RACCONTI DI ORDINARI STERMINI
Monday, March 1, 2010
Blueprints Of Steamships
Il dolore DELLA CARNE
Alla vigilia del vertice sul cambiamento climatico di Copenhagen, lo scorso dicembre, Paul McCartney si presentò al Parlamento Europeo. In quell'occasione pronunciò un discorso in favore della riduzione del consumo di carne, ricordando il fatto ben documentato che l'allevamento su scala industriale è tra le prime cause di emissioni di gas serra e riscaldamento globale. Mezzo mondo reagì però con le sopracciglia alzate all'apparizione di Sir Paul, quando non con aperto scherno; fuori dal parlamento, un gruppo della lobby degli allevatori organizzava un barbecue a cielo aperto, con hamburger e salsicce, rispondendo con sarcasmo al discorso del baronetto. Ora, se da un lato si può comprendere l'ostilità verso l'ennesimo miliardario famoso che pretende di impartire lezioni di etica, dall'altro questo episodio appare un esempio della reazione più comune a un tema, come il vegetarianesimo, semplice e pacato eppure a quanto pare disturbante. Come ogni vegetariano sa per esperienza, pochi argomenti suscitano un tale misto di incomprensione, sospetto, ironia qualunquista, quanto la scelta di non consumare carne. Tra le classiche obiezioni mosse a chi non mangia cibi di provenienza animale, due sono molto radicate, una legata alla tradizione cultural (man keep animals from time immemorial), the other the traditional natural (animals are eaten by other animals). Objections that could possibly have had some taken up to a century ago, when farming was based on traditional methods and the figure of a farmer he knew and respected his animals. Today, eating meat almost always means to consume the products of the farm and slaughterhouse industry, huge corporations that manage the birth and death of billions and billions of living beings. A scientifically organized on pain, torture, genetic manipulation, confinement in overcrowded spaces to death by suffocation, the most horrific methods of killing. Eternal Treblinka seems that Adolf Hitler was suffering from nervous stomach and flatulence. When the dictator was found that meat made it less smelly reduce its emissions intestinal tried to give preference to vegetable consumption. In fact, despite the legend that was vegetarian, Hitler never abandoned his beloved Bavarian sausages and other meat dishes, and vegetarians was always real fierce. Banned vegetarian organizations in Germany and later in the occupied territories, the German pacifist and vegetarian Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz had to flee to Paris and then in Italy, where he was finally arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau. All events that were mentioned in an essay a few years ago, Eternal Treblinka by Charles Patterson (in Italy published by Editori Riuniti, pp. 320, € 16). In addition to address the eating habits of the Führer, Patterson discusses the genesis of the model of extermination in Nazi concentration camps, even suggesting that this model had a form of common origin and similar in many technical and operational, with the industrial system of farming and slaughter American .
assembly line
If such a comparison may seem to some out of place, it should be noted that the first to do so was actually Isaac Bashevis Singer: he was the author of the Family Moskat to suggest that "for animals, it is an eternal Treblinka ", recalling the ghost the infamous death camp. On the other hand, the efficient machine of animal slaughter had already inspired other companies. Henry Ford, the automobile industry, confessed that she had been visiting a slaughterhouse in Chicago who suggested the idea for a system of work based on the assembly line. In slaughterhouses it was dismembered animal corpses as quickly as possible, in factories, it would assemble cars in the past just as fast. The tendency to dismiss vegetarianism as a matter for beautiful souls or intellectual Saputelli could almost be confirmed, at first glance, in front of a text just released in Italy: If nothing matters. Why do we eat animals? Jonathan Safran Foer (Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 368, € 18). Here is a young and famous American writer, with a little house in a nice neighborhood of Brooklyn, who at birth of first child is left to take middle-class anxieties about what is right to feed him, and begins to write an inquiry-reflection on the most controversial food: meat. It might sound like the story of the book. If it were true that Foer is a writer, that is driven by a sense of need and able to fully immerse themselves in the theme with a depth and literary style that corresponds to a depth of philosophical analysis, metaphorical resonance of emotional involvement.
result of three years of work, impeccably documented, ironic enough to avoid i toni della lezioncina e abbastanza drammatico da provocare brividi di abissale disagio, il libro ha suscitato rumore negli Stati Uniti, un misto di commenti entusiasti e molto ostili. Anche qui, vari recensori hanno preferito alzare un muro di scetticismo, trattando il libro come l'ennesimo caso di scontro tra i castelli in aria dei vegetariani e il realismo dei carnivori, i quali invece sarebbero impegnati a pensare a questioni più serie. Con notevole disonestà critica, la giornalista letteraria più bizzosa d'America, Michiko Kakutani del «New York Times», liquidava il libro chiedendo perché Foer non si dedicasse a cause migliori.
Paludi tossiche
«La carne solleva rilevanti questioni filosofiche and industry for more than a hundred and forty billion dollars a year, which occupies almost one third of the world's land surface, affects marine ecosystems and may also determine the future climate on Earth, "says Foer with dryness in his book. And later: "How destructive to be a culinary preferences before deciding to make us eat more?". The livestock industry says its goal is to feed the world, but it is difficult to see how a system that consumes enormous agricultural resources and raises animals affected by genetics so they can not reproduce the most natural way, can have a heart the fate of the world. Seems rather to be fed the obsession that consumes a lot of senseless animal proteins, much more than humanity has ever eaten before. Among the many powerful images that emerge from the book is that of toxic swamps near the large American farms. Now, imagine blacks in the open pits as big as football fields, designed to collect the excrement of animals: the discharges of these marshes often end in contact with rivers and aquifers, with terrifying effects. When I'm on the verge of overflowing, sometimes the solution is to spray them literally in the air, "a geyser of shit that spreads an aerosol of feces, creating gaseous vortices which cause severe neurological damage. Communities who live near these farms complain about problems of persistent nosebleeds, earache, diarrhea, chronic lung and heart burn. " When you enter
Foer, a night at a turkey farm in the company of a young activist, at first sight chicks stacked in the warehouse seem all the same. They're there, stunned, under the impassive artificial lights. Only when his eyes get used to distinguish the mass of animals, he sees the bewildering amount of deformed chicks, dehydrated, covered with blood and wounds, and those who lie dead.
The case studies of pain in the meat industry is immense and well-documented by thousands of confessions of workers, materials video shot in secret, government statistics. They range from the millions of chickens who end up living in scalding tanks for cattle that, for the same negligence in the chain of work, end up skinned while still conscious. We are stunned animals appear in a bland, so that the heart is still pumping when their throats slit and bleeding is faster. Huge quantities of birds with bone fractures to the procedures by which they are transported. Beaks cut off, severed tails, teeth veneers, piglets castrated, all without anesthesia. Confinement and lack of movement problems that cause bone deformities and insanity, animals rub against the bars to be covered with infected sores. There are
Then the abuse carried out by frustrated and underpaid workers: pigs thrown to drown in the swamps of sewage, beating pregnant sows, poultry crushed under the feet and thrown against the wall, cigarettes extinguished on animals, beatings with hammers, electric prods in the anus, all the indifference of his superiors. Phenomena but not isolated cases so extensive as to constitute the norm.
Not to mention the bombing of antibiotics, hormones and other medicines to replace the total absence of natural environment, genetic manipulation that gives rise to animals, monsters, unable to survive beyond their teenage years, more and more victims and suffering congenital deformities. Born in pain, live in pain and die in pain: the systematic and large-scale organization of a similar amount of pain has no historical precedent. Sure, it's not human suffering. But we still want to deny, against all scientific evidence and common sense, that animals have feelings and they might have an emotional life?
End users
While Foer's book provides details of the particular situation in the U.S., the reality of Europe seems to provide some protection in more formally to the animals. But it is easy to understand that billions of living beings everywhere are treated as objects, elements of an assembly-disassembly, prisoners of a technical process that does not recognize them as living space opens to the atrocities. Dall'altra parte ci sono i consumatori, utilizzatori finali di questa atrocità, felici di non farsi troppe domande su cosa ci sia dietro la carne plastificata, anonima e a poco prezzo che trovano al supermercato.
Come dice a Foer un allevatore tradizionale, che tenta di combattere i sistemi dell'allevamento industriale: «Gli animali hanno pagato caro il nostro desiderio di avere tutto in qualunque momento a un prezzo irrisorio». Mentre la nonna di Foer, ebrea scappata attraverso l'Europa ai tempi della Seconda Guerra Mondiale, ricorda al nipote che è assai pericoloso mangiare senza riconoscere il proprio cibo. Pur ridotta alla fame lei rifiutò, per tradizione kosher, di mangiare maiale: «Se niente importa, non c'è più nothing to save. "
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Marco Mancassola
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