Meyers on . . . Pollan?

How strange. Apparently not satisfied with trashing perfectly good postmodern writers novelists, B. R. Meyers turns his aim on Michael Pollan, accusing the author of the almost universally acclaimed The Omnivore's Dilemma of moral fuzziness when it comes to eating meat.

But by reducing man's moral nature to an extension of our instincts, Pollan is free to present his appetite as a sort of moral-o-meter, the final authority for judging the rightness of all things culinary. He shoots a wild pig, for example, hugely enjoying the experience. We even get a spiel about how hunting makes people face the inevitability of their own death. (Psychologists have long asserted the opposite: As Otto Rank put it, and in words relevant to meat eating in general, "the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other.") Ah, but then Pollan sees a photo of himself leering over the corpse and feels bad. So is killing pigs right or wrong? Or as he puts it, "What if it turned out I couldn't eat this meat?"

   

Spoiler alert: He could. He even congratulates himself on "doing well by the animal" by cooking and chewing it with the proper reverence. As reluctant as he is to attribute fear and pain to a live animal -- one mustn't anthropomorphize! -- he sees nothing strange in attributing a concern for decorum to a dead one. He apparently believes that we cannot fully relate to animals until they become food. In the introduction, we are told that eating something -- "transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds" -- constitutes the deepest possible "relationship" with it, "the most profound engagement" of all. (German police had to listen to similar reasoning in 2002 after arresting one Armin Meiwes, who had just put his omnicompetent jaws to work on a Siemens engineer.) Now, Epicurus, who strikes me as a vegetarian Pollan might listen to, made the rather obvious point that no living thing experiences death. As soon as life ceases, the body ceases to deserve the attribute human or animal, as the root of the latter word makes especially clear. The pig thus takes its farewell from Pollan almost as soon as he pulls his trigger in greeting. The mere flesh left behind tastes remarkably like that of us "long pigs -- to use the notorious cannibal term -- and the digestive tract cannot tell them apart at all. There is less "transformation" going on here than Pollan would like to think.

The moral-o-meter is applied to other meats as well (the book is subtitled "A Natural History of Four Meals"). Pollan buys a steer from a pasture in South Dakota, whereupon it is loaded onto a truck. When he catches up to it in a factory farm in Kansas, it is hock-deep in excrement. Pollan is far too talented not to convey the ghastliness of the "manure lagoon." (This is a writer, to mention again his tour de force section on corn, who can make even biochemistry vivid.) But does he sense the poignancy in the reunion?

Frankly, I found Pollan's arguments about the morality of eating meat perfectly fine, and I found Meyers's critique of them about as sensible of his critique of certain well-known novelists.

Comments

[Jacob Russell]

An author's nightmare.

To open the morning paper (do people still do that?), and discover Myers had written a review of your latest--and praised it to the skies!

I will be sure to send him an advance copy when my novel is published, confident he'll be properly outraged.

Then I can snip the most negative comments to use as blurbs on the book jacket.