Meat School Episode 3: Humans as Part of Nature

This is the transcript of a video broadcast for IGTV ‘Meat School.’ You can watch the archived broadcast here.

Hi everyone. Happy Friday. Welcome back to Meat School. We’re going a little out into the ether today, cause I want to settle something, mainly the business versus sustainability conversation that has been bubbling up in the questions. So, we’re going to be talking about sustainable design and humans as part of nature.

As a segue to this I want to tell you a story about my son. Like many of you I’ve been homeschooling. I’ve traded my teaching of other adults for teaching my eight-year-old, and the differences are pretty astounding.  (Teachers, we thank you. We really can’t say it enough.) Anyway, in the frustrations of reading the other day, a subject my youngest son struggles with, we took a break for science, which is a mutual favorite of ours. I took him downstairs to the basement to peek into the fermentation cabinet, where a batch of chorizo sausages were fermenting, and I told him the story about what was happening inside.

Maybe some of you saw the Instagram story. He decided to write a book about it, and we made a video of him telling the story of bacteria inside the sausages going to battle for the sugar, and gobbling up so much of it that they exploded, and the ones who didn’t get any starved. Maybe I’ll post it on here.  He drew little pictures of the bacteria pooping out acids and alcohols, lowering the pH and making way for other bacteria to finish the job. He decided eventually that fermentation is a war. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I’m rolling with the analogy. This idea that fermentation is a disaster, so to speak. Which those of us who enjoy fermented foods tend to agree, it’s a disaster that ends pretty beautifully. My kid was enthralled by this, as my usual adult-sized students are, to learn that the flavor we associate with cured salami is not just due to the bacteria’s metabolites (the poops, as Tucker called them), but also the dead bodies of the exploded and starved microbes. Crazy, right?

This is layered or patterned behind the fact that the hog that provided the meat for that salami also lived and the disaster of it’s death (as some people like to think of it) provided for the salami’s flavor and success. Patterned against that, the hog rooted in soil, which is pretty cataclysmic if you think about soil-level worlds, and it destroyed the homeostasis of the soil, but in doing that it made way for seeds to germinate on a farm that provided more sunlight and more energy for the soil, which grew the food for the pig. Life and death and life and death and life and death. Ongoing cycles of disaster and resurgence. This is how nature works. Not without catastrophe at all. Catastrophe is required, and folded into the design. When we think about COVID, I hope the metaphor is not lost. 

Which brings me to the point of today’s little lesson. About how we want to be in the world. Our past discussions have focused on the mainstream meat supply chain and how its flaws are being laid bare by the virus, but I don’t want that conversation to be judged as a simple one that pits cost and scale against integrity and stewardship. In essence, that’s the surface conversation that industry and economics people and the conscientious-design people have been having in a lame and binary way for a long time now. What we want to talk about it how industry and economics CAN work, without sacrificing human well-being and stewardship of natural resources. The dangerous territories that each side finds itself in are on one side saying that efficiency and profitability only come with the status quo way of doing business, and on the other side people saying that stewardship and quality of life, care and resiliency aren’t possible within an economic framework or with any goal of profitability. Or, saying that it’s too late, and we’ve messed up too much for it to matter whether we do it better or differently.

The salami and its microscopic internal war, and really any other natural cataclysm, show us otherwise. If we pay attention and employ moderation, we find hope.

 So I’m not doing this because I’m one of those “big is always bad” people or “business is evil” proponents. I just want to have a discussion about the values and the thresholds that guide our models. Temple Grandin said it well in an article last week. Big isn’t always BAD, but big is fragile. Regional food systems people have been saying this forever. Look to nature, of which we are part, and mimic nature’s patterns. Nature doesn’t put all of her eggs in one basket, so to speak. A diversity of many rather than one big leader is favored instead.

If we look at the life death life cycles of natural farming and salami making, we notice patterns that inform synergy, reciprocity and system health. This is called systems thinking—realizing that everything is connected, tends to repeat in cycles of disruption and repair. And that lets you pay attention to what limits and feeds each component of the system. It also allows you to realize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, so together all the parts create more than what any part could create on its own.

And so, the factory farm is a system, you might argue. but it’s a flawed one. Its bigness leads to its fragility in times of disaster, or a shock from the outside. That’s one example. Another example pertains to the workers. The workers are indeed parts of the system, but a host of factors lead to the hardship of their lives. We covered a few reasons why in the last episode. The death-shaming that happens in our conversations about meat, and the systemic racism and immigrant-hatred that threads through our culture and our politics — all of these things, as well as the “profitability as god”- limit the value of the worker as a part of that system, allowing the worker to be underpaid, overworked, endangered, and invisible. This further fuels other parts of that system being able to be valued and more visible, for example – profitability. It also masks or makes a mirage of what is actually happening below the surface.

Now, COVID has peeled back the casing. We shouldn’t be so surprised at what we find inside. If you peel back the casing of a salami, it’s not always going to be pretty, but the contrast of what it happening there is that the death is not without use, and not an end in itself. Can we not see now that we have an opportunity to honor those who have suffered by changing the way that this happens?

We call this copying of nature’s work biomimicry--borrowing our perceived design tenets from nature to build in redundancy, diversity, fertility, care, and resilience. We recognize that it does not come without a cost, but for all intents and purposes, costs are repaid by qualitative improvements or reinstatements of order. We think, and we hope, that if these principles can apply to a salami, a farm, a business, and a family, they can apply to a large business and even a government.

 So here is a diagram, if you’re a diagram person. This is from the book Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth and I really recommend it if you’re struggling to marry these sustainable design ideas with profitable business goals and economic principles. Also businesses run by my friends like Accelerating Appalachia and Cultivating Resilience, and in my own consulting, there are people who know how to help us re-shape the way we do business and farming and other activities to support economy and well-being.

This is a picture of how nature takes and creates, consumes and produces, and generally cycles energy, water, nutrients, and other building blocks of the natural world. If you apply it to making sweaters or growing livestock, it can make sense, too.

Some people say it’s too late. That humans have taken themselves out of nature, and done too much damage to repair natural systems. You know, you say, “the human overgrowth, or the breaking the design rules of nature hasn’t happened by accident.” I agree with you. So then you say, “humans have broken the rules on purpose and now it’s broken beyond repair.” But, maybe saying that is more of the same- taking humans out of nature. Let’s consider instead that maybe the overgrowth is also part of the natural cycle, and that unfortunately as hard as it may seem, that disaster is maybe folded into the design. And what comes next matters the most. 

Think of it like a flood. Water carries away everything in its wake. As it recedes again, it drops the finest particles first. These are the clays and the silts. It drops the largest particles last. These are the sands and the seeds. And afterward, the entire program is re-arranged. The evolutionary responses (what grows where, who settles where) are shaped by what landed where. It’s what happens next that matters now. It takes an incredible amount of moderation from both sides of the aisle to recognize this and work with it.

I see it all the time. I see people who have made tons of money in some status quo business models who get into farming and can’t see the value of slowing down production, or take more breaks, or see how something like growing a cover crop— a crop that is just for the soil and not for harvest- as something that will IMPROVE business. But then they do it and they see that it is improving the system, either by making the soil more fertile to produce more crops, or by increasing worker quality of life so that the output of their product is better and more attentive.

On the other side of the coin, people who are ultra pure into sustainability can be super afraid of the cataclysm. My farm consulting clients will say “oh I can’t do that it’s so disruptive, it’s so drastic.” Spraying is a perfect example here. I’ll be consulting with a landowner who has a really noxious or poisonous weed and they feel like they’ve tried all the natural approaches and they say “I don’t want to spray but I feel like spraying is all I can do.” And I say OK, well consider that maybe you have to spray. And that what you do afterward is the most important thing. If you have to create that cataclysm, but then you employ afterward the tenets of regenerative design, then you should get repair. New ground.

So, for years, people like me have argued the main design flaws of industrial food, and the cultural beliefs that cause humans to design systems as we do. Too big is too fragile. Lack of diversity reduces durability. Quality over cost-efficiency. Well-being of participants should be valued over the full-scale avoidance of suffering. These are the values, we argue, upon which nature is designed. Humans have broken the rules, sure. But as a virus makes its way through the population as nature’s proportional response, the rule breaking has shown its role in the design of all things. Now, as we re-open businesses and develop this controversial vaccine, we prepare our own evolutionary retort. I don’t think it’s too late.

The question of what we do next still matters.

Thanks for listening. Have a good weekend.