There’s a grey area. There’s always a grey area. The Parisian boundaries of above and below are more porous than say here in New York where I recount this. Better if the street had been completely deserted, but that’s what distinguishes the surface, even in the wee hours of the morning, from the utility tunnel that we might have absconded back down. In the moment one is always sorting out the varying grayness, the complicit mix of light and dark. You can, for example, forget to turn off your headlamp as you hustle to put some distance between you and the pitch dark you emerged from. Above ground the forgotten headlamp only marks you as out of place amidst the glaring street lights. The beam contributes nothing, so that you don’t even realize you are still sending it out, signalling yourself out to the world. But even this oversight simple points to the array of options that constantly flow one into the other, even in the intensified pressure of squeezing through a hole in the sidewalk.

“What are you doing?” the officer sensibly asked in what would be a series of questions marking the rhythm of our engagement. This rhythm was inseparable from the physical dance involving the emptying of our pockets: “What is this?” “And in this pocket?” “Do you have drugs?”

Or was it that these questions were precisely not sensible, marking instead only the appearance of sensibility, like a headlamp left on in the light that renders its useless? We all know how this dance goes, even if we are winging it, uncertain of the outcome. What we are doing is exactly what we have in common now: we are all standing over the manhole that we were just caught coming out of. We are egressing. We are being busted for egressing. We are, collectively, cops and egressors. But what are we doing? Even in the moment, when wisdom would dictate a suitably vague and contrite blend of truth and omission, it is surprisingly difficult to say. Does one answer with practicalities, introducing a whole apparatus constructed around a singular raison d’etre?

“Well, officer, we are scouting tunnels, looking for a critical passage that will take us under the Sein. If we find it, then we can set out a couple nights hence on the journey proper, a complete traversal of Paris from South to North, underground. We’re pretty confident of the Catacomb section, but are trying to work out how to get from there into the canal system and eventually into the sewers in the North. And we pretty much exhausted this utility tunnel, so we were just popping up to assess where it gets us.”

Such forthrightness seems ill advised, but largely because it would be evasive, refusing to answer the officer’s question, threatening to highlight the chasm gaping under our feet, this void beneath the surface. Where do we find common ground? Is it not simpler, less precise: we are cataphiles (the colloquial term for lovers of the catacombs) and we are exploring, and we are sorry, and recognize that you have caught us at something, and yet we are no trouble. (Is this even more true? Have we constructed the larger story as a smoke screen to ourselves? And what if this masks an even more difficult possibility, that we don’t indeed know what we are doing?)

The law prohibits things that we collectively care to consider unfathomable. But in doing so the law must articulate them in the most technical of manners. Enforcers of this technical naming of what must remain unspeakable are in some sense cataphiles, able to move across the barrier of the surface of things, comfortable below ground. What is most worrisome is when the gap is welded shut, threatening to keep you on whatever side you are currently on, backed into a corner or caught with nowhere to hide. To get caught on the side of the unspeakable is the horror, and history is replete with examples of how this becomes physically or technically brutal. (We should imagine, perhaps, not Theseus slaying the Minotaur, but a labyrinth in which we are Minotaurs to each other.) Still, for the enforcer of the law, to move with facility between these spaces is to have an implicit or explicit sense of the absurdity of the technical. It is this which allows the technical to work. We have technically been busted, but this is only the starting point. It is no doubt illegal: there is, I am brought up to speed afterwards, a fine for being in the catacombs, and here we were exiting not these vestigial spaces of Paris’ past but its working infrastructure. And yet I also am told that there is a minimum amount for a fine to follow you once you leave the country, and whether or not that is true, it points to the kinds of calculations, both technical and felt, that will determine in large part how this goes. Having grilled us and emptied our pockets, one officer clearly looks to the other with a look that asks, how shall we play this?

But as clearly as our group’s immediate fate rests on one side of this calculation, and as much as that look was not meant for us, it also indicates the extent to which we are all in it together. How this night goes is up for grabs for all of us. And if clearly we were doing something that is in some small way unspeakable—is this not what drew us to it each in our own fashion?—it is also this which has for a moment brought us together. In this sense we have more in common with each other than with the pedestrian who will walk by, taking in the scene but not breaking stride.

Stride breakers. It’s a kind of litmus test: how much can you see in another by the way they choose to move down the street, or stoop to pass down a limestone tunnel deep underneath the street? Stooped over in such a tunnel, and finding a headlamp bobbing down the tunnel from the other direction, you may not know much about what this encounter will look like, but you do know that you will find someone else who also finds him or herself stooping down a tunnel. This is the strange camaraderie of the catacombs, or the catacombed camaraderie of strangers. It turns out, in fact, that the catacombs are crawling with people. While I have climbed down alone in the evening only to emerge late the next day having been company only to myself the entire time, it is just as likely that one will run into a whole panoply of people. On the weekend, one can run into old friends in an underground party, cross path with single file expeditions, trade some “cata-knowledge,” or exchange email addresses. Or you might, for example, find yourself part of a loose six person team of New Yorkers and an Australian, coming together for a strange task. You might even find yourself in the candlelight sitting across from the mysterious Lazar—unofficial and evasive spokesperson for the infamous group UX—who may have just embraced your comrades as long lost friends. Somehow going underground is a teeming, complicit affair, full of life.

Bradley L. Garrett in his dissertation on Urban Exploration, stemming from his participation in the legendary crew London Team B, writes:

Urban explorers, in the hacking tradition, hack or exploit fractures in physical architecture and social expectations in an effort to find deeper meanings and different readings in places even as they preference process over results. This practice, rather than being strictly oppositional, is actually quite celebratory; it is a method of affecting desire through unencumbered play that creates a meld between body and city, representations and practice, explorers and place and, of course, between fellow trespassers.

Can we trace it back the other way, back across the threshold of the sidewalk? The two officers were now unwittingly interwoven into our story, becoming part of the direction and telling of the story we were creating both in words and space. And we, no doubt, were not so surprising to them, tucking neatly enough into their narrative. For the most part, we each kept our stories to ourselves, as if mindful of the gap, the difficult space between what we preferred to imagine of the other and the other themselves. We stayed closer to a kind of ritualized enactment, a tactful standoff. In response to the one guard’s raised eyebrow, asking his partner how this should resolve, the other shrugs. We are off the hook. “Next time we’ll bring you in.” And then one last odd gesture. He points to the sky and says, “It’s going to rain. Very dangerous.” What are we to make of this gesture? A parting shot to suggest who has the last word, the appropriate knowledge, justifying all of this drama, since we had skirted every other concern? Or was it a show of concern, either out of actual concern, or as a way of bridging the gap, collapsing the power differential, as if to say, “we know, we know, but still…” What would it take to imagine this encounter not as not “strictly oppositional” but “actually quite celebratory”? What desire are we playing out together?

We did not stick around to mull it over. But the encounter would keep beat with other similar situations, either actual or potential. Two of our crew find themselves similarly caught in the act of emerging after leaving a food drop for our later attempt at a full traversal. These become somehow familiar to us, but part of what I think we felt is the way in which they skirt the surface of things, glancing off. They form a kind of virtual texture to the journey, an odd contrapuntal possibility that was so clearly interwoven, and yet foreign, absurd even.

Some days later, after over forty hours walking and crawling the underside of the city from one end to the other, we finally emerge out of manhole in the sewer system (where, in contrast to the utility tunnel we had been in previously, rain was indeed a terrifying concern, despite our precautions). It is lunch time, and our exit is just feet from the sidewalk tables of a cafe, forcing pedestrians to squeeze by or wait for us to emerge one after the other, six troglodytes caked in grime. We make haste, sliding the cover back into position, before hoofing down the street to leave the scene. Nobody stops us this time. We make it to a small Parisian park, where we collapse on the grass, exhausted. After some time, a police officer approaches our prone crew. I prepare myself as best I can with what little energy I can muster.

"Argument remains inescapable.  When interdisciplinary work is conceived as part of the 'natural' generation and gravitation of fruitful inquiries that will be located in the disciplinary system, assumptions about criteria tend to be strongly disciplinary.  [...]  In critical interdisciplinarities, radical change is the goal.  The 'rhetoric of interpenetration' that is characteristic of critical interdisciplinarities does not simply enrich existing fields.  It constructs new criteria and replaces them.  It alters not only the products of research but the very procedures." 

-Julie Klein, Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities. University Press of Virginia 1996, p.211.

"Encounterings do not produce harmonious wholes, and smoothly preconstituted entities do not ever meet in the first place.  Such things cannot touch, much less attach; there is no first place; and species, neither singular nor plural, demand another practice of reckoning.  In the fashion of turtles [...] on turtles all the way down, meetings make us who and what we are in the avid contact zones that are the world.  Once 'we' have met, we can never be 'the same' again.  Propelled by the tasty but risky obligation of curiosity among companion species, once we know, we cannot not know.  If we know well, searching with fingery eyes, we care.  That is how responsibility grows."

-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press 2008, p.287.

"When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust.  The implosion of electric energy cannot be met by explosion or expansion, but it can be met by decentralism and the flexibility of multiple small centers.  For example, the rush of students into our universities is not explosion but implosion.  And the needful strategy to encounter this force is not to enlarge the university, but to create numerous groups of autonomous colleges in place of our centralized university plants that grew up on the lines of European government and nineteenth-century industry." 

-Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. MIT Press (Fifth Edition) 1964/1997, p.70-71.

"Through the theories they embody, paradigms prove to be constitutive of the research activity.  They are also, however, constitutive of science in other respects, and that is now the point.  In particular, our most recent examples show that paradigms provide scientists not only with a map but with some of the directions essential for map-making.  In learning a paradigm the scientist acquires theory, methods, and standards together, usually in an inextricable mixture.  Therefore, when paradigms change, there are usually significant shifts in the criteria determining the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed solutions."

-Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press (2nd ed.), 1970, p.121.

"The importance of dialogical action in human life shows the utter inadequacy of the monological subject of representations which emerges from the epistemological tradition.  We cannot understand human life merely in terms of individual subjects, who frame representations about and respond to others, because a great deal of human action happens only insofar as the agent understands and constitutes himself or herself as integrally part of a 'we.'  Much of our understanding of self, society, and world is carried in practices that consist in dialogical action.  i would like to argue, in fact, that language itself serves to set up spaces of common action, on a number of levels, intimate and public.  This means that our identity is never simply defined in terms of our individual properties.  It also places us in some social space." 

-Charles Taylor, "The Dialogical Self" (p.304-314), in David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Cornell University Press 1991, p.311.

"Neither natural nor human science forms a natural kind.  There are many interesting and important differences among the various scientific disciplines.  Paleontology and meteorology may be as interestingly different from one another and from high-energy physics as they are from macroeconomics or political science.  All have been shaped by a history of internal developments and interaction with other scientific fields and other social practices.  I follow Friedrich Nietzsche in insisting that 'only that which has no history is definable'; successful practice in the various sciences always has and will continue to escape the constraints and typologies placed on them by methodologists..." 

-Joseph Rouse, "Interpretation in Natural and Human Science" (p.42-58), in David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Cornell University Press 1991, p.46.

"The distinction between 'rationality' and something else has traditionally been drawn so as to coincide roughly with this distinction between inference and imagination.  We are being rational, so the story goes, insofar as we stick to the logical space given at the beginning of the inquiry and so long as we can offer an argument for the beliefs held at the end of the inquiry by referring back to the beliefs held at its beginning.  [...]  On this view, proto-Kuhnian suggestions that we might have to learn a new language to do history of science, or anthropology, or that we might have to invent a new language to make scientific or political progress, were thought of as 'irrationalist.'  In pre-Kuhnian times, rational inquiry was a matter of putting  everything into a single, widely available, familiar context -translating everything into the vocabulary provided by a set of sentences that any rational enquirer would agree to be truth-value candidates.  The human sciences were urged to get inside this context, while the arts were allowed to escape this requirement of 'rationality.'  The idea was that there was a rough equivalence between being scientific and being rational.  So being scientific is a matter of sticking within a logical space that formed an intrinsically privileged context.  We enlightened post-Kuhnians are free from this idea, but we are not yet free from what I shall call 'realism.'  This is the idea that inquiry is a matter of finding out the nature of something that lies outside the web of beliefs and desires." 

-Richard Rorty, "Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation" (59-80), in David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Cornell University Press 1991, p.63.

"Life expands and prolongs itself, in space and time, by means of little black boxes. What remains to be thought, then, is this propagation, pagus by pagus, plot or niche by area or site, page by page, individual by individual of diverse species, this invasion through distinct places; in other words, to meditate on the globality of localities, a summation which reveals the same paradox which sometimes supposes the universal of life is to be found in the singularity of place." 

-Michel Serres, Atlas. Paris, Julliard 1994, p.58.

"Conceived as an operationally closed system, modern society is world society.  It's function systems could never agree on regional, national, or cultural boundaries.  The system of science, the economic system, the system of mass media operate and observe clearly on a worldwide level.  But the political system nowadays, too, is a world system, segmented into 'states' to achieve a better fit between political power and changing conditions of public consensus.  [...]  But this does not mean that the social ends and begins at political boundaries -say, between the United States and Mexico, or between Germany and Austria.  Tourists enjoy (to some extent) legal protection and the staged authenticity of customs and traditions all over the world.  We can intermarry, whatever our national origins.  Conversion from one religion to another is possible, if religions care at all for an exclusive identity and membership.  But in spite of all this, the global system or modern society seems not to be able to produce one and only one self-description." 

-Niklas Luhmann, "Deconstruction as Second Order Observing." (p.94-112), in Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity. Stanford University Press 2002, p.107.

"The Charter of Transdisciplinarity:

Whereas, the present proliferation of academic and nonacademic disciplines is leading to an exponential increase of knowledge which makes a global view of the human being impossible;

Whereas, only a form of intelligence capable of grasping the cosmic dimension of the present conflicts is able to confront the complexity of our world and the present challenge to the spiritual and material self-destruction of the human species;

Whereas, life on earth is seriously threatened by the triumph of a techno-science that obeys only the terrible logic of efficacy for efficacy's sake;

Whereas, the present rupture between increasingly quantitative knowledge and increasingly impoverished inner identity is leading to the rise of a new brand of obscurantism with incalculable social and personal consequences;

Whereas, an historically unprecedented growth of knowledge is increasing the inequality between those who have not and those who do not, thus engendering increasing inequality within and between different nations on our planet;

Whereas, at the same time, hope is the counterpart of all the aforementioned challenges, a hope that this extraordinary development of knowledge could eventually lead to an evolution not unlike the development of primates into human beings;

Therefore, in consideration of all of the above, the participants on the First World Congress of Transdisciplinarity (Convento da Arrabida, Portugal, November 2-7, 1994) have adopted the present Charter, which comprises the fundamental principles  of the community of transdisciplinary researchers, and constitutes a personal moral commitment, without any legal or institutional constraint, on the part of everyone who signs this Charter.

Article 1: Any attempt to reduce the human being by formally defining what a human being is and subjecting the human being to restrictive analyses within a framework of formal structures, no matter what they are, is incompatible with the transdisciplinary vision. 

Article 2: The recognition of the existence of the different levels of reality governed by different types of logic is inherent in the transdisciplinary attitude.  Any attempt to reduce reality to a single level governed by a single form of logic does not lie within the scope of transdisciplinarity. 

Article 3: Transdisciplinarity complements disciplinary approaches.  It occasions the emergence of new data and new interactions from out of the encounter between disciplines.  It offers us a new vision of nature and reality.  Transdisciplinarity does not strive for mastery of several disciplines but aims to open all disciplines to that which they share and to that which lies beyond them. 

Article 4: The keystone of transdisciplinarity is the semantic and practical unification of the meanings that traverse and lie beyond different disciplines.  It presupposes an open-minded rationality by re-examining the concepts of 'definition' and 'objectivity'.  An excess of formalism, rigidity of definitions and a claim to total objectivity, entailing the exclusion of the subject, can only have a life-negating effect. 

Article 5: The transdisciplinary vision is resolutely open insofar as it goes beyond the field of the exact sciences and demands their dialogue and their reconciliation with the humanities and the social sciences, as well as with art, literature, poetry, and spiritual experience.

Article 6: In comparison with interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity is multireferential and multidimensional.  While taking account of the various approaches to time and history, transdisciplinarity does not exclude a transhistorical horizon.

Article 7: Transdisciplinarity constitutes neither a new religion, nor a new philosophy, nor a new metaphysics, nor a science of sciences. 

Article 8: The dignity of the human being is of both planetary and cosmic dimensions.  The appearance of human beings on Earth is one of the stages in the history of the Universe.  The recognition of the Earth as our home is one of the imperatives of transdisciplinarity.  Every human being is entitled to a nationality, but as an inhabitant of the Earth is also a transnational being.  The acknowledgement by international law of this twofold belonging, to a nation and to the Earth, in one of the goals of transdisciplinary research. 

Article 9: Transdisciplinarity leads to an open attitude towards myths and religions, and also towards those who respect them in a transdisciplinary spirit.      Article 10:     No single culture is privileged over any other culture.  The transdisciplinary approach is inherently transcultural.

Article 11: Authentic education cannot value abstraction over other forms of knowledge.  It must teach contextual, concrete and global approaches.  Transdisciplinary education revalues the role of intuition, imagination, sensibility, and the body in the transmission of knowledge. 

Article 12: The development of a transdisciplinary economy is based on the postulate that the economy must serve the human being and not the reverse. 

Article 13: The transdisciplinary ethic rejects any attitude that refuses dialogue and discussion, regardless of whether the origin of this attitude is ideological, scientistic, religious, economic, political, or philosophical.  Shared knowledge should lead to a shared understanding based on an absolute respect for collective and individual Otherness united by our common life on one and the same Earth.  

Article 14: Rigor, opening, and tolerance are the fundamental characteristics of the transdisciplinary attitude and vision.  Rigor in argument, taking into account all existing data, is the best defense against possible distortions.  Opening involves an acceptance of the unknown, the unexpected, and the unpredictable.  Tolerance implies acknowledging the right to ideas and truths opposed to our own. 

Final Article: The present Charter of Transdisciplinarity was adopted by the participants of the first World Congress of Transdisciplinarity, with no claim to any authority other than that of their own work and activity. 

In accordance with procedures to be agreed upon by transdisciplinary-minded persons of all countries, this Charter is open to the signature of anyone who is interested in promoting progressive national, international, and transnational measures to ensure the application of these Articles in everyday life." 

1. It'd be nice to have a semantics for symbiotic software. What makes a statement (or series of statements) true for us?

2. A statement (or series of statements, an 'account') is true if and only if it's monadequate.

3. This is a crazy word, 'monadequate'. But the semantic theory it carries isn't so crazy.

4. Take a domain of objects O at time T. When talking about O we utter statements whose predicates bind variables ranging over the aspects of objects in O at time T.

5. We assume that O, and every object in it, is infinitesimally complex. As Tarde says, "every thing is a society." This means that any object in O, and O itself, is a teeming profusion of aspects.

6. In other words: both O and objects in O are 'infinitesimally dense' such that, for any object in O or identical to O, between any two aspects a and b where ~(a=b), there exists a third unique aspect c, such that ~(a=c & a=b).

7. We call this is the monadic assumption. Any object we observe is a monad, which, following Leibniz, contains every other monad. (This is a non-chemical reading of the Monadology, following Tarde, Dewey, and G. Gordon Brown.)

8. This assumption is largely functional. We assume it to yield truth about social phenomena, particularly educative social phenomena.

9. For some class of people C, one subset of objects in C is each person's understanding of C's complexity at T+n. In other words, Each person in C has a certain understanding of C at T in some suture moment after T.

10. 'Understanding' signifies 'can talk about...' My understanding of x is the extent to which I can talk about x. This understanding may be true, false, neither, both, etc. It may not be knowledge, but it is more than perception.

11. A statement is monadic if it approximates C's infinitesimal complexity at T.

12. 'Approximate complexity' requires that there be no abstraction from the objects in C at T. Just descriptions of them and their behavior. That is, no simplification or reduction. (We typically call such approximations 'models', though most models don't approximate complexity. They reduce or simplify complexity via abstraction, eg. world spirit, collective consciousness, the State, the market, etc. Latour calls a series of statements that approximate complexity a 'trace', though not all traces are true in our semantics.)

13. A statement is adequate if it increases understanding of C for some or all of the people in C.

14. A statement is true if and only if it is both monadic and adequate, or monadequate.

In “The Moral Instinct,” Steven Pinker introduces the concept of the “Moralization Switch.” “Moralization is a psychological state that can be turned on and off like a switch, and when it is on, a distinctive mind-set commandeers our thinking”(Pinker, 34). Pinker also refers to the psychologist Paul Rozin who has studied the “toggle switch” between “healthy” and “moral” vegetarians. Unsure of where my morals lie on deciding on this new diet, I am curious to see if further exploration will give weight to one over the other. Which way will my switch flip, or will I stay an omnivore but become more self-conscious of my eating habits?  Unfortunately, the decision has become more challenging than expected. The age old question of, “What’s for dinner?” has morphed into a complex internal and external debate on morals.

This conundrum affects us all. There is a major disconnect between “us” and our “food.” “Many people are passionately opposed to puppy mills, yet still eat a hamburger from McDonalds. I think there is a pervasive ‘disconnect’”(Cole). Michael Pollan states, “The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check, either on the sentiment or brutality. ...nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians”(Pollan, Animal, 60).    

Health concerns have been placed on the back burner. However, recently there has been an explosion of documentaries, movies and books hitting the mainstream media to raise our awareness. Unfortunately, many of us do not have the time to sift through this information. With a brief look into our farming techniques and conversations with both healthy and morally conscious diners, I will attempt to locate a recipe for a well balanced diet.  

Picking up the critically acclaimed book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan sounded like the best starting point. Here Pollan attempts to follow his food back to its original source. Pollan commences with an in depth view into industrialized farming which constitutes a majority of the food we purchase and consume from supermarkets.  From following a calf, from birth to the dinner table, Pollan presents some disturbing facts for our viewing.

When pondering the life of a cow, we hold a preconceived notion that they spend their time moseying around a green pasture nibbling on grass all day. Unfortunately, after six months from birth this is no longer true. “Cows raised on grass simply take longer to reach slaughter weight than cows raised on a richer diet, and for half a century now the industry has devoted itself to shortening a beef animal’s allotted span on earth”(Pollan, Omnivore, 77). Although consuming grass is the natural ingredient for a cows diet, corn has emerged into the feedlot. By introducing corn the industrial farming business is forcing cows to go against nature and trains them to consume corn, which fattens them up quicker for slaughter and consumption.

Farms are no longer farms but CAFO’s, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. With the cheap prices of corn and the large demand for meat on the dinner table, large quantities of cattle are being corralled into confined spaces, “standing knee deep in their own waste” (Pollan, Animal, 63) and force fed an unnatural diet. These tight quarters also lead to unsanitary conditions in which severe ramifications have appeared. The cattle we are consuming are gravely affected by disease. Pollan states, “Most of the health problem that afflict feedlot cattle can be traced either directly or indirectly to their diet”(Pollan, Omnivore, 82). These health conditions “lead to diarrhea, ulcers, bloat, rumenitis, liver disease, [as well as] pnuemonia, coccodiosis, enteroxemia, [and] feedlot polio” (Pollan, Omnivore, 83). To counter this rise in animal sickness antibiotics and hormones are being administered. “Most of the antibiotics sold in America today end up in animal feed, a practice that, it is now generally acknowledged (except in agriculture), is leading directly to the evolution of new antibiotic-resistant superbugs”(Pollan, Omnivore, 84).

If the old saying is true then, by eating the All-American hamburger, in essence we are sick and suffering cows being unnaturally force fed by the lack of concern and greed of industrial farming. Does that hamburger or T-bone steak still seem as appetizing? Although this exploration has the capacity to make stomachs turn, cows are actually the lucky ones. In “An Animals Place,” Pollan states:

“...egg and hog operations are the worst. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their environment, at least don’t spend their eightweek lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. (Pollan, 63)

The “switch” has flipped. As Pinker states, “We all know what it fells like when the moralization switch flips inside us -the righteous glow, the burning dudgeon, the drive to recruit others to the cause” (Pinker, 34). Feeling sick to my stomach, with a bad case of the dry heaves, I question my carnivorous habits. Cole states, “CAFO’s are Animal Concentration Camps! I think of the plight of farm animals as a holocaust” (Cole). Morals, as well as health concerns, have placed me on a crusade. Eating animals appears to be both morally wrong and contains severe health ramifications. Why would we partake in the intentional suffering of docile animals, forced to live in their own excrement, and eat their highly contaminated flesh? Nothing appears to be beneficial from industrial farming. Not only are the animals helplessly suffering, the American consumer is suffering as well. Pollan seems to be correct with his assumption that upon “looking,” “...we either look away or become vegetarians” (Pollan, Animal, 60). Although not having physically seen these conditions, can you unlearn this information?

Pinker also refers to Jonathan Haidt’s “morality sphere” which contains five points of interest; Harm, Fairness, Community, Authority; Purity. If we view the current system along Haidt’s five spokes of morality, there doesn’t seem to be anything moral about both the process and the practice of being a carnivore. Both humans and animals are being harmed. There doesn’t appear to be any kind of fairness to either species. The authority controlling the operation seems to have no regard for either species as well. Nothing looks pure about the entire operation. Both Pollan, Vanessa and now myself agree here.

Now had Pollan stopped there, the decision would a piece of cake. However, Pollan then takes us on a journey to “...a very different sort of farm. It is typical of nothing, and yet its very existence puts the whole moral question of animal agriculture in a different light” (Pollan, Animal, 64). "Polyface, where a half dozen different animals species are raised together in an intensive rotational dance on the theme of symbiosis” (Pollan, Omnivore, 127). Polyface farms is run by Joel Salatin and his family in the Shenandoah Valley. Here the animals live in a humane fashion and their diets are consisted of what nature had planned for them. Salatin, however, will not admit that his occupation is farming animals. When questioned his response is, “I’m a grass farmer” (Pollan, Omnivore, 127). In his intricate rotation of animals upon his main crop, grass, the animals feed upon it, excrete feces, which in return becomes a revitalizing manure to rejuvenate the growth of the grass. “It’s all a symbiotic, multi-speciated synergistic relationship-dense production model that yields far more per acre than industrial models” (polyface.com).

Here the toggle begins again. From a healthy perspective this appears to be a grand solution. The animals come across to be happy and get to “fully express its physiological distinctiveness” (Pollan, Animal, 64). With pastoral farming the animals plight of unnecessary diseases seems to be eradicated. Meat and byproducts would be contaminate and hormone free.  As Pollan suggests the price of meat may rise but it’s a price worth paying for the quality and safety of the meat. Yet, somehow despite this glorious sounding farm, I find myself still in a bit of a pickle.

Although Pollan makes a strong case for pastoral farming, Cole planted her seeds of thought. “While I think that ‘happy’ farming is a step in the right direction, I still find it to be exploitative, and unhealthy -- for the eaters and the eaten. ‘Happy’ cows still have cholesterol, they still produce the cancer triggering casein in their milk” (Cole).

Cole, however raises another concern. “If we farmed dogs on ‘happy’ farms, slaughtered them and wrapped them in cellophane, there would be a huge public outcry” (Cole). Knowing my love and concern for dogs, she states, “I do not understand how an ‘animal-lover’ can reconcile the act of consuming another animal with their [my] belief in animal welfare” (Cole). Pollan briefly touches upon this as well. “Half of the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig -- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog -- that becomes the Christmas ham” (Pollan, Animal, 60).

Which leads us back to Haidt’s sphere of morality. Here the lines of demarcation have become blurred. Is there an immoral harm being committed here? Pollan suggest not, since he did start his research while eating a “rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare” (Animal58), and his work appears to be a method for finding the healthiest way to stay carnivorous. Cole, on the other had, states, “At the age of 10, I knew it was wrong to hurt or kill another for my benefit, and you cannot eat meat without causing harm, so I promptly informed my mother that I would not eat meat again”(Cole). Should my love and concern for one animal extend to all? I certainly do not love all humans but yet feel that killing and murdering another is intolerable.

However, Pollan exposes hypocrisy within veganism. “The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer’s tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky” (Pollan, Animal 110). If we did stop eating animals, what would happen to them? Farm animals have been domesticated for centuries. Would they be able to survive on their own? It appears that either way animals will placed into jeopardy. Is the “moral” answer to let them fend for themselves?

While contemplating this perplexing situation, I feel as stumped as Mick Jones and Joe Strummer of The Clash. “Should I stay or should I go” [Veggie]. “If I stay there will be trouble... [Heart Disease, Obesity, Diabetes...] and if I go it will be double” (Jones); not eating animals yet still consciously aware they are being harmed and slaughtered. The ability to come to a concise decision seems inconceivable at this precise moment. However, recognizing the severity of the situation, I do plan to engage in inquiring where my “food” comes from and what it is composed of. This process will most likely lead to a diet consisting of smaller amounts of animal products, perhaps eventually lead to vegetarianism, or even a vegan lifestyle. With all that said, I have but one last question. What’s eating you?

Works Cited

Cole, Vanessa, Personal interview. 21 Oct. 2011.

Jones, Mick, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” Combat Rock (CD). Epic, 1982.

Mente, de Koning, Shannon, & Anand, "A Systematic Review of the Evidence Supporting a Causal Link Between Dietary Factors and Coronary Heart Disease."  Archives of Internal Medicine, 2009; 169(7), p.659-669.

Pinker, Steven, “The Moral Instinct.” New York Times Magazine.  Jan 13, 2008, p.32-58.

Pollan, Michael, “An Animal's Place.” New York Times Magazine. 10 Nov. 2002, 58-111.

Pollan, Michael, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: a Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2007. EPUB file. Nook.