is a just a matter that kids (like a lot of us) were raised a certain way and didn’t know any differently. I think that kids raised on animal farms have it that much harder. To see things as they really are is difficult, depressing, but hopefully releasing in the end.
    Kristof may need to preserve the integrity of his roots: parents, his experiences, and ultimately his own sense of self, by maintaining the relationship with animals that he 'grew up' with.
    He refuses to see himself/his childhood in those animals- confined, manipulated, indoctrinated, and most importantly *defined* by others (parents) seen at the time as a power greater than himself-just as we see animal others. The animals he knew growing up gave him all the *signs*.. he just doesn't want to know it, to see the whole, and struggles with the ideas/emotions that would free himself(from the exploited/victim role) through giving freedom to animals.

    August 25, 2009
  4. Oh heck, why not just finish the thought: Kristof has been searching for his soul that got separated from him at the childhood farm. His defenses keep him off target however. He seeks soul in the small, family farm itself. But farms don’t kill animals, people do. He want to see that the problem lies in the way animals are treated, not the way they are related to as beings in their own right. He deflects the problem to animals, not to the problem of his own self/soul. His soul was lost when his innocence, along the animal’s innocence, was taken by others who were supposed to look out for his heart. Not betray it.

    He built a mind cage around himself and his heart for self preservation. Factory farms however *magnify* the foundational conflict in his relationship with animals, and his mindcage is too small to contain to this. He is trying to fabricate a bigger mind cage (internalized welfarism, like any welfarism, is based on instinctual drives to seek an immediate end to suffering- in this case his own).

    He is afraid to free himself from the mind cage, as it makes him, his past, and his loyal memories secure from unacceptable thoughts, such as betrayal. Thus he cannot see that animals (i.e. ‘self) should be freed. The animals, as a result continue to be betrayed in the service of human need. Kristof want to continue to belong, be accepted, be seen as a beautiful person- to match the shell that he has created around his self.

    August 25, 2009
  5. Olivia #

    Smiles to Mary, John, Bea, John and John (rather, the three of you!),

    I had some thoughts on Kristof's column before I read all of your pinpoint-accurate ones:

    Someone who has been so super-desensitized as a youth that he can actually KILL the friends he admires (his "step-siblings") — and this despite the feeble or vociferous protestations of those friends and of their equally helpless family members and friends — must have an even harder time divorcing himself from the whole animal exploitation syndrome than someone who never knew "food" animals as friends but has simply regarded them, from afar, as a mass of faceless, feelingless, flailing-around body parts.

    Thus, the person who learns at some point in his flesh-eating life about the evils of factory farming may be more emotionally ready to embrace veganism than is the attached-to-the-egg-filled-apron-strings farm-raised adult. The former is newly confronting the idea that earth's fellow inhabitants are being betrayed by the billions; the latter has already been adulterated with the belief that it is normal to betray one's friends as long as their species (aka physical look) is different.

    Hope you don't mind my adoption of your step-sibling phrase, John. It reminds me that animals are only a step removed from man, but that we're all related through our common Parent and by the common qualities we inherit and exhibit.

    As for the word "soul," I define it as our spiritual sense, which is our true intuition and which informs us that we are at-one with all beings. Anyone who is taught to believe that species are meant to be divided and to destroy one another is not using his spiritual sense, and is trapped in soullessness. Kristof will NOT find peace until he admits, like Harold Brown and Howard Lyman finally did, that he was betrayed by false education as a child, right along with those innocent geese and chickens.

    August 28, 2009

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