There are three food certification programs that focus on the humane treatment of farm animals. They’re all administered by animal welfare organizations. When you see these seals on meat and dairy product packaging, you know they meet certain standards of humane treatment of animals:

It’s hard to say which is best. They all have winning qualities and they all probably have some problems.

• Animal Welfare Approved (AWA) has the most stringent standards and only works with small family farms. They also don’t charge farmers, so they have no vested interest in awarding their seal.
• Certified Humane is endorsed by the ASPC. Temple Grandin is on their Scientific Committee.
• American Humane Certified (AHC) traces its roots back to the formation of the Humane Society in 1877. Temple Grandin is on their Advisory Board.

That’s all fine and good, right? Now, inevitably, the bad news: very few farmers, including those with evident concern for animal welfare, are certifying their products. In addition, the products that are being certified are difficult to find. (An upcoming post will detail Michael’s research on this, and show how to locate certified products in your area.)

We have some guesses about why so few farmers are certifying:

• Certification may be too expensive (although AWA does it for free).
• Small farmers may be selling out their entire stock without the aid of certification, reducing the incentive to certify.
• Farmers may consider one or more standards burdensome, cost-prohibitive, or misguided.
• Farmers that certify may not have the production capacity necessary to get their products into supermarkets. This may be the case with our beloved co-op.

The seals are a guarantee that a set of humane standards are met, but not having the seal doesn’t mean they’re not. For me, the seal is not needed so long as I believe the farmer is treating his or her animals humanely. What constitutes proof of this? I really don’t know. So I’ve started to go to the farmers market at Grand Army Plaza to talk to farmers directly (more on this in my next post), and soon I’ll begin visiting local farms. The journey continues.

In trying to figure things out, here’s what I’ve read so far. It’s been equal parts horrifying, inspiring, nauseating, and fascinating:

• The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
• In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
• Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin
• Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin
• The Compassionate Carnivore by Catherine Friend (I’m halfway through this one)

And here’s what’s at the top of the pile:

• The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
• Bringing It to the Table: On Farming and Food by Wendell Berry
• Meat: A Love Story by Susan Bourette
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma for Kids: The Secrets Behind What You Eat by Michael Pollan
• Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food by Gene Baur
• Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy by Matthew Scully

I haven’t read in this kind of depth about any topic since grad school. I’m eager to round out my syllabus, so please feel free to recommend additional reading!

I’m good at guilt. For instance, I feel guilty that I wasn’t nicer to my mother. This is one thing, but I manage to take it further by feeling guilty that I’m healthy and fit, while my mother was the opposite–until she died at 62 of obesity-related heart disease. Maybe my concern about diet is partly a response to her diet; after all, if her food practices had been different, maybe she’d still be here (I’ll never know).

My mother was Italian and my father was Jewish, which may contribute some teeny-tiny bit to my food and guilt issues.

I feel guilty that I’ve eaten so many animals who had lived ghastly lives and died horrid deaths. I feel even guiltier that for several years, I did so knowing the reality of factory farming, and still enjoyed every bite. I feel guilty that, as I ate burger after burger, I had the hubris to smirk and call those burgers “guilty pleasures” as I ate them, as if that awareness would absolve me.

I’m working on the guilt. I know it serves no purpose. It’s like feeling pity for a homeless person and averting your eyes. Pity changes nothing. I don’t need to feel guilty, just inform myself enough to decide on some personal food policies and stick to them. Enough with the guilt already, I’m making myself nuts.

If yellow is the color of cowardice, and green the color of envy, what’s the color of guilt? I imagine it a deep, glistening red. Nicely marbled with beige fat.

I’m reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and loving it. It’s her memoir of her family’s first year of exclusively eating locally (she and her family have a small farm in the southern Appalachians). Last night I read her account of “harvest day”; that is, the slaughtering of six roosters and six turkeys she raised from chicks.

She’s a family farmer who practices low-stress, painless slaughter. “Harvest” is a family affair; even Kingsolver’s 9-year-old daughter participates. I thought the chapter would be too heavy and disturbing for bedtime reading. And it kind of was, but not in a bad way, if that makes sense.

It was simply an honest description of how animals become food (if they’re lucky enough to be raised outside the factory system). The bird is taken from its coop, carried across the yard upside down by the legs (which lulls them to “sleep”) and is set across a chopping block. What happens next is, as Kingsolver notes, “quick and final. All sensation ends with that quick stroke.” She and the other adults present answer the kids’ questions, and the whole gang eventually settles into shared gallows humor. About this backyard “bloodbath” (she is covered in blood by day’s end) Kingsolver writes:

U.S. consumers may take our pick of reasons to be wary of [factory-farmed meat]: growth hormones, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, unhealthy cholesterol composition, deadly E. coli strains, fuel consumption, concentration of manure into toxic waste lagoons, and the turpitude of keeping confined creatures at the limits of their physiological and psychological endurance. It’s that last one that finally ended it for me. Yes, I am a person who raises some animals for the purpose of whacking them into cuts of meat for my family. But this work has made me more sympathetic, not less, toward the poor wretches that live shoulder to shoulder with their brethren waiting for the next meal of stomach-corroding porridge.

In an essay titled “Food With a Face,” Michael Pollan wrote:

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what Capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory consent. Here, in these places, life itself is redefined–as protein production–and with it, suffering… the industrialization and dehumanization of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do.

On the other hand, Kingsolver’s farm offers a dreamy glimpse into the alternative. Her chickens’ lives and deaths are the opposite of brutal, and her descriptions of raising animals for food are lyrical and real. I’ve haven’t read her fiction yet, but her lifestyle and food practices are so idyllic, the book feels like an escape in the same way a good novel does.