Bringing Moos and Oinks Into the Food Debate

[Guest guest]

Bringing Moos and Oinks Into the Food Debate

New York Times

July 25, 2007

THE first farm animal Gene Baur ever snatched from a stockyard was a lamb he

named Hilda.

That was 1986. She’s now buried under a little tombstone near the center of

Farm Sanctuary, 180 acres of vegan nirvana here in the Finger Lakes region of

upstate New York.

Back then, Mr. Baur was living in a school bus near a tofu factory in

Pennsylvania and selling vegetarian hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts to

support his animal rescue operation.

Now, more than a thousand animals once destined for the slaughterhouse live

here and on another Farm Sanctuary property in California. Farm Sanctuary has a

$5.7 million budget, fed in part by a donor club named after his beloved Hilda.

Supporters can sign up for a Farm Sanctuary MasterCard. A $200-a-seat gala

dinner in Los Angeles this fall will feature seitan Wellington and stars like

Emily Deschanel and Forest Whitaker.

As Farm Sanctuary has grown, so too has its influence. Soon, due in part to

the organization’s work, veal calves and pregnant pigs in Arizona won’t be kept

in cages so tight they can’t turn around. Eggs from cage-free hens have become

so popular that there is a national shortage. A law in Chicago bans the sale of

foie gras.

And earlier this month, the New Jersey Supreme Court agreed to hear a case

concerning common farming practices that a coalition led by Farm Sanctuary says

are inhumane.

All of these developments reflect the maturation and sophistication of Mr.

Baur and others in a network of animal activists who have more control over

America’s dinner table than ever before.

Among animal rights groups, the 1980s were considered the decade of

grass-roots activism. The 1990s saw the rise of court actions and ballot

initiatives. This decade is about building budgets, influencing policy and

cultivating elected officials, all with a deliberate focus on livestock.

Farm Sanctuary and other groups still know how to make the most of gory

slaughterhouse footage from hidden cameras. The animals they call " rescued " —

some abandoned, some saved from natural disasters, some left for dead at

slaughterhouses — clearly started life as someone else’s property.

But in recent years they have adopted more subtle tactics, like holding stock

in major food corporations, organizing nimble political campaigns and lobbying

lawmakers.

While some groups, like the Animal Welfare Institute, work with ranchers to

codify the best methods of raising animals for meat and eggs, most, like Farm

Sanctuary and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, ultimately want

people to stop using even wool and honey because they believe the products

exploit living creatures.

But all of these believers have learned that with less stridency comes more

respect and influence in food politics. So they no longer concentrate their

energy on burning effigies of Colonel Sanders and stealing chickens. They don’t

demonize meat — with the exception of foie gras and veal — or the people who

produce it. Instead, they use softer rhetoric, focusing on a campaign even

committed carnivores can get behind: better conditions for farm animals.

In some ways, it’s simply a matter of style.

" Instead of telling it like it is, we’re learning to present things in a more

moderate way, " Mr. Baur said. " When it comes to this vegan ideal, that’s an

aspiration. Would I love everyone to be vegan? Yes. But we want to be respectful

and not judgmental. "

Certainly, concerns over health and food safety, and a growing interest in

where food comes from among consumers and chefs, has made animal welfare an

easier sell.

Technology has helped savvy activists deliver their message, too —

specifically mass e-mail, easily concealed cameras and the ability to quickly

distribute images online, like footage of slaughterhouses and the 2004 spoof

" The Meatrix. "

They have also learned to harness the power of celebrity in a tabloid culture,

courting as spokespeople anyone famous who might have recently put down steak

tartare in favor of vegetable carpaccio.

" I think there is a shift in public consciousness, " said Bruce Friedrich, vice

president of international grass-roots campaigns for PETA. " When Cameron Diaz

learns that pigs are smarter than 3-year-olds and she’s like, ‘Oh my God, I’m

eating my niece,’ that has an impact. "

The image makeover has been so successful that a 2006 survey of 5,000 people

ages 13 to 24 showed that PETA was the nonprofit organization most would like to

volunteer for, according to the market research firm Label Networks. The

American Red Cross was second.

Beyond image polishing, animal rights groups also learned how to marshal

resources and set up a classic " good-cop, bad-cop " dynamic to put farm animal

welfare on legislative agendas. The Chicago foie gras ban was passed because the

nation’s largest animal rights groups coordinated their strategies, according to

several who were involved. A Chicago alderman, Joe Moore, read an article about

the fight over foie gras between the chefs Charlie Trotter and Rick Tramonto and

proposed a ban. Word spread quickly among local and national animal rights

groups, some of whom Mr. Moore invited to play a leading role.

The game was on. Farm Sanctuary put one of its lobbyists on the case. The

Humane Society of the United States paid for large ads in the city’s newspapers.

The activists gave Mr. Moore a controversial video supposedly showing life

inside a California foie gras operation made by the Animal Protection and Rescue

League and PETA. He screened it at a city hearing.

PETA, whose over-the-top protests are considered divisive by some animal

rights groups, stayed away on the day of the vote. The law is now being

reconsidered, and PETA has unleashed its supporters.

PETA uses more than half of its $30 million budget to poke the meat and

fast-food industry in the eye with shock-based educational campaigns. PETA

protesters have handed out Unhappy Meals filled with bloody, dismembered toy

animals and miniature KFC buckets filled with packets of fake blood and bones.

As factions in the animal rights movement continue to grow and splinter,

sometimes using violence to make their point, the Humane Society, which is 30

years older than PETA, has emerged as the reasonable, wise big brother of the

farm animal protection movement.

The arrival of Wayne Pacelle as head of the Humane Society in 2004 both

turbo-charged the farm animal welfare movement and gave it a sheen of

respectability.

As the organization’s first vegan president, he quickly sharpened the group’s

focus to farm animals. He also absorbed smaller organizations, merging with the

180,000-member Doris Day Animal League and the Fund for Animals. The budget has

jumped to $132 million from $75 million, Mr. Pacelle said.

Like PETA, the Humane Society has purchased enough stock in corporations like

Tyson, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Smithfield’s to have the legal clout to

introduce resolutions.

Mr. Friedrich said PETA had some early success pressuring stockholders when it

was fighting to stop companies from testing soap and beauty products on animals.

It then began buying stock in McDonald’s, attending a shareholder’s meeting for

the first time in 1998.

Like Mr. Baur, Mr. Pacelle understands that not everyone is going to stop

eating animals, so he focuses on what he calls the three R’s: refinement of

farming techniques, reducing meat consumption and replacement of animal

products. That way, he hopes, the Humane Society tent is big enough to include

both ardent meat eaters and hard-core vegans.

The broader-umbrella approach is working. Take the case of Wolfgang Puck. In

March, he announced that he would stop serving foie gras and buy eggs only from

chickens not confined to small cages. Veal, pork and poultry suppliers will have

to abide by stricter standards, too.

For five years before the announcement, Mr. Baur’s group had been pressuring

Mr. Puck to change his meaty ways. Mr. Puck, in an interview in March, said that

had nothing to do with his new policies. He simply came to the conclusion that

better standards were the best thing for his customers, his food and the

animals. But he did credit the Humane Society for his education.

Mr. Puck met Mr. Pacelle through Sharon Patrick, a branding consultant he had

hired. Ms. Patrick, the former president of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia,

believed animal welfare could be an important component in her plan for Mr.

Puck.

She brokered a meeting between the two men, and eight months later Mr. Puck

presented his new animal welfare plan.

But farmers and corporations are only gingerly endorsing animal rights groups

— if at all.

The flurry of corporate animal welfare policies that began in 1999 with

McDonald’s are simply sound corporate strategy, company representatives say. The

genesis was likely the 1993 E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants,

which sickened hundreds and killed four children. Companies realized they had to

get a better handle on where their meat was coming from.

And they say it had nothing to do with PETA.

" Ask them and they will tell you they are the sole responsible party for

bringing all these changes, but I have yet to see one of their campaigns produce

results where they affected the company in terms of customer traffic or

profitability, " said Denny Lynch, a spokesman for Wendy’s.

Like other big fast food companies, Wendy’s has been a target of animal

activists’ campaigns. Earlier this month, it announced a strengthened animal

welfare policy.

Burger King executives say that at their company, too, change is driven by

consumers, not activist pressure.

" If we think consumers are a little more engaged in this, then so are we, "

said Steve Grover, vice president for food safety, quality assurance and

regulatory compliance. " I look at it like a hockey player. I want to be there

before the puck gets there. "

Cattle ranchers say pressure from PETA and Farm Sanctuary are not the reason

they have started handling animals with more care. As the owners of Niman Ranch

and Coleman Natural discovered, people are willing to pay more for meat from

animals that are better cared for and whose origins can be traced from birth

through processing.

" The groups that don’t want us to eat any animals at all are so radical and

off-the-wall that we don’t even worry about them, " said Scott Sell, the owner of

Quail Ridge Ag and Livestock Services, a Georgia cattle company. " In our

industry we are the original animal welfarists. We take care of the animals

because they take care of us. "

But Temple Grandin, the animal science expert from Colorado State University

who first led McDonald’s executives on a tour of their suppliers’

slaughterhouses, believes that activists had plenty of impact on changes in how

farm animals are cared for.

" Activist pressure starts it because heat softens steel, " she said. But she

also offered some friendly advice. " What the activists’ groups have to be

careful about is that you want to soften the steel and not vaporize it. "

Activists have only slightly warmer relations with chefs, despite their recent

fascination with farming.

For example, Mr. Trotter said animal welfare has become more important because

American gastronomic consumers increasingly want to do right by the animals they

eat.

" You don’t just have to be a card-carrying PETA member anymore to go that

route, " he said in an e-mail message.

The chefs Mario Batali and Adam Perry Lang, along with the restaurateur Joe

Bastianich, are creating a company called BBL Beef Brokers to produce humanely

raised meat that is pampered from the farm to the slaughterhouse.

" From the chef’s perspective it comes down to, ‘Yeah, the steak looks good but

why is it not performing?’ " Mr. Perry Lang said. " It’s because of how the

animal was raised and handled. That’s not animal rights, but it is animal

welfare. "

Although animal rights groups and chefs might agree that farm animals need to

be treated with more care, one side wants to put those animals on the grill and

the other wants to simply hang out with them.

The chasm between the two groups spilled over into the August edition of

VegNews, a glossy magazine that is a mix of People and Real Simple for the

meatless set. The magazine printed a publisher’s note taking the international

gastronomic group Slow Food to task for not including more vegetarians. The

story carried the headline " The Developmentally Disabled Food Movement " and

called the organization’s leaders " human-centric food snobs. "

Erika Lesser, executive director of Slow Food U.S.A., said that kind of jab

keeps the two sides apart.

" There is a place at the Slow Food table for vegetarians, for omnivores,

whatever your ‘itarian’ persuasion is, but I haven’t met many vegetarians who

are willing to sit at the table with omnivores, " she said.

The gap between animal lovers and animal lovers who love to eat them is

exactly what Mr. Baur, a man who eats noodles with margarine, soy sauce and

brewer’s yeast and has only barely heard of Chez Panisse, would like to close.

" We’re not really in philosophical alignment, " he said. " But I like to think

we’re in strategic alliance. "

 

 

 

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