Frankly, these responses boggle my noodle. Both McMahon and Viertel seem to forget that an integral aspect of animal cruelty is not just how an animal is treated while it's alive but also the inconvenient truth that—no matter how they are raised—the animals we eat ultimately succumb to a violent death, one that they are smart enough to anticipate, sentient enough to suffer through, and, were they given an option, wise enough to avoid. On some (philosophical?) level, the humanity of the treatment is compromised the moment the death blow lands—this is certainly "one of the problems with cruelty to animals." In fact, dare one interpret that gruesome moment as penultimate to anything else, consider the reaction of a man as cold-steeled and tough-minded as Anthony Bourdain who, after witnessing the slaughter of a six-month-old hand-fed pig, left this unforgettable response in Kitchen Confidential:

For a guy who'd spent twenty-eight years serving dead animals and sneering at vegetarians, I was having an unseemly amount of trouble getting with the program. I had to suck it up. . . It took four strong men, experts at this sort of thing, to restrain the pig, then drag and wrestle him up onto his side ... With the weight of two men pinning him down, and another holding his hind legs, the main man with the knife, gripping him by the head, leaned over and plunged the knife all the way into the beast's thorax, just above the heart. The pig went wild. The screaming penetrated the fillings in my teeth ... With an incredible shower of fresh blood, the pig fought mightily ...They finally managed to wrestle the poor beast back up onto the cart again, the guy with the mustache working the blade back and forth like a toilet plunger ...

Anyone who has seen anything remotely like this intuitively understands the truth of the matter: the pig does not go gently for the very basic reason that the pig does not want to go.

The fact that the harsh reality of animal death for billions of creatures does not immediately overwhelm concerns about the economic viability of several hundred small farms (McMahon's point), much less the emotional distance separating privileged consumers from their local farmers (Viertel), suggests that Friends of the Earth and Slow Food are just as removed from the reality of agriculture as anyone else. Contrary to what it may seem, what we're ultimately witnessing with the sustainable food movement's opposition to in vitro meat is not so much a warped moral calculus—Viertel, I know firsthand, is far too thoughtful and intelligent for such a flaw—but rather something much more prosaic: the protection of sacred turf.

Viertel's and McMahon's comments followed me around—nagged me, actually—for days after I read them. But then I realized something: the politics of meat is the politics of self interest—no matter what side of the debate one is on—and, as is always the case, everyone's interest is fiercely protected except that of the animals. Just as corn and soy are the bread and butter of Big Ag, the persistence of small, traditionally conceptualized farms practicing time honored agricultural techniques is the sine qua non of the sustainable food movement. Without these small family farms, and without animals being humanely raised to be slaughtered, the movement's turf would shrink. The knowledge that science and technology could have the potential to fundamentally redefine (and improve) the very agricultural tradition that so many organizations are designed to protect is knowledge we can hardly expect interested parties to evaluate in fair terms. My guess is that it probably terrifies them.

And I kind of feel their pain. But still: a pound of flesh sacrificed by a small cadre of sustainable animal farms would be an immeasurable gain for the billions unable to articulate their position on the matter of their own death. Anyway, I know how my fork would vote.