Against Nature

From our house, we look over a crumpled landscape of verdant fields and meadows. City dwellers might even describe it as idyllic. Yet something is not quite right. The bucolic equivalent of a Stepford wife’s smile, perhaps.

It’s difficult to pinpoint – until you ask yourself, “Where are all the farm animals?”  Apart from the odd cluster of sheep and auburn cows and all those deranged dogs that leap out at passing cars, they simply aren’t evident in the numbers commensurate with such a green and pleasant land.

Why not?  The reason, you discover, is that legions are incarcerated in the grim grey single-storey sheds that characterise the local farms. Soulless places built of concrete blocks, corrugated iron and other unhealthy man-made materials.

Every day, I take our dog out for the two constitutionals that keep us both fit and slender.  Often our circuit passes the nearest farm, where a savage Alsatian barks his contempt for our pampered, neutered hound.  Last year, two 40-foot metal feeding contraptions – like alien invaders dreamed up by H.G. Wells – were erected outside the jerry-built sheds, with their disquieting chimneys that I think of as “Treblinka”.

I try not to look.  And I try to shut my ears to the lowing within.  Despite the reassuring marketing posters of a calf suckling at its mother’s udder, I know what the veal trade means.  It’s one reason why we, as a family, choose to be vegetarians.  Despite the tenet of oriental gourmets, I cannot believe that suffering enhances taste.

Logically, too, should bloodless meat have any taste?  Is it merely the sauce that accompanies it?  Do we demand veal, I wonder, simply because we demand the choice?  Our parents ate veal and their parents before them; therefore we must have veal on our plates.

When they’re not out on their tractors, the brothers who own the farm are inside the sheds.  Even with the automatic feeders, they work hard.  I know them well now and they’re certainly not bad men.  They sluice out the pens regularly and appear to be solicitous about their “beasts”.  If you’re ever stuck, too, you can count on them to help you out.

But I’ve never spoken to them about the ethics of their livelihood.  There seems little point.  Even the notion of vegetarianism would be mystifying.  Far from being heartless villains, they’re merely part of a system, to use one example, which re-cycles our taxes as grants to encourage farmers around here to grow tobacco to kill smokers.

So these concentration camps are everywhere.  And it’s not just calves inside.  Many are full of goats – even sheep.  Why, for pity’s sake?  Surely such animals should be out there in all weathers, grazing in all these lush fields.  But, apparently, eating different vegetation at different times of the year causes the cheese to taste different.  Aha!  It’s the supermarkets, then, and the public’s demand for uniformity.  Just as our apples must be homogenous and unblemished, so our cheese must taste exactly the same all year round.

Modern food technology can overcome the limitations of nature. Farm animals are not so much sentient creatures, more economic commodities. Shut them up in sheds, feed them their pellets and keep them producing until they stop yielding.

And what, apart from the obvious letters and petitions, is to be done?  As a consumer, I can choose to observe the laws of nature rather than the market.  Choose not to eat veal.  Choose to buy our goats’ cheese from farmers who allow their animals to graze regularly.  Choose to eat flavoursome if misshapen apples.  Choose to eat fruit and vegetables when they are in season.

As a parent, I can teach my child what is right and wrong, what is natural and unnatural.  Hopefully she will develop confidence enough to explain to friends why it’s perverse to rear farm animals in dingy sheds.  Hopefully she will come to appreciate that if we let market forces dictate the way we go about the business of living, ultimately we will pay a big price for our transgressions against nature.

The author, Mark Sampson was born in 1954 in London and raised in Belfast.  He has lived in Southwest France since 1995. His family’s straw-bale house was featured in Grand Designs Abroad and his latest book, Essential Questions to Ask When Buying a House in France, appeared earlier this year.  He writes a fortnightly column for 50connect as an ‘ex-pat’ living in France.

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