2/28/2024 0 Comments Predator meat vs prey meat![]() ![]() Williams: I can’t say that I could justify the pleasure that I take from it, or argue that anyone else should. We paused to admire them they paused as well, staring back at us cautiously before continuing into the night.Ĭohen: How do you personally reconcile your enjoyment of meat with your knowledge of how it got to your plate? At one point, as we shivered on the porch in the evening, a doe and her fawns emerged from a copse of trees across the street. I am not a vegetarian either, but I sought this conversation with him in part to answer the question: If I have respect and empathy for other sentient beings, how can I also desire to eat them? We sat for a long time in his house last November discussing this question. as inhumane and believes that radical reforms are needed. But he also sees the way meat is marketed and produced in the U.S. To him there is value in recognizing that humans evolved as omnivores, and even the desire some of us have not to harm animals must be understood within the context of a natural cycle in which animals eat each other. He is currently on a fellowship at the University of Iowa’s creative-writing program. In 2019 he and his partner moved to Indonesia, where he reported on the global coffee industry, but the pandemic brought them back to the States. ![]() He finished college in Atlanta and found work there as a culture writer and a food critic for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (He has followed the path of the writer John McPhee’s fascination with oranges, down to the bag of them he put on the table when I arrived at his home in Iowa City, Iowa, for this interview.) After dropping out of college in Boston, he decided to bike across the country to San Francisco, where he lived for several years. The largest section is devoted to Williams’s trip to a tiny community in northern Alaska that has survived for centuries by hunting whales.īorn in Louisiana, Williams grew up outside of Tampa, Florida, in orange-growing country. ![]() His recent book, Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating, is a document of his journey, juxtaposing personal experiences with the history of meat eating and human-animal relations. But if something troubled him, he wanted to look at it directly. “We each want to think of ourselves as somebody who doesn’t cause pain or death in the world,” he explains. He worked in poultry and beef slaughterhouses, spent time with farmers throughout the South, and learned to hunt - all in an effort to understand a deeper question about the human animal. The meat was placed in different packaging depending on where it was going - the organic market, the budget bin, or the hot new restaurant.Īrmed with this awareness, Williams continued to explore what was happening behind the scenes of our food system. Then an investigation into the locally sourced chicken at many Atlanta restaurants led him to an industrial warehouse that could slaughter 250,000 chickens a day. At first he was assigned puff pieces on restaurant openings and trendy cuisine. He spent years in Atlanta writing about food for local weeklies, magazines, and newspapers. Wyatt Williams has wrestled with these questions for more than a decade. Why do we draw these lines? In doing so, what are we saying about ourselves? In many Western countries we cannot imagine eating the cats and dogs who share our homes, but these animals are meals in other parts of the world. On grocery-store shelves in Central Asian countries you can find horse meat in a can in Kentucky horses are highly valued and part of a long racing tradition. These preferences have evolved to some degree as a result of geographical and cultural boundaries. ![]() A t some point in history, humans began to make distinctions between animals they wanted to eat and animals they wanted to tame or befriend. ![]()
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