Pharm Animals

Recently I read ‘Eating Animals’, the shocking book by Jonathan Safran Foer that lifts the lid on modern farming methods and challenges us to think about our attitudes to meat. It is an emotional appeal, and rightly so, as we have become progressively detached from our food sources. Although he makes the case very well indeed, Jonathan does not set out to persuade us to become vegetarian, but rather to have a deep appreciation for the animals and to safeguard their welfare in both life and death.

Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs)are now the norm in America and for decades commercial  chicken meat has been produced in densely packed fowl sheds around the world. Animals are herded and flocked out of sight and out of mind. Their growth is accelerated and their days and nights artificially regulated so that their slaughter can be scheduled to match market demands. How have we become so indifferent to their plight? In what other aspects of our lives have we become similarly clinical and detached? Given a moment to pause, what warnings might we take from these situations?

My nightmare scenario is of a world in which humanity farms itself in the pursuit of profit. Many would argue that it’s already happening. We are witnessing an explosion of chronic disease in the Western world most of which can be attributed to diet abnormalities and stress. Obesity, Diabetes, Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer rates are affecting ever younger people as we consume more refined carbohydrate ‘convenience’ foods on the run in our competitive 24/7 world. Now, by our mid-fifties, we have created a captive market for the pharmaceutical industries. They have created a bewildering array of pills for our ailments.  So we take our statins, our beta blockers, our anti-depressants, NSAIDS and sleeping pills to get us through the day. Our life expectancy may have been extended but our quality of life has been extinguished.

In a grotesque parallel to the meat we eat, we are ‘pharming’ ourselves out of sight and certainly out of our minds. Aggressive business plans demand that our organisations grow at accelerated rates and that we compete rather than cooperate. We feed ourselves fat salaries and long hours, so that we can go to and come home from work in the dark. We don’t see our families, though we chain ourselves with mortgages so that we can feed our illusions of family living. Surgical or accountancy interventions reshape our bodies, our corporations, to create the lean and mean fighting machines that can win in the arena of our choosing – or more likely, in the arena of someone else’s choosing. We burn out on schedule and retire to a world of medication and suffering.

As with Saffron Foer, I urge that we pause, not necessarily to abandon the challenges of modern life, but to cultivate a deep appreciation for our fellow man so that we can live life to the full and protect our planet for future generations. Let us not waste our days as headless chickens on the conveyor belt of capitalism but become the ‘Organic Free Range Citizens’ we were born to be.

©Paul Curran, April 2012