“Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. ‘Life is not very interesting,’ we seem to have decided. ‘Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast’”
On 27 March, 2018 chef Michael Hunter left the kitchen of his Toronto restaurant to greet anti-meat protestors with a deer leg and a butcher’s knife in hand, proceeding to carve it in front of them. “He’s rejoicing in the dismembering of an animal!” says one of activists in a live video posted to Facebook. Hunter’s restaurant serves up wild boar minced venison, bison steak, and duck heart yakitori—all claimed to be sourced ethically and locally. His patrons are “food-conscious carnivores” who are mindful that the animals graze freely and live an enjoyable life. Yet Hunter serves foie gras in his restaurant, a food which is notoriously known as the most cruelly produced animal product that involves force feeding ducks through a tube. Hunter is part of an ethical gourmand movement which emphasizes conscientious eating regardless of whether it is meat or vegetables being eaten. His argument is that ethical food consumption depends on having a meaningful relationship with your food—knowing where it comes from, participating in its production, cooking it yourself, getting it locally, knowing the life history of the species—these activities not only justify eating but define what good eating is. The anti-meat activists outside of Hunter’s restaurant vehemently disagree.
The protestors outside of Hunter’s restaurant have a hardline stance against animal killing of any kind. “It’s a line that cannot be crossed” weighs in Alex Lockwood, “There is no humane killing. These restaurants remain within the exploitative bubble of human exceptionalism”. While these anti-meat activists claim to be driven by the categorical wrongness of killing other beings, the choice to target “conscientious carnivores” rather than fast food restaurants killing animals on an industrial scale may seem puzzling. However, it makes sense in consideration of the great privilege and awareness required to describe oneself as conscientious carnivore. Such diners choose to eat animals which have lived privileged lives themselves. This choice exemplifies a preoccupation with the life that an animal has lived and suggest a valuation and awareness of that animal’s life that a vegan activist might share with a carnivore. The difference is that the meat-eater’s valuation finds its end in a brief pre-indulgent contemplation—like the lumberjack who has just chopped down a 100 year old tree and stops to marvel at the tree rings. Whereas patrons of fast food restaurants can claim ignorance of factory farming, the “conscientious carnivores” who dine at Hunter’s restaurant relish in the awareness of where their food comes from. When an ethically-raised animal ends up on one’s dinner plate, imagining the enjoyable life it had becomes the aperitif. This may be why vegan activists target these restaurants. There is something deeply offensive and perhaps fetishizing about contemplating an animal’s intrinsic value of its own life as one eats it.
The position held by Hunter and ethical gourmands is not one which is ethically defendable in an immediately intuitive way. Familiar lines of ethical argument such as utilitarianism or deontology focus on maximizing the best consequences or the universal applicability of actions. Both of these condemn the loss of life as unethical and neither seem to care whether one has a special relationship with the thing being killing.
One way to make sense of ethical gourmandism may be found in the environmental ethics of Holmes Rolston III. Rolston claims that when we describe nature’s function we describe its correct function. We find ourselves in a place which is already valuable regardless of the values we prescribe in our human-to-human interactions. He describes our confrontation with “a projective nature, one restlessly full of projects—stars, comets, planets, moons, and also rocks, crystals, rivers, canyons, seas”. While a rock may not have “wills or interests” which seem worthy of ethical consideration, these abiotic natural projects still have “headings, trajectories, traits, successions, beginnings, endings, cycles, which give them a tectonic integrity”. In practice, many natural projects such as predation seem coldly indifferent to individual life—“blind and ever urgent exploitation is nature's driving theme”. Yet this exploitation underlies a “generating, maintaining system [which] is prior to individual life”. It is these spontaneous yet systemic projects which increase species diversity and increase the quality of individual life over the course of geological time. A natural system is just as real as the organisms which constitute it. It is on this systemic level that “storied natural history” is delineated and it is on this level that we can look back on the genealogy of our own potential to be valuers in the first place. It is on this basis that eating meat is justified. According to Rolston it is appropriate to “leave wild animals to the ravages of nature” since such spontaneous suffering precedes us, reaffirms a valuable ecology, and is instrumental to projective nature.
While one of the protestors outside of Hunter’s restaurant claims that ethical gourmands are acting within a “bubble of human exceptionalism”, Rolston would flip this around to say that anti-meat protestors are the ones stuck inside this kind of bubble. It is anthropocentrism which leads us to ask questions such as ‘Can they suffer?’ or ‘Is it alive?’—questions clearly originating from our compassion for other beings but not particularly relevant to natural systems. Appreciating the miraculous story of nature requires going beyond anthropocentric value. Thus the ethical dilemma to extract from the events that unfolded outside Hunter’s restaurant goes beyond the ethics of eating meat and is really about humanity’s relationship with nature on a broader scale. Do we approach nature by expanding the intimate circle of our anthropocentric moral concern or should we locate and embrace wild values that may seem alien or bloodthirsty?
Gourmandism confronts us with the clash of taste and brutality. Foods like foie gras demonstrate how chefs are willing to cause suffering in pursuit of flavour. But the search for flavour, which is in itself an artifactual frontier that culinary artists constantly push, often goes hand in hand with a respect for natural ingredients and preparation methods. Rolston’s philosophy suggests nature should not be approached by expanding our moral concern as we would to fellow humans, but rather by discovering and following an aesthetic of wild value. Such value may seem brutal unless one is convinced that natural suffering is a painful good which propels the story of natural history towards new and higher value.
“The duck-hunter in his blind and the operatic singer on the stage, despite the disparity of their accoutrements, are doing the same thing. Each is reviving, in play, a drama formerly inherent in daily life. Both are, in the last analysis, esthetic exercises.”
Quotes from Holmes Rolston are from his book “Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World”. I can share the page numbers if anyone is interested.
Some details about Hunter’s restaurant are based on this article from the Guardian written by Calum Marsh.