The curious case of the dog-eating
On the unshakeably spiritual side of food
Greetings Southlanders! I’m on the road today, kicking off a whirlwind week: in Columbia, Mo., tonight, then back south to Baton Rouge on Thursday. Then it’s onto Little Rock on Saturday, for the Six Bridges Festival, where I’ll be in conversation with Alice Driver, the author of an important new book about the immigrant workers in Tyson’s meatpacking plants.
If you can’t make these events, you can still listen to my recent appearance on Outside/In Radio—a longtime favorite podcast—or Rice University’s Gulf Streams Podcast!
Finally, a reminder that I’m launching a Southlands Book Club for paid subscribers on October 15, when we’ll be discussing Christopher Brown’s A Natural History of Empty Lots. Upgrade now to join!
A warrior of Irish legend, Cú Chulainn, was granted a magical ability: He was all but unkillable in battle—so long as he never ate dog.
Unfortunately, Cú Chulainn was also an eminently polite man, uncomfortable turning down hospitality. So when an old woman served him dog meat, he felt obligated to partake. He was attacked soon after. The end.
I learned this story from Wikipedia’s almost disturbingly helpful entry on dog meat—which goes as far as offering nutrition facts. The Irish legend is poorly cited, but it too perfectly captures one of the common tensions embedded within meat eating to pass up sharing : How to balance personal ethics against our desire to live in fellowship with fellow humans?
I’ve been thinking about meat a lot lately, in part because it’s an incredibly revealing component of our relationship with the natural world: How shows how we, as individuals and societies, choose to relate to our fellow animals. And meat-eating—dog-eating, at that—has been in the news lately, since the Republican nominees for president and vice president have been spreading false rumors about immigrants hunting and eating local pets.
You probably know this, but the whole ordeal started after an obviously tenuous story appeared in a Facebook group: a resident of Columbus, Ohio, noted that she’d heard that a friend’s daughter’s cat had been killed and eaten by a Haitian immigrant. JD Vance fact-checked the story, calling the city manager if there was any evidence. Nope. That didn’t stop Vance and Co.; Trump preferred the story at the presidential debate. Two days later, at a rally, he claimed that “migrants were walking off with the town’s geese,” too—based on a viral photo that was actually taken in Columbus, Ohio, and showed a man carrying geese that were apparently killed by traffic.1
Vance has all but admitted to the lies, saying he is willing “to create stories” that wake up the media to the plight of the American people. It seems that enough of the world sees through these thin tales to make a joke of them. But the politicians wouldn’t deploy them if they had no power—a power that is drawn from the way our culinary taboos swiftly and strictly delineate our communities, who is human and who is savage.
No American food rule is more indelible than the ban on eating pets. Even Anthony Bourdain, a famously adventurous eater, made it his one prohibition, even as he admitted it was “arbitrary” and “hypocritical.” Jonathan Safran Foer offers in his book Eating Animals—an extended argument against eating animals—a satirical defense of dog eating.2 Safran Foer (who occasionally debated against Bourdain) also emphasizes the capricious nature of this taboo—in some human cultures, dogs are consumed—and its hypocrisy. Our rule does not seem to be “don’t eat smart critters,” he notes, since we happily chow down on pigs; and if the rule is “don’t eat companion animals,” then wouldn’t it be okay for the petless to grill up a dog?
In his zeal for proving hypocrisy, Safran Foer misses the real rule here: “Don’t eat family.” Even petless Americans seem to understand that here, dogs and cats are intimate members of our little household circles, and we do not eat the members of those circles. There are other ways to draw those circles that as, or maybe even more, logical. But, for now, at least, here in America, this is the rule we’ve got. Arbitrary, sure, but I’m not sure its hypocritical.3
There’s another reason I’ve been thinking about meat lately: It might be the subject of my next book. I want to examine the role that meat-eating has played in our species’ history. I want to explore whether there’s a way for us to keep eating meat that, well, won’t burn up the planet or launch yet another pandemic. In this book-to-be, I’d love to stick to facts and logic and figures; uncomfortably, though, as I draft the proposal, I keep drafting arguments that are undeniably spiritual. When Michael Pollan goes on Oprah to expound on what “mindful eating can do for our souls”—that every time we sit down at the table, “we get to express our values through food”—it strikes me as somewhat seem elitist and out of touch. So many Americans can barely afford to keep food on the table. Are they obligated to consider whether the chicken in their nuggets lived a good life? But again and again, I come to the conclusion that until we all remember that every meal is indeed a sacrament—our most intimate connection with the rest of the world—we won’t be able to fix the mess that is meat.4
Which leads me to a strange place as I consider all this public talk of dog-eating. Don’t mistake me: Trump and Vance’s lies are ugly and racist, destructive and divisive—abhorrent. (Perhaps Cú Chulainn is a cautionary tale: stick to your food rules or you will die. But I’d prefer we learn to admire his tolerance.) But they do remind me that, even in a world that’s uncomfortable talking spirituality, none of us have ever left the spiritual realm. At least occasionally, we remember that collective ethics shape how we’re supposed to eat, how we’re supposed to live in a more-than-human world. The task now is to fan the flames of that nascent spark of a sense of family and to create new rules—rules that connect, not divide. Rules that will save the world rather than destroy it.
What I’m reading
🦖 Confessions of a former carnivore (The New Republic): If you’ve made it this far, you won’t be surprised that I have thoughts about this thoughtful essay. There’s much I agree with, but I have thoughts on where the let’s-all-go-vegan rhetoric—and any rhetoric about the ethics of what we as individuals put on our dinner plates—so often falls short. That’ll be in another newsletter down the line…
🦞 Greed, gluttony and the crackup of Red Lobster (New York Times): In 1970, just two years after the first Red Lobster opened in Lakeland, Fla., the company was purchased by General Mills. Within a decade, it was the country’s largest table-service dining chain. Then came the long fall—which culminated last year when the brand made its $20 Ultimate Endless Shrimp deal an “all day, every day” fixture. Since the chain had recently been purchased by a seafood supplier, the change looked like a move to offload old inventory onto an already doomed brand. A cautionary tale of what happens when seafood is turned from a local product into a faceless, global commodity.
🍃 Three ways to find wildness wherever you are (Garden & Gun): Chris Brown, the focus of our last newsletter—and our upcoming book club (Oct. 15, for paid subscribers!)—offers three ways to find the edgelands nearby.
🐟 Yes, fish were swimming on Kenner roads after Hurricane Francine (Nola.com): I’ve always thought of Louisiana’s drainage canals as lifeless concrete ditches, but—in yet another reminder of the extent of the edgelands—it turns out they’re “full of many species of fish, native and introduced, and when the water level exceeds the banks the fish swim out,” as a state official notes. Some Kenner locals even cooked up their street fish. How does that fit with food taboos?
🥾 The 10 most beautiful hikes in the U.S. (Outside): I fear it might be a metaphorical “DEI hire,” but still I will take note of any national mention of the wild beauty in the South. I guess I’m adding the first 30 miles of the Florida Trail to my southlands bucket list.
🥭 Keep the pawpaw weird and wild (The Nature Beat): Somehow, on my trips on the Mississippi, I’ve never managed to harvest a pawpaw—which, as Gabe Popkin notes, is “America’s largest edible native tree fruit.” Popkin’s dispatch has me wanting to try again if only to dream of “an alternative food culture built around mutuality, responsibility and care.” Go read about the “anticapitalist fruit.”
🐊 Inside one governor’s crusade to tear down the wall between church and state (Rolling Stone): This whole feature is fascinating—and especially important to me, as a citizen governed by said governor. But really what caught me most were the descriptions of Jeff Landry’s gator-hunt fundraisers. I’ve discussed before the way that hunters are often good conservationists—but sometimes aren’t. This gator hunt strikes me as another instance where a relationship with non-human nature is too devoid of reverence or care.
For some thoughts on the ethics of eating roadkill, head back to this old essay on white-tailed deer.
At least as of 2009, when the book was published, dog eating was legal in 44 states, according to Safran Foer.
I tend to think it’s natural—and meaningful—good, even—that our cultural rules about kinship are widely absorbed across any given “society.” Still, is it okay for the petless to eat dog? My answer: Sure, why not? I personally will never eat a dog (or a cat), so I’m no Cú Chulainn, but I try not to moralize about other cultures’ concepts of family or food.
How do we fix meat? To wade into an argument that is probably better served for a separate essay all its own, I think we need to extend our notion of family to, at the very least, other domesticated animals—to the cows and pigs and chickens that we raise on farms eat. Not that these animals need to be afforded the same rules as our household pets; as I’ve noted elsewhere, I think there are viable ethical systems that consider animals to be kin of a kind and yet allow for their killing. But that only works if we recognize that the animal has made a sacrifice and appropriately honor that fact at each death and each meal. Chickens self-domesticated—willingly joining human villages several thousand years ago. They should, then, be considered a part of our extended families, and housed only in conditions that allow, throughout the years they’re alive, the best possible chicken life.
Blaise Pezold at Docville Farms downriver knows a lot about pawpaws - he's been collecting seeds for years, trying to bring the tree back to the deep south.
This reminds me of a book I read a few years ago called Every Twelve Seconds by Timothy Pachirat on how industrial meat production in the Great Plains is very violent and very hidden from American eyes. The imagined and ignored relationships between migrants and meat is certainly disquieting.