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It’s What’s for Dinner
To be an ethical eater, one can no longer betray a deep ignorance about the workings of nature
By Scott Korb
Most honest discussions that bring together food and animals are really, at bottom, about suffering and killing and death, topics that we all know have a way of making people feel bad. This is especially true, I’ve found, if those people are young college students whose lives have been relatively unburdened by the kinds of suffering and death — and the increasingly regular thoughts about such things — that go along with honest living in the world.
Each semester for the past five years, I’ve set out to discuss the suffering and killing and deaths of animals as part of a freshman-level food-writing course I call “Setting a Fine Table,” so named for a favorite line from
M.F.K. Fisher. Fisher is the American food writer whose work, which I first read after a few too many years as a vegetarian and then a vegan, suggested how I might return to taking real pleasure in food again. Step one involved admitting I’d been wrong about the supposed pleasure (and joyful pain) I’d been taking all those years in refusing so much of what’s out there to eat. No matter what I thought about how pure and good my diet was as a vegan, how Fisher ate was always better, whether in her youth, when she watched…
