Mindful Consumption

By Karen Elias

Waiting for me on the kitchen counter this morning is the jar of chickpeas I left to soak in water overnight. I think I’m half in love with them. They come to the house in a bag made of burlap – not plastic! – which I hold up to my nose every chance I get, breathing in a scent that seems to have gotten lost along the way, something that’s possibly a reminder for me of ancestral barns and lofts full of hay.  When the chickpeas are softened by cooking, I’ll mash half of them for this week’s sandwich spread, and the other half I’ll add to a stir-fry for supper. I’m beginning to believe that becoming a vegetarian might be a real possibility.

I’m indulging in this bit of virtue-signaling because I’m a climate activist who – although I eliminated red meat many years ago when I committed to a Mediterranean diet — still eats some chicken, turkey and fish. It’s been possible to maintain cognitive dissonance around these incompatibilities because my focus has been on fossil fuels, allowing me to keep the most reprehensible facts about what’s called “animal agriculture” at bay.

No more.

A post by Ed Winters, Surge Co-Founder and Co-Director, called “Why is Animal Agriculture Bad for the Environment” lays out the clear connections to our planetary damage. Now I need to acknowledge that animal farming is destroying the rainforest, infringing on habitat, and driving species to extinction – and that “even if the use of fossil fuel was ended immediately, the emissions produced by the agricultural sector alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees celsius and would even make it difficult not to hit two degrees.” The highest emissions of greenhouse gases, Winters states, occur in systems where meat is in high demand [Why is animal agriculture so bad for the environment? — Surge | Creative Non-Profit for Animal Rights].

In the U.S. 99% of animals raised for consumption are factory farmed [Factory Farms Expanding as Cruel, Unsustainable Industrial Agriculture Dominates the U.S. Food System]. A post by Sinergia Animal focuses on the horrors of these Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs. According to its website, Sinergia Animal is an “international animal protection organization working in countries of the Global South to reduce the suffering of farmed animals and promote more compassionate food choices.” Factory farming operates on the premise that “[a]nimals are considered units of production, [so] profitability is prioritized over their care.” This means that animals are packed into spaces so crowded that they are sometimes unable even to turn around. Because under such conditions chickens, for example, will resort to aggressive pecking behaviors, they are cruelly debeaked to prevent damaged produce. Because under such conditions animals will become diseased, they are preemptively given antibiotics. “Animals could thus be kept in unhealthy conditions without impacting productivity” [What is bad about factory farming? Is it cruel?].  

 
In addition, according to the post, animals raised on factory farms are genetically “enhanced” to increase profit. Chickens and turkeys now grow unnaturally fast and are genetically modified to maximize the growth of breast meat. Cows are bred for increased milk production. All of this increases stress and health problems. The post goes on to make clear the environmental and human health impacts of factory farming, including production of greenhouse gases, air and water pollution, increased monocrop production of soy and corn for animal feed, as well as antibiotic resistance in humans that comes from mutations resulting from overuse. These facts are, in themselves, sadly compelling, but especially disturbing is the suffering we inflicit on the animals being raised for our consumption who “have everything natural and fulfilling in their lives taken away . . .” [What is bad about factory farming? Is it cruel?].  Robin Wall Kimmerer’s comment, from “The Honorable Harvest,” a chapter in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, seems especially apt here: “We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame . . .” (195).

It’s clear that today’s typical farming practices are not sustainable over the long term. According to Winters, shifting to raise crops for a plant-based diet would mean that we could feed the world’s people, restore our degraded landscapes and animal habitats, halt species-death, and along the way reduce our greenhouse gas emissions [Why is animal agriculture so bad for the environment? — Surge | Creative Non-Profit for Animal Rights]. Georgia Wluka, from the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, advocates for the adoption of “[t]raditional Indigenous agricultural practices” that “can serve as an essential guide in the widespread adoption of sustainable, regenerative agriculture methods.” These practices are rooted in the need to understand natural processes, to pay attention to system-wide balanced relationships, and to ensure long-term sustainability (“the seven-generation model”), and often involve promoting traditional Indigenous staples such as tepary beans that can withstand conditions of extreme heat and drought [Growing Stronger: The Sustainable Roots of Indigenous Agriculture | Article | EESI].

Our current non-sustainable food system is being revisioned by a growing regenerative farming movement aimed at recovering sustainability through reconnection with the land. A remarkable example of these efforts is the 72-acre Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY, a working farm created to heal the wounds of systemic racism and return “aspiring farmers of color” to a right relationship with the soil (1). In an interview (“To Free Ourselves, We Must Feed Ourselves”) with Tracy Frisch of Sun Magazine, Leah Penniman, the founder of the farm, talks about the four hundred years of oppression that have kept African Americans from their rightful heritage. Before boarding the slave ships that would violently remove them from their homelands, the women made sure to preserve their most precious crops by braiding the seed-stalks in their hair. The subsequent slave labor “of 12.5 million skilled African farmers who were taken by force from their homelands” (3) built our present-day system, a fact that still has not been officially acknowledged. Even after slavery ended, the structural racism embedded in our system – from sharecropping to red-lining – kept African Americans from owning property. Penniman makes the point that, due to these oppressive practices, “land ownership is over 98% white” (4), which means that Blacks have found it difficult to accumulate generational wealth. The ravages of racism that tore them from the land and kept them from claiming it have convinced many Blacks that “the land herself was the oppressor, rather than the place where the oppression took place” (4), and they are hesitant to connect with the earth. So part of the training program offered by the farm includes ancestral ceremonies created to heal that trauma by encouraging participants to listen to the wisdom that comes from reconnection to their earthly roots. Penniman sums up the work of the farm by saying, “The work of Soul Fire is about reaching back over those four hundred years of oppression and recovering our noble and dignified heritage of belonging to the land” (4). In its commitment to redress societal evils as well as to heal psychological and spiritual wounds – for example, reserving more than 10% of its harvest for low-income people (8), and creating a “reparations map” that connects projects in need of funding with wealthy donors (11) – Soul Fire Farm is working on multiple levels to repair those traumatic rifts that have kept Black Americans specifically, but all of us more generally, from a right relationship with the earth.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in  a chapter called “Diet for a Mindful Planet” from The World We Have, brings the discussion home, asking us to think about consumption as a spiritual practice. At the fourth level of consumption, what Hanh calls “the food of consciousness” (30), he asks us to be mindful not only of our ancestors’ suffering but also of “the suffering of the collective consciousness of our own time” (31), which includes human as well as more-than-human lamentations. With mindful consumption, it becomes painfully clear that these lamentations include the cries of animals being raised on factory farms, whose flesh is ultimately packaged neatly in plastic containers and placed in refrigerated coolers, which – in their pristine impersonality – are one hundred times removed from the horrifying conditions of these animals’ raising. “Mother Earth suffers deeply,” Hanh says, “because of our way of eating” (23 – 4).

“’What shall I eat today?’ is a very deep question,” he says (25). For me, it’s becoming a deepening question. A package of black tepary beans is arriving soon in the mail [Heirloom beans, grains and spices grown on small family farms]. I’m busy discovering recipes for soup, hummus, empanadas, salad, and even brownies. It feels like a good start.