Annie Lowrey
Appearances
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Can I microdose veganism?
I didn't see any turkeys thrown out of planes, but I'm talking to a ton of people. And then towards the end of this conversation, I was talking to this guy who was involved, and he was like, oh, you know, there were turkeys that were thrown out of planes. I was like, what are you talking about? I was there the entire time.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And he was like, oh, well, they weren't thrown out of planes, but they threw them like off of a truck. Like they had gone to someplace high and thrown them out of a truck. And again, I was like, I did not see that. I was not there. And he was like, well, I wasn't there either, but I heard about it. And so I managed to get daisy chained to this guy.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And he was like, yeah, we decided to have like a little festival within the festival to do some turkey throwing. And like, you know, nobody got hurt. It was wonderful. Everybody loved it. And that was the kind of end of the piece.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yeah, totally. I felt nothing for the turkeys whose legs were for sale at the Yelville turkey drop, and nothing for the birds in the surrounding hills. Even when I knew they were sitting, crowded by their neighbors, legs broken and beak cut, awaiting the electric bath and the scalding tank and the dinner table. Felt nothing for the turkey toms threshed to death as soon as they were born.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Something for the birds chucked out of the plane, flapping wildly to stay upright. I felt something for the birds panting and panicking when caught by children below, pinned down with their heavy breasts and thick thighs and thin bones. I felt perhaps too much for George, that fabulous ham of a turkey that had rushed out to greet me but was too shy to take some tomato out of my hand.
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Can I microdose veganism?
To think this way and to feel this way is, of course, to be human. To paraphrase Joseph Stalin, one turkey thrown out of a plane is a tragicomedy. 46 million turkeys killed in a slaughterhouse is Thanksgiving dinner. You can hold the suffering of one being in your head and your heart, but the suffering of many becomes static.
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Can I microdose veganism?
I get it. When I was earlier in my veganism, I had this rule for myself, which was that if I was maintaining a vegan diet and avoiding things like buying leather or fur or products that I knew were tested on animals, that I didn't have to go look at vegan propaganda or really just go look at what the food system was actually doing.
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Can I microdose veganism?
But if I wanted to eat meat and dairy and buy leather goods and all of that, that I should really understand what I was doing and what I was purchasing, and I had to go look at it. And the information is out there.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And I actually think that I, in that sense, was similar to everybody, which is that people don't want animals to suffer at all. Your average person is an animal lover, and I think is really sincere about that. You can look at how people treat their dogs and their cats, and they don't want animals to live lives of pain and fear and then have this really horrible end either.
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Can I microdose veganism?
But they also don't want to think about it. They want somebody else to think about it. They want to trust that there is a system that is protecting animals.
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Can I microdose veganism?
In the fall, I was contacted by the head of a farmed animal advocacy group called Farm Forward. And a guy named Andrew, he used to be involved with the organization that checks the welfare and sort of sets the welfare standard for the meat that you see in Whole Foods.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And he said that he had gotten information from a number of whistleblowers, both people who had worked on these farms and worked with the farm.
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Can I microdose veganism?
This wasn't like a big factory farm company. This was a farm that is almost kind of famous and considered really best of class in terms of dairy production. That interested me about it, in part because I was skeptical, right? I was like, you're telling me that this farm that's really notable for having high animal welfare standards is abusing animals.
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Can I microdose veganism?
So I was looking through all of these photographs and videos and I was just like, well, how do I know what's going on here?
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yes. So dairy cows are kind of beef cows with a job to do first.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Beef cows, they're both male and female. And most beef cows in the United States are kept on range. They're kept outside in big herds. And they're not really messed with, right, until they are brought to a feedlot to fatten up and then they're sent to slaughter. That's the life cycle of your average beef cow in the U.S., Dairy cows are inseminated or bred, the calves are taken away.
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Can I microdose veganism?
The male calves are generally not worth very much because they can't become dairy cows and they don't make great meats. You're not going to spend a lot of money raising them and fattening them up. So the male calves often are slaughtered quite quickly and they become something like dog food. The dairy cows then are milked for a couple of years, somewhere between usually two and six years.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And the auction is, you know, this isn't Sotheby's. It is like a small kind of rickety roadside operation. This is in the far north of California. It's like four or five hours north of San Francisco. So it's sort of in the middle of nowhere. It's a public auction. You can go sit on like these plywood bleachers and cows come in and the auctioneer sort of mumble chants and the cows get a price.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Exactly. That's what's happening. That is precisely what's happening. There's cowboy hats involved. And a lot of the cows are going for like a couple dollars per pound, $2 per pound maybe. And then some other cows go for really, really cheap, like $0.05 a pound, $0.10 a pound.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And after the auction was over, later that night, all of the animals that were sold are kept in these pens back behind the auction house. And so we went with one of the buyers of some of the cows to look at them and got a copy of the auction affidavit, which is a legal document kind of showing the chain of title of who's owned a cow. And you can look at the cow's ear tag and see who owned it.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yes. So this is in the back of the auction, and that was when I saw more closely just how kind of little and skinny cow 13039 was. Aw, little baby. Hi.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Just explain what you just did for me. So she's still producing milk, so this cow has been recently milked.
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Can I microdose veganism?
This is A2A2 milk. And one of her eyes was, like, cloudy and roomy, and then the other one was covered with a denim eye patch.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Which was notable. She was the only cow there with a denim eye patch. So I kind of helped to sort of work up the denim patch's edge. And the patch was glued directly onto her orbital rim. And I'm kind of like very, very gently like using my finger, right, like to sort of get it. And at some point, one of the folks who was there just pulls it off. And her eye... kind of half falls out.
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Can I microdose veganism?
It swells out of the socket. Wow. And it's still attached to her skull by sinew and, you know, some of the tissue internal to the eye. And there's, you know, musculature there.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yeah. It was bloody and pussy. It smelled really bad. And I asked, when the rancher's there, I was like, what has happened here? And all of the folks there who work in the dairy or the cattle industry were like, well, that's cancer eye. It was so surprising to me. We didn't know that there were going to be any cows from this farm when we went there.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And we did not know that there was going to be a cow that so clearly should have been euthanized probably some time ago. A cow this sick shouldn't have been transported, should have received medical care a long time ago, shouldn't have been sent to auction.
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Can I microdose veganism?
This was a cow that, you know, if you were facing the question of do you send this cow to auction or do you euthanize on site, I don't know why you wouldn't have euthanized on site.
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Can I microdose veganism?
What is criminal is... socially constructed, right? And in the case of animals, we might think that we have a standard for how we want to treat animals in our care in this country.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And we kind of set that standard that they should have medical care, that they should have adequate food and water, that they shouldn't have painful things done to their bodies without anesthesia, that they should be euthanized quickly if they're in pain and they can't be treated. But what I think has happened is kind of the opposite.
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Can I microdose veganism?
We've understood what it takes to produce food inexpensively and reliably at mass scale. And whatever that requires of animals is what is legal.
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Can I microdose veganism?
The farm is just impossibly beautiful in this kind of, you know, there's like wild elk roaming around and flocks of wild birds. And the cows are really out there on pasture. They really, really are. This is Northern California, so it's really mild, wet weather. And they're kept out in these kind of like beautiful fields all by the ocean. Lots of space.
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Can I microdose veganism?
I would rather be a beef cow than a dairy cow, but this is, it is physically beautiful, and I think that there's a lot of things about the farm where they're doing it well.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yeah, I'm really grateful that they sat down with me and answered all of my questions. And it was awkward and it was tense. But I appreciated getting their perspective. And I also came away from my meeting with them thinking that I'm not sure that... I'm not sure, especially with dairy specifically, I don't know how much better you could do than how they're doing. Wait, really?
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Can I microdose veganism?
I think that one thing that I took away was that— They were just so big. There were so many cows. The whole operation was so enormous. And so it did have that kind of element of industrialization. Second thing is that the organic prohibition on the use of antibiotics, it just creates terrible incentives and results in a lot of animal cruelty.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yes. My name is Annie Lowry, and I am a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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Can I microdose veganism?
The United States has an extraordinarily rigid rule in its organic program that any animal who's given an antibiotic at any point in its life is no longer organic. So if you had an organic dairy cow who was given a course of antibiotics for, like, you know, pneumonia at week seven of its life, it's a conventional cow for the rest of time. Five years later, it still can't be an organic cow.
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Can I microdose veganism?
But this is problematic because it incentivizes farmers not to give organic cows antibiotics even when they really need them.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Totally. And it means that if a cow is not going to die from an infection, the math suggests that you should withhold the antibiotic. There's a rule also in the organic program that you cannot withhold antibiotics in order to maintain a cow's organic status. But talking to folks in the industry, it happens all the time.
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Can I microdose veganism?
I haven't for a long time. I was like a slippery slope vegetarian, so I ate meat for most of my life. And then at some point was like, okay, I'm going to try to stop eating the low welfare stuff. So I was like, okay, I'm going to try to eat animals that have lived a pretty good life, high welfare.
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Can I microdose veganism?
They had instituted a policy, and they actually showed me it, that they had written out in English and Spanish for all of the farmhands just about what to look for canceri. They said they didn't get a lot of canceri because it's pretty cloudy there and UV exposure is one of the things that seems to be a factor in the development of canceri.
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Can I microdose veganism?
But they admitted, they were like, yeah, that cow should have been sold to auction or euthanized way sooner. That shouldn't have happened.
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Can I microdose veganism?
It was interesting. I had been bracing to get a lot of angry emails from farmers and organic farmers about, you know, did an isolated incident really mean a pattern of abuse? And I actually got a ton of notes from farmers, both organic and non-organic, saying that they thought that the substance of the piece was a little bit shocking and that it shouldn't have happened.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And a lot of them saying basically, yeah, like with a farm that big, I don't know how you would have really high standards for that many cows. I also got notes from some farmers who I think are really committed to doing it right. This was two dairy farmers in the Northeast.
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Can I microdose veganism?
And they said that they don't like the system as it exists either because there's some really high quality animal welfare certifiers, nonprofits, but there's some that are just industry fronts. If you can just like slap, you know, ethically sourced or certified as humane by so-and-so on any product, that means that it's not fair in an even playing field for all of the farmers either, right?
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Can I microdose veganism?
I was a vegetarian for a long time, and I can talk about why I think that that's not really a useful moral category. I think you're better off eating beef and, like, oysters than you are eating eggs and dairy.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Absolutely. So my answer to this is always, you can just eat less. You can just reduce your meat, dairy, and egg consumption by cutting it down. You don't have to go all the way. You could do it like once or twice a week, like one meal per day. That's great. That's like a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful start. Sometimes I hear people and they're like, my consumption doesn't matter.
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Can I microdose veganism?
There's this massive machinery of agricultural production in the United States. What does it matter if I'm not eating it or if I am eating it? I'm such a tiny, tiny part of demand. But there's actual studies that really do show kind of like two things. So one is that supply is responsive to demand. Absolutely.
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Can I microdose veganism?
So if you stop eating animal products entirely, there's like a measurable number of animals that won't die and won't be part of the food system for that. And the second thing is that there is a kind of subtle social contagion effect that people do kind of tend to do what the people around them do.
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Can I microdose veganism?
So if you're like, yeah, I'm trying to eat higher quality meat or I'm trying to eat less of it, I do think that that matters.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yeah. I wrote a whole piece about this. You can't persuade people. It's so fascinating to me. We have had 50 years of animal rights and vegan activism that has not increased the share of vegetarians in the United States at all. None. None.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Completely and totally unsuccessful social movement. You can get people to kind of maybe go vegan-ish or vegetarian a little bit on the margin. It never sticks.
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Can I microdose veganism?
It's a really hard cause. People don't want to be told that they are participating in something evil. They don't want to feel bad about themselves in that way. And it's just a really hard sell. Like, oh, all those meals that your grandmother made you, those were cruel and immoral. That's an awful message to deliver to somebody. Like, oh, you want ice cream because your boyfriend broke up with you?
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Can I microdose veganism?
Why don't you think about the animal, right? Nobody likes it.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yeah, Yellowville, Arkansas. It's beautiful. It's in the Ozarks and a really tiny town. And it happens to be in a part of the United States that has a lot of turkey processing. So they grow a lot of turkeys and they process a lot of turkeys there. And they've had this tradition for like 70 years. It's at this kind of fall festival that they have called the Turkey Trot.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Turkeys don't really fly. They can kind of catch the wind sometimes. So the turkeys you probably eat, like a butterball turkey at Thanksgiving, that turkey is not going to be able to fly at all. They are so big. They are so heavy. They might like flap a little bit, but it's, you know, it'd be like sticking two tiny wings on like a dishwasher, right? Like it's just not going to be able to fly at
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Can I microdose veganism?
Yes. And they're using generally sort of the heritage turkeys, so the dark feathered ones. If you're buying like a really nice Thanksgiving turkey, it might be one of these. And those turkeys are better flyers. And I would also note, because I always get commentary about this, wild turkeys can kind of fly, but they're not good flyers. They're not going to fly long distances, right?
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Can I microdose veganism?
Like they can get up into trees and things like that. I'm not saying that they can't fly, but they're not good.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Oh, God. These people, they're like, I've seen them. And I'm like, Trust me, they're bad flyers. These are not hawks. These are not eagles. They're not sparrows. They're not pigeons. And, yeah, that was exactly it. So, anyway, in Yellville, so they throw the turkeys out of this, like, low-flying aircraft. They do this for literally decades. And some of the birds die immediately.
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Can I microdose veganism?
Some of the birds die of shock or stress. They have, like, heart attacks, basically, because they're so upset by this. A lot of them are injured. Some of them survive.
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Can I microdose veganism?
They have this, like, really amazingly overwritten story. And then at some point PETA hears about it. I see. And PETA gets involved. And PETA is just great at whipping folks up. They're like, this is terrible. There's this whole campaign to shut it down.
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Can I microdose veganism?
The town cops weren't going to do anything about the turkeys. Like, these are people from this community. Why would they stop it? and be like, okay, let's get that plane's tag number and go and try and find it. People had tried to get the FAA involved because they were like— They wanted the FAA to regulate. Exactly. They were like, can you throw turkeys out of planes?
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Can I microdose veganism?
This doesn't seem like a great idea. And the FAA is basically like, yeah, we're not getting involved in this.
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Can I microdose veganism?
So I went to Yelville to talk to people about this, in part because there was just so much— there's such strong partisans on either side. And a lot of folks in Yelville, many of whom work in turkey processing, are like, you have national media attention over 10 birds, not all of whom die, some of whom survived. At the same time that we are like an agriculturally dependent community where—
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Can I microdose veganism?
You know, every fall we eat 45 million turkeys that live life in warehouses and get slaughtered when they're like a few months old. Isn't there some irony here?