Politics and Policy Archive

Welcome to Politics and Policy where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the important political and public policy questions facing us as Jews and as Americans living in the ever more interdependent global village of today. Every other week you will find a new article on this page.

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Sacrifices

By Jennifer E. Krause

It was a typical weekday evening. I came home from work, switched on National Public Radio, and started listening to "All Things Considered" as I considered how much of my mail was junk and what I would be having for dinner. I sat down and began to sift through the glossy special offers and envelopes filled with personalized address labels "for my convenience" that I never ordered. Having concluded the tedious mail ritual, I focused my gaze on the pile of take-out menus that would eventually yield my evening meal. It was then that I heard Jo Jones, a dairy farmer in Wales, tell her tale.

It was not what she said as much as the tone that made me stop and really listen. The pain in her voice as she told the terrible story of her day would not allow the radio to be the simple background noise for the end of mine. On that day, two hundred twenty-eight of her family's pedigreed dairy cows - the entire herd - had been slaughtered after half were diagnosed with cases of foot-and-mouth disease. As Jones narrated the horror to the interviewer thousands of miles away, her cows and her fields were burning, for slaughter of the animals is only the first step towards eliminating the disease that has infected almost 300,000 in just three weeks. Jones knew every one of the cows by name, as did her young daughter. She told the reporter that they never needed numbers or tags to tell them apart.

Cows and other livestock have been in the news over the past several months for a number of reasons, none of which are good. Between the mad cow crisis and the recent foot-and-mouth outbreak in Great Britain, Europe, South America and the Middle East, fear has become a regular ingredient in the staple foods of many peoples' lives. And it is prompting officials to reexamine the recipe for how food gets to the table. Many say the sources of these crises run deeper than the diseases themselves, and are a direct result of increased production, wider profit margins, and globalization. Greater demand, they say, means more animals being transported longer distances, kept in smaller spaces, in unhealthy conditions, leaving the door open to dangerous infections that threaten animal and human alike.

In the United States, we have yet to see these particular crises threaten our lives in any significant way. We have not had a case of foot-and-mouth disease in this country for over seventy years, and a variety of offices take measures every day to prevent mad cow disease and CJD, the disease found in humans who eat infected meat, from becoming a frightening reality for Americans. And yet, I would imagine that there are very few meat eaters in the U.S. who have not stopped to think even for a moment about what this all means.

I am one of those meat eaters, and I grow more and more concerned all the time. Yet my concern is not just about disease, but about the barrage of questions that demand our attention in a new universe of eating. I came across a teaching in the Talmud recently that struck me with regard to this topic. In the text, the rabbis are trying to decide how to make a Sabbath meal more special than a meal eaten on any other day of the week. One of them suggests that the meal should include meat and wine, to which another replies, "But we who are accustomed to having meat and wine every day, how shall we mark a change?" The rabbis were addressing a reality in their own way of life, suggesting that new choices create new challenges. We are faced with a similar challenge, but on a scale that the rabbis never could have imagined.

Today so many of us are fortunate enough to have an infinite number of meal choices on any day of the week. We go to the grocery store where we find meat ready for cooking displayed in refrigerated cases and a staggering variety of fruits and vegetables available, whether they are in season in our own region or not. We can purchase prepared meals or have meals delivered to our homes and offices without having to look at the food in its raw form, handle it, or transform it into the dish that appears before us. We have access to a tremendous amount of information about our bodies and how different diets affect our health, information that can enhance life or can cause us to become so hyper-focused on our physical selves that we forget there is a soul inside. Now, in a time when we have more choices, where there are more possibilities than ever, how are we to make the separations, set the limits, and create the boundaries that will keep us connected to the sanctity and the responsibilities of eating?

We are faced with the challenges of abundance rather than scarcity, challenges for which we are less equipped because they are so foreign. Now more than ever our appetites and our demands have an impact on the way the world does business, what ends up in our supermarkets, and what we put on our tables. Our appetites and our demands also have an impact on what does not end up on other peoples' tables in parts of the world we will never see with our own eyes. In an age of technological advances that allow us to see more of the world from our living room in an hour than Magellan could have seen in a lifetime, we can also see less if we choose to do so.

Most of us do not see where our food comes from, do not raise the animals, plant the seeds, or till the soil, nor do we see the people who do. Most of us do not become a part of the process until we get the ingredients home or, in some cases, until the food arrives at our door. But the not knowing and not seeing actually demand of us that we know and see more, that we do not allow ourselves to opt out of that journey from earth to table and beyond just because we can. Determining how to factor ourselves back into the equation is the talmud of our times, with every person who eats functioning as a rabbi, setting limits by asking questions such as:

· What role do my own eating choices play in how much or how little food is available to others, both in my own community and in other parts of the world?

· Where is the food I am buying and eating produced? In what countries or states? By whom and under what conditions?

· Do the markets I shop in or the restaurants I eat in donate surplus goods to local shelters and food pantries?

We will all ask different questions, and more often than not it will be impossible to answer them all. But the act of asking enables us to open our eyes to the fact that eating is never just eating. It is a connection to people, sources, and forces both seen and unseen, a blessing for us that should not be a curse for others.

In the Book of Deuteronomy, God permits people to slaughter, eat, and enjoy meat. It is written: "When the Lord enlarges your territory, as has been promised, and you say, 'I shall eat some meat,' for you have the urge to eat meat, you may eat meat whenever you wish" (12:20). In Tractate Chullin, the section of the Talmud that deals primarily with kosher laws, the rabbis comment on this verse from the Torah. They say: "The Torah here teaches a rule of conduct, that a person should not eat meat unless he has a special appetite for it" (84a). Of course, when meat was eaten in the time of the Temple it was taken from a sacrifice, an offering to God, and there was no mistaking that life had been sacrificed in order to sustain the lives of others. Today we really do live in expanded territories and remarkable times, and yet when we eat meat, when I eat meat, I have to wonder how truly aware we are of our appetites, of how our appetites drive people, policies, and governments, or of the sacrifices involved in sating them. And when I heard Jo Jones speaking just steps away from the smoking pyres upon which her cows had been burnt, something told me that this is not the sacrifice God had in mind.