The Problem with Fake Meat

The writer and social commenter Ezra Klein recently published an article in the New York Times, entitled ‘The Gross Cruelty of Factory Farming,’ which rightly decried our world’s practice of producing animals for consumption as though they are iPhones. You can’t talk about the horrors of the practice without talking about them, and Klein does mention what life and death are like, for instance, for the chickens that are raised this way. He hopes that most of us will be mortified, perhaps more than ever before, and that we will join him as he calls for two remedial approaches to these awful methods. He proposes on one hand that we help fund organizations that try to improve conditions for animals destined to be food; and secondly, that we embrace the nascent movement to replace meat with that which can be grown or otherwise produced in a factory.

I am an admiring reader of the brilliant and polymathic Mr. Klein, and am enthusiastically sympathetic to his cause, but I believe that his assessment completely neglects the most significant part of the problem. I could not commend him or this piece any more highly for shining a light on the gruesomeness of our meat habit over the course of the last half-century. It is an abomination in every way, including for the planet and for our bodies, and the cruelty inflicted on other living creatures is worst of all. But the suggestion that mitigating the circumstances of the animals, and learning to mass produce fake meat in factories, are the two best solutions, without also suggesting that people could think about eating quite a bit less meat, is, so to speak, like missing the broad side of the barn.

The invention and development of processed food was, in the first place, precisely the cause of the mess we’re in — and in many more ways than one. When American factories started manufacturing Wonder Bread and Velveeta, and people began to forget the last time they made a pot of soup, a Pandora’s box of deficiencies was unleashed, with which we are all still very much reckoning. The profound ways in which we lost touch with real food are many, and are voluminously insidious. For one thing, millions of people began to lose a sense for what, exactly, they were eating, and subsequently for when they had had enough to eat. They ate bags of Doritos and Oreos, utterly failing to realize that there was not a drop of nutrition to be found therein. The calories were automatic, and effortless, and that unmistakable chemical whiff of factory-produced aroma wafted from the plastic packaging as soon as it was opened. Obesity soon followed. The junk food, as it has been called, might as well have been dusted with cocaine.

Also, and more importantly lost, in the decades since the obliteration of American cooking, was a common love for the magnificent raw ingredients that come out of the earth. Carrots, onions and celery are curse words at this moment, in the mostly sad history of food in this country. Children learn to scrunch their faces, as though there is something foul about them; chefs virtually never mention them on menus. You are probably ten or a hundred times more likely to hear someone, randomly declare their distaste for broccoli, or beans, or asparagus, or tomatoes, than you are to hear someone exalt any of them, or relish their seasonal arrival. Before American business made them a proper noun, ‘whole’ foods were thought by some to be making a comeback; but appreciation for ingredients is hard to spot, beyond tony little urban markets and salad shops. Mostly, America in 2022 is still a place where there are a thousand fast food hamburgers for every fresh salad, or bowl of homemade soup.

Klein’s piece is deeply unsettling, and it should be. The whole thing is unsettling. He wants us to think for a few minutes about what happens on the kill floor at a chicken processing plant. I take him up on that, and then I think about the vision he puts forth, of massive factories, operated by computers and a few people in hazmat suits, where petri dish-grown chicken is processed into protein-rich crap with dipping sauces. I wonder if that seems like a rosy scenario to him or anyone else who doesn’t own the factories. Some will say that massive models are necessary to feed people for the pennies they have to spend on food. Others will say that people are overworked and have no time to cook for themselves or their families. But is there any doubt that we must rediscover respect for food, and that this should and must come first? I am not talking about expensive ingredients, nor about elaborate preparations. I am talking about making sauerkraut from cabbage, and making popcorn instead of opening a can of Pringles. For those who can square it ethically, I am talking about eating high-quality, humanely-raised meat, and hopefully quite a bit less of it.

The same day I read Mr. Klein’s piece, I was pushing my cart through my local food co-op, when I was approached by a petite older lady. She was about eighty years-old, and even so, she seemed rather sprightly, in her track suit top and coiffed haircut. She and I had passed each other a few times in the produce section, and by the time we both had moved into bulk foods, she summoned the will to ask me a question about my cart full of vegetables. Pointing at a plastic bag stuffed with baby arugula, she asked, “Do you cook that or eat it raw?” I am a chef, and I love being asked questions about ingredients, inside the restaurant or out. Anyone who asks me a question in a supermarket is likely to receive a somewhat comprehensive reply. “You know,” I said, “You can cook arugula, but if I’m going to sautée some greens, I’ll choose some that are a little heartier. I like chard, or broccoli rabe, I would even prefer sautéed spinach to arugula. I like arugula for its raw texture, and spicy flavor. I like it in salads.” “Huh,” she said, absorbing the information. “I never learned to love vegetables.”

I would like to suggest that the worst facet in the enormous debacle that is our attitude towards meat is the cruelty we exhibit towards animals. I am deeply sympathetic to vegetarians, and am never sure that I won’t be one soon. But right behind the cruelty, on a list of worst things, is the carelessness we exhibit with our own bodies. We love precious few of the ingredients we eat, and mostly, in fact, don’t even know what they are. A prescription to address the horror that is factory farming, by the engineering of man-made mystery meat wrapped in plastic, does not seem to mitigate the root of the problem. We need to zoom in, not out, on the ingredients that come from the earth, including meat. We have a lot of room to become more adept at recognizing them and handling them, and at fostering respect for the gifts they bestow.