Michael believes there are four defenses people use to justify their wrongdoings, both to themselves and others. He calls these the Four Horsemen of Justification. He’s a pain in my ass.

Anyway, according to his theory, sometimes a single defense is used; other times, two or more. But everyone everywhere uses the same four defenses. They are:

• Deflect the blame
• Defend your character
• Minimize the wrong
• Attack the accuser

The reference is a tad hyperbolic.

When I violate my own food policies—let’s say I’ve “accidentally” eaten soup made with chicken broth or had a bite of someone’s cheeseburger—here’s how the horsemen gallop across my mind:

• Deflect the blame: “The evil food system in this country created this situation, and I’m powerless against the force of agribusiness.”
• Defend your character. I’m a big fan of this one; it’s quite versatile: “I do plenty of socially/environmentally responsible things,” “It would have been thrown out if I didn’t eat it and I can’t stand to see food go to waste,” “I’m doing the best I can!” “I worked really hard today and I’m tired of thinking about this stuff. Isn’t life hard enough without such restrictions on simple pleasures?”
• Minimize the wrong: “One burger is a drop in the bucket,” “One person can’t change anything anyway,” “If I didn’t actually pay for it, I’m not supporting the system.”
• Attack the accuser: I’m usually my own harshest critic, but if Michael points out a misstep, I might think, “Well, you’re wearing leather shoes, so where do you draw the line?”

Whenever I’m trying to defend myself in one of these ways and Michael rolls out his trusty theory, I always want to shout, pouty-teenager-style, “Fine, here’s a fifth: I know it’s wrong, and I don’t care!” I don’t bother, though, because Michael will just shake his head and say, “You’re minimizing the wrong.”

I just can’t get my head around this news from the other side of the pond: Scientists ‘grow’ meat in laboratory.

On the one hand, I figure if the Dutch government is behind it, how wrong can it be? On the other hand, I think, perhaps in knee-jerk fashion, that genetically-modified anything is bad and weird. On still another hand (I do realize that’s three hands), I hope it’s the magic bullet for feeding the world’s exponentially-growing population and putting the ethical and environmental horrors of factory-farmed meat behind us. I seem to contain multitudes. As do muscle cells, apparently:

The scientists extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig and then put them in a broth of other animal products. The cells then multiplied and created muscle tissue. They believe that it can be turned into something like steak if they can find a way to artificially “exercise” the muscle.

The idea isn’t new. For example, the meat on Star Trek was created by devices called replicators (in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, such meat was called “vatgrown flesh”). Back in reality, in 1930, Winston Churchill said, “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” (I had no idea Winston Churchill thought about such things; looks like he too contained multitudes.) NASA’s been working on turkey cells for a decade, trying to provide astronauts in space with improved forms of long-term food (the first edible form of “in vitro meat” was produced in 2000: fish fillets from goldfish cells). Fast forward to 2008, when PETA offered a million dollars to the first company to bring lab-grown chicken meat to consumers by 2012.

Finally, in 2009, Time Magazine declared in vitro meat production one of the year’s 50 breakthrough ideas. Of course bloodletting was also considered a breakthrough idea in its day, as was, more recently and more to the point, DDT. Still, if scientists end up creating a Frankenstein that can end factory farming, I’d be willing to at least meet the guy, no judgments.

As part of a bold new plan we’ve been hatching, my friend Stephan and I visited a community garden in the Bronx last weekend for a talk called City Chickens 101. It’s perfectly legal to keep hens in New York City. I don’t have a backyard, but Stephan does and he’s seriously considering it, in which case I’d be a not-so-silent partner. The hens would have good lives, we’d eat their eggs, and then, once they stopped laying, we’d face the ultimate question of whether to eat their flesh.

Abu Talib

The talk was at Taqwa Community Farm, an acre of plots near Yankee Stadium. Once littered with hypodermic needles and trash, the place is now home to ten chickens and a beekeeping operation (beekeeping was recently legalized in New York City). The founder of the farm, Abu Talib, raises the hens and sells or gives away their eggs. At our seminar, sponsored by Just Food, Mr. Talib and Karen Washington of La Familia Verde Community Garden Coalition introduced us to the basics of city chicken keeping.[ref]

To prove how totally ignorant I was about some rather basic chicken facts, here are direct excerpts from my notes:

* Coop=their house. Run=their “yard.”
* Eggs are just eggs–like human ovulation, they must be fertilized by rooster to become chicken.
* Brooding=sitting on eggs and not doing anything else.
* Straw=remnants of hay.
[/ref]

Here’s what you do:

Karen Washington

• Build a predator-proof coop (henhouse) and chicken run out of wood and chicken wire. You can buy kits with everything you need, or design one yourself. The run should be big enough for the chickens to roam freely.
• Fill the henhouse with hay so it’s warm in winter, and use hay to cover the run.
• Build nesting boxes in the coop for hens to lay their eggs.
• Get at least two hens (they don’t like to be alone), and choose an appropriate breed: in New York City the best choices are Rhode Island Red, Australoop, and Cochins because they’re good egg-layers, fairly resistant to disease, and gentle. You can actually find hens on petfinder.com!
• Once a week shovel their poop and straw into a compost heap to create the “black gold” fertilizer gardeners dream about.
• Feed and water them twice a day; they’ll find bugs, grubs, and worms on their own.
• Collect their eggs frequently so they don’t eat them.

Stephan imagines the possibilities.

Some neighbors of Stephan’s are already doing this, so we’re going to talk to them and check out their coop and run. Stay tuned…

Previously, in Digging for Gold, Michael presented the results of his search for local humane-certified meat and animal products. Now he’s back to explain how to do a similar search in your area.

First off, brace yourself, because this isn’t easy. For one thing, there’s no central database for this information, so you have to cobble it together from many different sources. Also, there simply aren’t that many certified products, and the products that do exist can be impossible to locate online. Still, if you’re committed to eating humanely-raised meat, one local source can make all the difference, so why not give it a shot?

Note: Third-party certification doesn’t necessarily apply to all products made by a particular producer. The key thing is the seal. If a product has a certified seal, it’s certified. No seal, no certification.[ref]Actually, I found a few certified products that lack the seal. However, to preserve both time and sanity, it’s best to pretend this can’t happen.[/ref]

Let’s take it one certifier at a time.

American Humane Certified

1. Go to http://thehumanetouch.org/certified-producers. This page lists all Certified Humane producers arranged by product type (beef, poultry, dairy, etc.). Each section includes a list of producers, their locations, and a link to their profiles. Click through to the profiles of promising producers.
2. Read the producer profiles. If a producer still seems promising, click through to their website.
3. Here’s where the going gets rough, because producer websites don’t necessarily indicate which products are certified, and only rarely identify where certified products are sold. If you run into trouble on either front, I recommend doing an advanced Google search on the term certified within the website. If this fails to uncover the necessary information, or more likely reveals that the information isn’t there, you might try contacting the producer directly. Otherwise, if you’re lucky enough to know the name of the product or products you’re looking for, move on to step #4.
4. Try a search that combines the product name with the name of your city or region. This is how I found a source for bacon: I already knew the product name from the producer’s website, so I did a search that combined the product name with the phrase “New York.”

Certified Humane

1. Go to http://www.certifiedhumane.org/about/whoiscertified.html. This page lists producers in two alphabetized groups: those who produce only certified products, and those who produce a combination of certified and uncertified products (the latter lists all certified products made by each producer). Click through to the websites of promising producers.

From here, refer to step #3 under American Certified Humane, above.

Animal Welfare Approved

AWA has three times as many producers as the other two groups combined. You might think this would make AWA-certified products more readily available, but that’s not the case–or at least not in New York.[ref]AWA works with smaller producers than the two other certifiers, so more AWA producers doesn’t necessary equal more AWA-certified products. For more on the differences between the certifiers, see One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.[/ref]

One thing AWA does have over the others is an online database. However, it’s not without its flaws. For example, search results include a hodgepodge of sources and suppliers: farms, farmers markets, online stores and catalogs, grocery stores and supermarkets, specialty foodshops, food processors/marketers/distributors, and especially (or especially in New York) restaurants. So if you’re only looking for certified products in local retail stores, your search results are going to include a lot of dead ends.

The steps:

1. Go to http://www.animalwelfareapproved.org/awasearch/search/bystate_product and search on one or more product types within a particular state. Click through to profiles of promising sources.
2. Read each profile, and if a source still seems promising, click through to its website.
3. From here, refer to step #3 under American Certified Humane, above.