Hypothetical putanesca

A version of this article was first published: ethics.org.au - December 2011

John Bevins

John Bevins was asked some weeks after attending the Rozelle Feast Day hypothetical, The ‘Ethics of Pork Production, Distribution and Consumption’, to write a review. As he’d not worn his writer’s hat, nor taken a note pad or recorder, he offers instead “a putanesca put together with stale memories and a pinch of prejudice”.

This was shaping up to be a piece about porkies.

Who, from time to time, doesn't tell them?

But it took an unexpected and worrying turn and mired me in a dark and uncomfortable place: A gully, well away from the bright verdant pastures where little white lies hop about and the occasional porkie ranges freely.

I really thought I'd caught a porkie. Or at least a fluffy white lie.

It was a sunny Sydney arvo several Saturdays ago. I'd come directly from Bondi Beach, salty like bacon, having collected my animal-crazy daughter from the horse stables at Centennial Park. (More about bacon later.) In a venue across the road from the magnificently decrepit White Bay Power Station, we sat in anticipation of a hypothetical confrontationally entitled ‘The Ethics of Pork Production, Distribution and Consumption’.

On a makeshift stage in front of a make-change audience sat an unlikely cast—unlikely given that getting them all there together for such a controversial topic must have begun, itself, as a somewhat hypothetical idea. “Hey, what if we got an animal rights activist, an academic who is an expert in primary production, a free-range pig farmer, a progressive providore, a top restaurateur, the pork buyer from one of the big two retailers, a politician and the head of the pork industry itself to discuss the industry’s animal welfare issues?”

Presto! There they all were! As billed! Well, not all, one member of the cast was a last-minute cancellation. It looked like Jesus Christ Superstar without you-know-who.

Dana Campbell, the chief executive of Voiceless, the animal protection institute founded by Brian Sherman via inspiration from his daughter, was there. And Professor John Crawford, Chair of Sustainable Agriculture at Sydney University. And Stephan Evans, owner of Limerick Free Range Pork. And Grant Hilliard, owner of Feather & Bone. And Mark Jensen, chef and owner of the Red Lantern Restaurant. And Senator Lee Rhiannon, the Greens spokesperson on Animal Welfare. And Andrew Spencer, the Chief Executive of Australian Pork Limited. And the panel Chair was there, Philip Wright, a counsellor and educator from St James Ethics Centre. He opened gently with the advice that Coles wouldn't be attending—they’d cancelled the day before, pressures of work, what with Christmas approaching.

The audience groaned. Someone shouted "It's a Saturday afternoon!"

You can see where the porkie angle comes in.

I duly and dutifully called Coles and told them that’s how this was shaping up—being as transparent as I knew how, because the subject was transparency. My hope was that Coles would turn off the spin cycle and come clean about the real reason for not attending, cold feet say, and that praise would flow for all who practice—even belatedly—that oldest and simplest of homilies, Honesty is the Best Policy. It would be an upbeat piece and we’d all be up there—on those aforementioned verdant pastures, in the sunny gardens of a beautiful white homestead, Mea Culpa, feasting and listening to a band called Truth.

But instead I'm alone in a dark uncomfortable place. Gullibility Gully? For me, naïveté can strike at any time (my daughter told me recently that ‘gullible’ isn’t even in the dictionary and I shot back, instantly, “Isn’t it?”), However, right now, I prefer to think I’m in the Glen of Good Faith. Although as it turns out it’s no less dark a place.

So while some may remain convinced that Coles did conspire not to be there, believing the Financial Review report of the panelist pulling out under orders from his boss, I’ll take at face value Coles’ explanation. This was not the avoidance of a blow torch to the belly, a sight as delicious as crackling getting made on MasterChef, Coles simply had a clash of commitments. These things happen. The corporation didn’t see that this show missing such a crucial member of the cast as its panelist was going to be a disappointment for everyone attending, but why should it? It’s a corporation. Suggesting that an understudy might have been a good idea, or some other Plan B, in the hope of seeing evidence that ‘The Ethics of Pork Production, Distribution and Consumption’ was important to such a powerful retailer, led me nowhere.

Lost in Glen of Good Faith, I was left to conclude that Coles simply, suddenly, had better things or more important things to do than to engage publicly on this particular issue of animal welfare.

That’s a shame because, as hypotheticals go, it was tame, tame, tame. That’s how it was always going to be of course because that was part of the deal, which is understandable. It is also wise and necessary. Everyone on the panel was polite and reasonable which is how it must be if our kids, and not their kids, are to look back in astonishment and say, “Did they really treat animals like that back then?” Sooner or later, and my hunch is sooner, humanity will awaken to the inhumanity of its treatment of the animals it eats. It will awaken through civil, social dialogue among all stakeholders. That dialogue will happen because powerful industries will initiate it, albeit it through the encouragement of advisers whose ‘A head in the sand makes the bum a target’ warnings will eventually get heard.

My take outs from this Rozelle Feast Day hypothetical were modest, but include the story of a friendly free-ranging pig who brings a gift to the farmer's wife every time she enters the paddock. It might just be a clump of grass, but it’s the thought that counts. They include the surprising fact—well, no-one there disputed it—that virtually all of our bacon comes from Denmark where animal welfare may not have the importance it does here. They include 'boar taint'—something you don't want to know about (boar taint is the reason our Asian butchers buy pork from only female pigs).

Hardly anyone hates animals. And the few who do are a piddling part of the problem. As Bree Van de Kamp said to her son Andrew in Desperate Housewives, "The opposite of love isn’t hate—it’s indifference”. Those who don’t love animals, and many of us who do love animals, can be indifferent to their welfare. A good example of such a person is the one writing this. It’s indifference through ignorance, habit, career pressure, peer pressure, sheer appetite, whatever.

Indifference isn’t cruelty.

But it breeds it.

John Bevins is a former Director of St James Ethics Centre. He was an advertising copywriter for 40 odd years, 28 of them at his own eponymous agency. He is now a pro surfer (well, he’s pro surfing). Discuss these themes with John Bevins in the forum.