One of my favorite Italian dishes was scaloppine al limone, a fried cut of veal with lemon juice. Second favorite would be any other scaloppine, but it’s been a couple of years since I tasted any. See, the trouble is, they’re made with veal, and the way veal itself is made takes all the fun out of eating any.
If you think too much about the ordeal all of your meat dishes go through on their way to your table, it does nothing to help your enjoyment of even fried chicken or a pork chop. But with most meats, the animal at least gets some kind of life before the chop-chop. The calf gets nothing. At birth he goes into a wooden crate too small to turn around in. He never tastes his mother’s milk. That’s pumped away to sell, while the baby is given a formula that is liberally mixed with streptomycin, penicillin and four or five other antibiotics, for the purpose of making him grow faster. Their secondary effect is that they also give him constant diarrhea, which no one cleans away, so the calf lies in it for most of its life.
Oh, and they have one other effect. They contribute to that exercise in controlled breeding that the farmers of the world have been carrying on for some generations now, in which their antibiotics kill off all the weaker bacteria, leaving the stronger — and better able to resist all known antibiotics — in each generation to become the dominant varieties. This, in turn, has its own effects, one of which is that my personal resident bacteria are now immune to all known antibiotics except to those few that are almost as toxic to large mammals — like me, for instance — as to the bacteria they are meant to control.
This, of course, means that, if and when I pick up any future serious infection, my doctors will have to guess whether the antibacterial properties of one of them outweighs its toxicity. Or whether, on the other hand, the effect of injecting me with it would resemble the effects of infecting strychnine.
But enough about me.
So tell me: do you still really enjoy veal? Or, to look at the problem from a different angle, should we go on letting the veal manufacturers grow the little calves in total misery when they could at least give them clean crates?
Mo says:
Veal crates have been banned in the UK for over 20 years, and the European Union as a whole for four years. I think a few of the US states have enacted bans, although I don’t know if that’s actually come into force anywhere yet.
October 29, 2011, 6:31 amJohn Traylor says:
As I live in a county that has many farms, many of them Amish or Mennonite I long ago saw first hand how the calves are treated and I lost all taste for veal many years ago.
October 29, 2011, 8:01 amA very nice post Mr. Pohl.
Shakatany says:
Several years ago I did some research for my friend Amy Hatkoff who was writing her book, “The Inner World of Farm Animals” with stories of the intelligence and personalities of the animals that are forced to suffer in the huge farm factories before they are slaughtered. I haven’t given up meat entirely but now I’m a part-time vegetarian.
October 29, 2011, 9:07 amKen Marable says:
I’m with you and haven’t ate veal since I first found out what it was. Thankfully, I heard the truth when I was only about 12, so I haven’t gone anywhere near veal for decades and have told my kids from day one how horrifying it is.
October 29, 2011, 10:33 ampjcamp says:
Haven’t eaten veal in 30 years. I avoid all the products of factory farms.
October 30, 2011, 12:43 amdrlloyd11 says:
Hi,
It honestly doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I’m not saying that to be combative or because some right-wing radio jerk said so. I simply don’t feel any empathetic feeling on this.
Now please, before words like “sociopath” get banded about I’m not like this with humans or even house pets. Heck, I can’t evil choose the “Evil path” in RPGs (Bioware games for example). But there is no switch that fires in my mind that makes be feel even slightly bad. I literally mean this in the most basic way.
I can get on some soapbox or something and expound on this, but I present this information to explain that
1) There are some people who will be presented with information on how something they like or use has a negative effect on others and they just won’t care.
2)This can be a-lot of things, cigarettes, IPods, cars, pornography, or those cheap shirts at wal mart.
3)Some people who feel this way may get defensive or make up some conspiracy theory that what they are told is not true, but those people are just fooling them selves.
4)I actually dislike immensely the idea of a creature suffering ever, but someone that doesn’t factor into the this.
So I present myself as a specimen of home-sapiens-carnivorous-no-conscience-foodus . A person who for what ever reason simply feels nothing on this topic, but is not a psychopath or anything like that.
October 30, 2011, 7:00 amIn any event, I hope people reply to this if they disagree .
Smith says:
Maybe you can order veal from a country with slightly more civilised farming practices?
http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=new+zealand+veal+farming&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a
October 31, 2011, 2:18 amJonathan K. Stephens says:
Hi,
Yep, sorry Mr. P., I’m with drlloyd11 on this one.
I’m not going to split hairs on this one. While morally against obvious unnecessary cruelty to animals, believing that such actions reveal a dangerously unbalanced mind, I’m an omnivore and I eat meat. I like veal and I don’t have any hesitation in eating it.
It was presented to me at an early age that in the final analysis these are animals, and their only function is to be eaten, much like the point of view of lions hunting young zebras in Africa.
I choose to believe that most farmers are reasonably ethical individuals whose product quality depends on them acting in a reasonably ethical manner. I’m sure there are a couple of bad eggs out there but I trust that they will eventually be weeded out. That is, of course, one of the purposes of having laws.
In reading this, I was immediately reminded of a quote by one of your old pals, REH, and I’m shoehorning it in to illustrate my point of view.
“There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who ‘love Nature’ while deploring the ‘artificialities’ with which ‘Man has spoiled ‘Nature.’ The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of ‘Nature’ — but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the Naturist reveals his hatred for his own race — i.e., his own self-hatred.”
All the best,
JKS
November 2, 2011, 10:58 pmJoel says:
Virtually all meat production in the U.S. — not just veal — is horrifically cruel. If you can’t eat veal, you shouldn’t be able to eat any beef, or pork, or chicken produced by a large distributor. Dairy too.
It sounds extreme, but it’s the reality of factory farming. Not thinking about it doesn’t make the suffering of all of those animals go away.
November 3, 2011, 4:56 pmJay Borcherding says:
I have an affinity for animals in general and mammals in particular, and I deplore cruelty. Having said that, I also enjoy eating some animals.
So long as my omnivorous lifestyle is not fundamentally threatened, I believe it is only reasonable, just, and fair that the creatures who are destined to be human meals be treated as kindly as possible.
The active torment and torture that Fred describes is deplorable, and ought to be banned. It is a relief that I’ve only rarely eaten veal–I prefer the taste of adults cattle–but it saddens me that such cruel farming practices continue to occur in the U.S.
November 4, 2011, 8:15 pmJJ Brannon says:
I agree with Dr. Lloyd. Before hieing with my parents to Alaska to begin my formal education, I lived on a farm. My kept a pig we named Pinky and I fed her slops, singing to her and scratching the bristles between her ears.
Then, when she was nicely fattened, we ate her.
This, by the way, is the story I told the college kids pressing the Ban Veal pamphlets into my hands on South Street, Philly, when I was walking there with my XSO in 1988, before I flicked the pamphlet back into the hands of their callow leader, with the caveat, “Make sure before you arrogantly presume to foist your propaganda on to someone, that the person isn’t one who thinks his childhood pet made the tastiest pork-chops he’s ever eaten.”
They paled to a light-blue-greenish hue and did everything but make the Sign of the Cross against me as they hastily retreated.
My Dad, with me in tow, also used to shoot Bambi and take the carcass to the slaughterhouse to wrap for the deep-freezer as nice joints of venison.
Fred, you’re one of the most gracious authors I’ve had the pleasure to meet but, as in the instance of the crawfish/shrimp farm story earlier, some of us have not been indoctrinated to anthropomorphize our food and cannot agree with your stance. We can agree that you have a right to your own feelings on the matter but it is entirely unpersuasive.
There’s an interesting article I read in the few years discussing ethics/morality that considered the hypothetical case of a family eating their own dog that was killed in an accident and how this relates to conservatism vs. liberalism.
JJB
November 4, 2011, 9:21 pmJJ Brannon says:
Okay, I forgot to include the link to the articel:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html
JJB
November 4, 2011, 9:24 pmCatherine N. says:
I have found local humanely-raised veal. Its fabulous. I try not to eat meat that is factory-farmed, but eat local as much as possible….
I do think that the Big Agriculture companies have gone overboard, in treating animals like components in a factory processing system. The best way to combat this is by eating animals from small, local places, much like doing a CSA, when you buy a share in a local farm’s harvest.
I just believe that we can eat animals, but we should eat animals raised the way nature intended, with love, and good treatment. And killed humanely. And I do my best to do this.
See if you can find a local farm that raises their own veal humanely…
November 9, 2011, 9:51 amSkinner says:
I used to eat veal, but when my girlfriend (now fiance) asked me to simply think for a while about the horrors a veal calf goes through, I decided I’d rather not eat it in future. And now I don’t eat veal. Cheers.
November 10, 2011, 5:43 am