Probably the Most Depressing Post I'll Ever Write

Sometimes my thinking goes to some really dark places, and a really weird thing happens:  I recognize that I'm being grim and fatalistic, but it doesn't seem all that unreasonable.  I think it's probably some kind of cognitive dissonance that allows me to think wild theoretical things without the emotional weight of real-life consequences, but knowing that intellectually doesn't have any practical effect.

Here's a case in point:  P.Z. Myers, a biologist and blogger that I generally enjoy reading and often agree with posted this yesterday.  In it, he discusses a medical science experiment in the U.K. wherein kittens' eyes are sewn shut in order to explore the relationship between the physical, structural growth of the brain and visual processing.  The Mirror conducted a (typically useless, as public opinion polls tend to be) public opinion poll about whether this was an acceptable practice.  For a number of reasons including the fact that kittens are wonderful and people love them and the decidedly inflammatory tone to the article, the poll was, at the time of Myers' post, roughly 92% against these experiments.

The point of the post, to some extent, was to encourage readers to "pharyngulate" the poll, a process wherein readers of Myers' blog, Pharyngula, rush the polls to reflect the community's pro-science, skeptical values.  When last I read the comments, the poll had been successfully pharyngulated to the extent that the numbers were closing on an even split.

Meanwhile, in the comments section of the post itself, the chatter among Myers' readers departed from the typical script wherein fans agree and dissent comes from outrageous trolls and wingnuts. In this case the debate was, as blog-comment debate goes, fairly collegial and, with notable exceptions, civil.  While a large majority supported the "necessary evil" of animal testing, there was a contingent of loyal opposition that just couldn't get behind it.

The general consensus posited by supporters was that opponents found this exercise horrific because the animals in question were kittens, a species for which humans feel a particular emotional and often familial attachment.  A portion of the naysayers agreed that they would feel differently about non-companion animals, and a tiny faction opposed animal testing full stop.

Some way into the hundreds of comments, Myers' chimed back in to say that he found it disturbing that people would suggest that there was some inherent difference in using kittens, over, say, ferrets as the process was so mildly intrusive and humanely practiced that it should not be objectionable regardless of species. The implication from the pro-test crowd was that opposition was illogical and emotionally-driven at best and anti-science nut jobs at worst.

You can probably guess that I, a person who just yesterday exclaimed over some delicious potato chips, "Wow!  They taste like sour cream and onion, but no cows were raped to make them taste good!" oppose animal experimentation.  And I KNOW huge advances in medical science have come from it.  And I KNOW that even products labeled "no animal testing" contain ingredients that were likely tested on animals some other time by some other company. And I KNOW everyone's just dying to say, "If your mother/boyfriend/self/insert-loved-one-here had cancer/multiple sclerosis/insert-lethal-disease-here and animal testing could produce a cure you'd change your tune," but you know what?  This is where shit gets really dark.

Because while I've actually worked myself into full-on panic attacks thinking about the possibility of losing the people dear to me (Have you seen the movie "The Fountain"?  I wept uncontrollably for nearly half an hour afterwards at the idea that I could easily lose my then husband to long disease or in the blink of an eye to a simple traffic accident or mad gunman) but I really just can't square the morality of torturing and killing animals (yes, they're "euthanized" afterwards... the silver-lining of which is it cuts down on the lingering psychological effects) in the name of possibly reducing suffering in others.

This debate is one of those intractable ones like abortion and religion wherein arguments on both sides are familiar and heavily worn and generally ineffective in swaying the opposition.  The comment-section debate was chock full of but-they're-not-sentient-yes-they-are-okay-maybe-but-they-don't-have-agency arguments with a heavy dose of sewing-their-eyes-shut-isn't-painful-sometimes-it's-used-therapeutically-and-you-don't-call-it-torture-then-plus-lab-assistants-care-for-and-about-the-animals-post-op.

To which I say this:

I feel bad when I step on my kitten's tail because I know she feels pain. I put the cats in a different room when I vacuum because they experience fear.  They experience and remember and avoid recurrence of trauma as evidenced by their immediate flight at the sight of said vacuum cleaner or the grim cat Alcatraz that is the travel kennel.  To the extent that they have preferences for what does or doesn't happen to them, however reflexive and instinctual those preferences are, they have agency.  Sometimes, like children, their preferences are overridden for their greater good (going to the vet, say) but, as with children, we respect their needs and desires as members of the community that is our home.

As to the relative lack of suffering involved in this procedure (compared to, I dunno...force-feeding poisons? putting chemicals in their eyes?  vivisection?) I'll turn some smug chump's comment back on him: "I don't see anyone opposed to animal testing volunteering themselves."  EXACTLY, you moron.  You would not conduct this very "gentle," very "non-invasive" procedure on your child or yourself, so please spare me the argument that it's really no big deal.  And there are a lot of cringe-inducing things we do to treat disease, things that are painful and difficult but which we deem a worthwhile trade off for the privilege of staying alive (radiation and chemotherapy come to mind) that we wouldn't dream of inflicting on a healthy person.  Context matters in questions of morality.

I can't think of any distinction between human and animal life that makes the sacrifice and suffering of the latter on behalf of the former acceptable.  We've agreed that we ought not experiment on any humans regardless of their physical or mental capacity or their relative contributions to society so what makes similar considerations fair game when we're talking non-human animals?

Down, down the rabbit hole (ha!) I go to a place where I just don't think humanity inherently deserves...well, a lot of the things we take for granted as a reward for being the smartest monkeys going, where I'm so unclear about what our end game is that I wonder why we play at all, where our similarities to parasitic organisms, propagating and expanding for the sake of it without regard for anything but basic survival are uncomfortable.  Surely we've done amazing, wonderful things with all the gifts evolution has wrought, but to my mind our capacity to ponder and act on complex philosophical and ethical considerations is the characteristic that ostensibly sets us apart from the hoi polloi of critters scrambling to pass on genetic material.

It's normal to want to protect the things closest to you before you extend care outside your personal sphere.  In times of scarcity, a parent will feed his or her child before offering food to the neighbors, and help the neighbors before donating to a charity (mostly, maybe, unless they let their dog poop on the lawn).  But we generally recognize (some more clearly than others) an obligation to the larger society, that despite our desire to take care of those closest to us, it's not acceptable to inflict suffering on others in order to alleviate our own.  Unfortunately, this recognition is incredibly myopic.  As the spheres grow larger into national and international human communities we become increasingly willing to overlook that moral logic, and when it comes to the place of humans in a global, ecological context, that sense of community obligations tend to break down altogether.

I believe, on an individual level, in living while you're alive, making the most and best of every day because when you're dead, you're done.  Ideally we would enact a similar M.O. as a species.  Yes, we should strive to learn and explore everything we possibly can, make the most and best of our big brains, but conscientiously, with more respect for the world around us right now than for our theoretical future selves, because if we go the way of the dinosaurs, we're done.  I don't wish ill on the imaginary future, but I think the greater responsibility ought to be to building for that future by creating the most just and sustainable culture possible in the relatively-controllable present

It feels weird and kind of awful to think so bleakly, and I'm sure there's more than a little news-induced gloom in play, but it's also crushingly depressing that people can so easily rationalize cruelty from a position of incredible arrogance.  I'm not giving up on humanity, I'm just doom-fatigued and disappointed in a thousand different ways.

I'll be over here in my misanthropic cave eating twigs and dying of preventable illness if anyone needs me.

Here's the Beef: Where's the Beef?

Know what's delicious? Bacon.  Know what's a tasty addition to almost everything? Goat cheese.  Guess what I ate a lot of in 2010.  Give up? Pizza. And quesadillas.

When I went vegetarian and eventually vegan, I didn't suddenly decide that these things don't taste good. I made a decision that my desire for certain flavors really didn't justify the death and suffering that comes with them.

Within the realm of foods that I have no ethical objection to, I eat the ones that taste good when I can, the ones that taste okay when necessary, and avoid the ones that taste bad.  Them's some pretty simple criteria.  Using this program, I don't reject good tasting food because the ingredients aren't what I expected.  I've never, for instance, thought, "Wow, this is the best blueberry pie I've ever eaten, but they thickened it with corn starch instead of flour, so I'll buy that blander one down the street where they use flour."

Which is why, a few short weeks into baking for profit as well as fun, I'm feeling a little frustrated.

I knew going into it that getting vegan food to the general public would be an uphill battle.  "Vegan" is a word with a lot of baggage, conjuring images of asceticism and denial, visiting judgment on omni eaters, and linked to its extremist cousin raw foods with all the peculiar culinary acrobatics that go into crafting familiar-food analogs from walnuts and agave syrup.  Going in, my plan was to make awesome stuff, send up the vegan Bat-signal to let them know it exists, but not market it specifically as vegan.  I'm a child of the 80's and I've internalized the core lesson of the Pepsi challenge:  what people like and what they think they like aren't always the same, and that gap is largely a function of ephemeral concerns like image and marketing.

But as it happens, my first customer is a conventional bakery, and the fact that they carry my wares is specifically a function of the fact that I bake without eggs and dairy, an alternative option labeled accordingly.  It wasn't necessarily in the original plan, but I'm grateful to have a steady outlet where my stuff sells well.  And in the first batch, two sold to my friends, one to a girl whose vegan friend needed cheering up, and one to someone who made no mention of it being vegan.  It's a small sample, but it leaves room to hope that I might still appeal to a wider audience even with the scarlet V on the label.

Then I took some samples to a coffee shop.  The owner knew before I arrived that the samples were vegan and after asking some questions about ingredients and process she asked, "But you only do vegan, right?"

When I said yes, she got a far-away, disappointed look.

"Okay...it's just that we're looking for someone who can do other things too."

"Well, try the samples and see what you think.  If you can taste the difference, more power to you, but I think you'll find they're not any different than conventional," I said.

In the course of our fifteen minute conversation she mentioned that they wanted someone who could do "other things that aren't vegan" at least three times, always wearing a little frown and using that let-you-down-gently tone that says, "It's not you, it's me...no, actually, it's definitely you."

And fine. It's her business, it's her decision, but it's dumb.  Not just because I think I make a really great product (which I do), but because it was a decision that very clearly had nothing to do with the actual product and everything to do with her gut reaction to the idea of vegan.

I have a tasting coming up with a large corporate concern to make a bid for snacks at their meetings, etc.  I have not mentioned that I'm a "specialty" baker, nor do I plan to.  More than one person has asked if I've told them, and to a person they've responded with surprise when I say no, as though I'm planning to scam the elderly out of their pensions.

But I'm not tricking anyone into eating something they object to -- the ingredients are the same as most conventional items,  and I'm fairly sure no one's looking to get their protein or calcium from the egg in a cupcake or the scant amount of milk in frosting, so I'm not depriving them of any expected benefit.  I'm offering tasty treats.  If they reject them because they don't like them, or don't like the price, or because I can't do the volume they need, I can accept that because those are reasonable, reality-based issues.  But I won't put myself in a position to lose business based on vague ideas about what a recipe should be like instead of what the product actually is.

Someday I'll have a brick and mortar establishment, a little cafe with pastries and cakes and soups and sandwiches like any other cafe with pastries and soups and sandwiches, except there won't be any meat or animal products.  I won't point it out, and most people won't notice.  I'm not looking to proselytize, I just want to make awesome food consistent with my ethics and stand or fall on the strength of my skill.

And as my semi-estranged father told me the other day in a moment of casually shocking intimacy, "That's what I've always admired about you...when you want something, you go to the mat to get it."

Thanks, Dad, I guess I do.  And I will, I just want a fair fight.

Rutabaga!

This happy l'il guy's gonna be the face of Rutabaga Baking.

Good news, guys.  The moment has arrived for me to stop being wistful and get busy.

After lo these many months of mooning about, talking a big, vague game about Finally Doing It, allow me to talk a big, only slightly more specific game.

I'm currently procrastinating on putting together a price list for Rutabaga Baking, for a customer who will receive delivery next week.  Until the order's actually in I'll refrain from naming the venue, but that'll follow soon.  I'm just too excited to keep it entirely under my hat!

Tastes Like Chicken

I never thought I'd see the day when chickens were en vogue.  And yet a devoted subset of urban poultry enthusiasts has successfully lobbied for changes in zoning that allow for household chicken ownership, and I've watched dozens of people I know put on their coveralls and build a coop.  In my work as a freight forwarder, I've listened to the peeping of a whole lot of baby chicks crammed in cardboard boxes and shipped through the postal system to their new, unlikely homes.

In Vermont, my friend Andrea got eggs donated from a local composting company.  They took up residence at her childrens' school where they hatched and grew.  Recently though, like a Christmas puppy, the question of what to do when the fun is over cropped up.  She's been trying to find a home for two roosters, without success.  When she contacted a local chicken rescue (I know...who knew such a thing existed) they scolded her, saying that hatching chickens in a school was irresponsible. Frustrated that her attempt to provide a rare hands-on learning experience and then deal responsibly with the outcome was met with disdain she said, "I hate to be a right-winger, but I am not making a hefty donation so 3 roosters can be free from 'opression'"

The solution then, was slaughter.  Andrea's a vegetarian.  I'm a vegan.  Enter awkward times.

I've been on the wrong end of misconstrued written communication enough times that I hesitated before answering, then finally decided to just straight up say that I wasn't trying to be flippant, that I very seriously believe that there's an important lesson in there about where we draw the line between pets and dinner.  Andrea's not the sort to gloss over uncomfortable details, and I know that she's made a study of vegetarianism and veganism.  One of the reasons she's a vegetarian is that she's uncomfortable with the reality of slaughter.  If she isn't vegan, nothing I say is going to suddenly change the conclusions she's drawn.  And food is, I would say, one of the most personal choices we make, at least of the ones that are public.  You might like kinky sex, but there's rarely going to be a gathering where you have to explain yourself.  If you have unusual food preferences, people expect you to answer for them at every meal, whether in public or private.

But for her kids, who are probably vegetarian by proxy, this is the moment where the rubber meets the road.  Last week, they had roosters with names and played with them and fed them.  This week when they sit down at the dinner table, Smoky and Goober or whatever they're called will be the main course. I met my very first vegetarian friend in first grade.  She lived in a rural area and kept chickens and ducks.  She couldn't reconcile her love for the living animals with eating them, so she became vegetarian.  It was, in retrospect, a pretty remarkable line of reasoning for a kid that age.

As vegans go, I'm a pretty light touch.  I'd prefer to seduce you with amazing food than PETA videos.  I make a distinction between industrial egg and dairy production (well, not so much dairy, since the cow almost always ends up slaughtered) and domestic by-product.  The fact is that these animals are domesticated, so the option is to treat them as a commodity or as companions. I'd argue that since we're the ones who domesticated them, we have an obligation to care for their helpless selves.  I still wear leather shoes purchased before I became vegan because I think the environmental cost of purchasing new (vegan products are also often synthetic) is higher than the already incurred cost of the shoes I own.  I'm an advocate of considering your choices even once you've become vegan, making responsible decisions to the best of your ability rather than the making choices consistent with inherited political purity.

In general, my friends are supportive, if slightly bewildered by my veganism, but sometimes it somes out in ways that are excrutiating.  I have a friend who's a cook who insists on telling me about progressive CSAs where you can contribute toward humanely raised beef and pork. I appreciate his attempt to connect with me, but I finally had to tell him that if, at the end of the day (or years, as the case may be) the animal is suddenly killed, it's not actually all that nice.  If I were held hostage and my captors gave me nice living quarters and three squares a day, then killed me anyway, I'd still be dead.  You can argue that animals don't have expectations about longevity or what they'll accomplish in this life, but I'd counter that the plans of people aren't necessarily so compelling that they're much better. It's a slippery slope to start weighing which lives are worthwhile and which aren't.

Americans don't eat dogs or guinea pigs. Other cultures do. It would be way out of line for me to say I have enough information to make those decisions for anyone but myself, but in my sometimes deeply judgmental mind I resent the fact that most people do the things they do without ever considering the consequences or alternatives.  Whether it's going to church every week, dieting to achieve a cultural standard, or eating animals, these are choices that deserve more thought.