Animal Farm

Some of you may be surprised to learn that I became a vegetarian a few weeks before coming to Nepal. For me, Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals was the straw that (humanely, I hope) broke the camel’s back, topping off a proverbial haystack that included a vegetarian mother and sister, high cholesterol, a few good food films (particularly Food, Inc. and The Future of Food), and the most liberally liberal of liberal arts educations (which has also made possible the construction of obfuscated run-on sentences based on overstretched rhetorical expressions, like this one). But I digress. The time to quit meat, I figured, could not be better. Why would I want to eat meat in Nepal?

Some more of you may be surprised to learn that I have become an omnivore again. It wasn’t that I missed the taste, or that I got tired of explaining why I was a vegetarian. It’s that my rationale for not eating meat doesn’t hold true in Nepal. It’s tempting to think that that all meat is equal, but some meat is more equal than others.

My real problem with American meat has to do with factory farming. Some of the following is only relevant to either ruminant or poultry farming, but much of it applies to both. A few large companies dominate these industries, receiving subsidies that artificially depress prices and increase consumption. Animals are packed into dark, dirty spaces with many other occupants, which breeds violence and disease. Having been bred to grow unnaturally quickly, many develop health problems. They are fed a diet of corn and other fodder unsuitable to their digestive systems and nutritional needs; a good amount of America’s arable land is used to grow this food, which feeds animals rather than people. On such a large scale, these animals create enormous amounts of waste, some of which pollutes waterways and has various downstream effects. After a sufficiently miserable life, animals face a frightening and sometimes ineffective slaughter. Processing is unsanitary, with many parts of many animals mixing together. All of the above is invisible to American consumers, who need only select their preferred package from a supermarket isle or appetizing item off a restaurant menu. They (i.e. you) then cook and eat this meat in inappropriately large portions at two or three meals a day, which, in addition to fueling the problems described above, has contributed to the rise of a whole array of health problems. In short, everyone suffers—animals, the environment, farmers, and us. I have separate issues with large-scale fish farming, primarily the quantity and diversity of animals that needlessly die when trawling for a particular variety.

That’s the reality of meat in modern America, but it didn’t used to be this way. In Nepal and most other parts of the world, meat is raised locally, which often means literally from your own back yard. Animals live outside most of the day, eating grass that grows either wildly or in the fields between planting seasons. Their waste is used as fertilizer for fields or fuel for stoves. Animals are killed in broad daylight with a well-placed machete chop to the neck, which, given the vacant expression on the dead animal’s face, it never saw coming. Meat is expensive (as much as 800 rupees for a kilo of goat meat, with bones), so Nepalis don’t eat it very often; my relatively wealthy, meatloving family still only eats it once or twice a week. When they do eat meat, the serving sizes are far more reasonable. Furthermore, the lack of a formal industry makes raising livestock an expensive investment but an excellent way for rural Nepali families to earn additional income.

Aside from some hygienic issues with meat storage and preparation, the system here is all-around better. There’s actually not much one could conceivably be opposed to. I was beginning to feel like a hypocrite encouraging pregnant mothers to eat more meat when I too am likely suffering from iron and protein deficiencies, or talking with farmers about the benefits of small-scale goat farming as a opponent to raising livestock. In the context of Nepal, eating meat may actually be more in line with my values than not. So one day, when my host brother showed up with a big plastic bag of venison, I said to hell with it. In one sense, watching an animal’s beheading, cleaning, and dismemberment is a far more graphic and gross way to meet your meat. In another, what’s maybe more disturbing is our aloofness from the process of how animals become food in America. Shielding your eyes from hard realities doesn’t make them go away—it only permits the existence of greater wrongs.