Does such a thing actually exist? Happy meat that is. I am actually surprised I haven’t read about this term in the the New York Times Magazine.
So there I am enjoying a wonderful meal atop West Seattle staring out at skyline on a beautiful but chilly day when one of the people sitting at the table threw down the term “happy meat”. The context I won’t get completely right but something along the lines of “that is why I really try my best to purchase only happy meat”.
Where do I begin? First of course is the obvious: is this a new term from the meat industry itself? Second, what is happy meat? Can meat actually be happy? Anthropomorphizing dead flesh? After it has spent its life on a factory farm, stuck with antibiotics, fed pesticides, stripped of children, not allowed to turn around or see the light of day, beaten, electrocuted, and hung upside down on a meat hook, the meat itself becomes happy? Third, ascribing feeling to the meat but not the cow/chicken/pig?
I said nothing, but rather just pondered this idea of happy meat. It works as a mantra, and it would make someone who eats meat and who is aware of the realities of factory farming feel much better about themselves. Happy meat… as opposed to the sad meat?
So let’s use the term the way I suppose it was meant. The cow for example is a free-range cow, free of antibiotics, allowed to turn around in its stall, moos a lot, prances around the farm, and then is sent to slaughter, before being wrapped in cellophane and then sold at a local co-op for a slightly or more than slightly higher price. I imagine this is what was meant by “happy meat”.
This idea finds me really wanting to go get some happy face stickers and plaster them all over the meat at various grocery stores.
Ultimately though is it not just another way of distancing ourselves from the reality of meat in our capitalist society? We don’t even acknowledge it as the animal it was, just that it is meat. Happy meat. I feel as though people who do begin to “think” about the interconnectedness of our ‘food’ but who are not ready to make the change (or at least admit to the devastation factory farming causes) must develop some new codes to which allows them to continue to deny the fact that farmed animals feel and are treated any which way but humane. Maybe ‘happy meat’ gives them the moral or ethical grounds of humane?
Because once you admit that, you can’t go back. You get it. You understand that meat no matter how you raise it or bake it: meat cannot be happy. It is dead, decomposing, rotting flesh. Happy meat, or free-range meat, is sent to the same slaughterhouses and put through the same abuses people never what to hear about. Happy meat is not the bunch of cows in Old McDonald’s farm you would sing about in Kindergarten.
It was June of 1979 when the patriarchs of McDonald’s rolled out the concept of a Happy Meal. Dick Bramms believed that it would sell McDonald’s as a family restaurant to American. In targeting children the concept included a toy of some sort. This would include puzzle books or stencils before the tie-ins to major movies and toy lines. The meal’s purpose was to please children.
So the Pavlovian promise of a free toy was and continues to be a marketing genius, all the while making our children fat. But who cares about what they are actually eating? They are HAPPY! Forget that the small plastic toy will one day end up in a landfill, or the nutritional content of the meal… it is cheap, fast, and my kid is happy.
We love happy in this society. As long as we are happy fuck everyone else. As long as we chase this ‘happy’ nothing else matters. Now those kids who were originally sold the Happy Meal, are in their thirties and some of them have learned to ask questions or even think about the food they digest with its impact on the topsoil, water usage, landfill, pesticides, and the practices of corporations. Some have not.
Some still want to find the ‘happy’ in a meal/meat that is anything but.
