Journalist Andrew Rimas and professor Evan D.G. Fraser’s new book, Beef (William Morrow, September 2008), is a story that needed to be told.
By that I mean it’s a helpful book. Even an important one. Now, it’s by no means perfect. It covers too much ground in too much detail much too quickly. Pardon me, but it bites off more than it can chew. It sometimes waxes more poetically than the authors are able to control. But it’s good. And it’s good because it makes the increasing number of us who really care about food—not just how it tastes, but the ethical and environmental implications of it as well—feel better.
With chapters that each take up greater or lesser spans of history (“The Ecological and Evolutionary Origins of the Cow: Prehistory—8000 B.C.”, followed by “The Origin of Religion: 8000 B.C.—400 B.C.,” for example) Beef seems modeled after Karen Armstrong’s charming primer, A Short History of Myth, which the authors actually quote in attempting to explain early myths and legends surrounding cattle.
That mythic and legendary quality of cows—that is, what they mean, from the “cosmic bovine” Audumla in Viking mythology, whose sweat “begat the races of the Earth,” to the “dangerous” and “paradoxical” bull in Picasso’s Guernica—is just as important to Rimas and Fraser as how they (the cows) taste when properly cooked (or properly not cooked, as the case may be). “To be meaty,” the authors note very early on, “means to possess merit and conviction,” qualities they possess as writers.
The opposite of meaty, of course, is vegetal. And inherent in Beef’s historical argument—though one could complain that a series of anecdotes does not an argument make—is a shrewd case against vegetarianism.
"Human beings love beef. They love its perfumed smoke, they love its roiling drops of blood and grease, they love its density, so much more gravid in the belly than any vegetable, like ballast for living. ... To be vegetal means to be practically dead."
Rimas and Fraser’s focus on mythology says something about their understanding of what we need in order to live. And just as a vegetarian may argue with their take on the gravidity of a beet, say, an atheist might protest against the authors’ implicit claim that myths, like beef itself, provide “ballast for living.”
And so, Beef persists against vegetarians and atheists alike. “The Book of Genesis,” the authors remind us, “makes another point on the subject of eating meat. After the Flood, God finally permitted the Hebrews to consume animal flesh. Livestock, and cows, became central to the diet of the Chosen People.” In Christian terms, world-wide (that is, paradise-wide) vegetarianism appears to have ended after the Fall, a point the authors seem to acknowledge late in the book when they note, “Evolution has made eaters out of us. It is our original sin.”
Yet in the end—in mythical terms, the prophecy of Isaiah when the lion lies down with the lamb and eats hay like an ox—we’ll all be back to vegetarianism. Apparently, we’ll also be free of original sin.
The point is this: To be an eater between the Fall and the end of time— to eat in the world as we know it, have always known it, and will always know it—is to face the hard fact that, as journalist David Casas, Rimas and Fraser’s guide through Spanish bullfighting, notes: “Suffering exists. ... Walt Disney got it wrong.”
We know suffering exists because we know we suffer. And while understanding the suffering even of other people is a highly complex issue, as the late novelist David Foster Wallace explained in the 2004 essay “Consider the Lobster,” believing that animals suffer “gets progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from higher-type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and finally invertebrates like lobsters.”
Abstract as it may be, knowing all this, knowing there is no practicable or life-saving way out of our own suffering; and, further, accepting that suffering probably exists for any animal that expresses interests and preferences—terms that Wallace identifies as the stuff of “hard-core philosophy,” but that basically mean an interest in not feeling pain and a personal preference for non-suffering—knowing this makes us uncomfortable. (It did Wallace, at least. And it does me.)
Like ancient myths, or as Joan Didion put it, those stories we tell each other today in order to live, books like Beef and even Wallace’s lobster essay, are meant to make eating more comfortable for people who take seriously the fact that suffering exists. The most engaging chapters of Beef come at the end, when the authors make the environmentalist argument against industrialized meat production and for both “a leaner economic model” (i.e., higher prices) and restraint in what we eat, “something unnatural to the American character.”
This reminds the reader of the even more compelling writer Michael Pollan, who makes a living making eaters comfortable, yet only after first calling into question everything they eat. As for meat, Pollan agrees with Rimas and Fraser both that restraint is essential and that evolution has made us meat eaters. In his 2002 essay “An Animal’s Place,” Pollan “defends his life” (and ours) as a meat eater by first presenting us with a farm where “chickens live like chickens, ... cows, cows; pigs, pigs” (a tactic that Rimas and Fraser use as well). He then dismantles arguments in favor of animal rights by highlighting the symbiosis of “predation—animals eating animals” and asserting our own “evolutionary heritage”:
"Eating meat helped make us what we are, in a social and biological sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the fire where the meat was cooked, human culture first flourished. Granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice of part of our identity—our own animality."
All that Pollan ever says, like all we read in Beef—as well as all the comfort these writers bring readers—seems based on an agreement with Casas that suffering exists. That fact may be the reason we continue to write and tell stories at all.
And yet about a great story-teller named Walt Disney, Casas is wrong. With Bambi (1942), at least, Disney got it right, as did his studio much more recently under the direction of Jeffrey Katzenberg, releasing The Lion King, an animated world full of suffering, in 1994. After leaving Disney, Katzenberg went on to form DreamWorks, and got it right once again with Madagascar (2005), the story of a near-paradisiacal zoo in Central Park, where a lion named Alex lies down with a zebra named Marty, but eats pre-cut steaks he can’t possibly know were carved from a cow. Though ambivalent and inconsistent in the way it presents the carnivore’s dilemma—and perhaps even through that ambivalence—Madagascar shows us the world as it is and helps us deal with it. In this way, it is like its cartoon precursors and the myths that have always settled our lives.
Kafka raises a difficult ethical question in his parable “The Hunter Gracchus”: “I was a hunter; was there any sin in that?” And the answer we get from Beef (like the one we get from Wallace or Pollan or Katzenberg, or the prophet Isaiah, or we might assume even from Karen Armstrong or Joan Didion, or of course from the author of Genesis) is yes. Absolutely. There is sin in that. But it’s the sin we’re born with, the sin we evolved with. And despite all our sins as eaters, what we use as ballast—from myth, to beef and even bullfighting—reminds us, as Rimas and Fraser conclude, that while suffering exists “life is—still—sublime.”
Scott Korb is the coauthor, with Peter Bebergal, of The Faith Between Us. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Gastronomica, and elsewhere.
