Amanda and I don’t own a television. This is hardly a culture crusade; we just don’t watch many shows, and thought it was better to be deliberate about the ones we did watch. It also forces us to be more creative when we have an evening with nothing to do. But not having a television has changed the way I perceive my culture: I implicitly assume that the country watches less TV than they did ten or twenty years ago—for no other reason than because I watch less TV now than I did ten or twenty years ago. But this is in direct contradiction to Nielsen statistics which indicate that Americans watch more television now than ever before.

This is a form of what a psychology textbook would call egocentrism. It means that I interpret the world based on myself first of all. The term is usually used to refer to a developmental stage in infants where the baby thinks that his mother doesn’t exist if he closes his eyes, but I think that in some small capacity we never grow out of it. When our basic needs are met, when we never once in our lives have to wonder where the next meal will come from or where we will stay that night, it’s easy to believe subconsciously that the same is true of everyone. (Even here I assume that this is true of everyone because it’s true of me.)

My own theory is that this is a defense mechanism. In America we are assaulted every day by stories and statistics telling us all the things we need to care about: AIDS, corporate corruption, dirty water, drugs, endangered species, exercise, high fructose corn syrup, poverty, sustainable agriculture, topsoil erosion. It’s too much. It leads to cultural apathy. I can’t possibly fix any of those things, so I can’t allow myself to care. Any time I hear of a new disaster, injustice or social problem, my first filter is, Does it affect me? Does it have an immediate impact on my life, or will its consequences not come to pass until after I’m gone? And this determines whether I think about it constantly for weeks and months or whether I forget about it in a half hour.

The brain is wired to cause us to focus primarily on the problems that are directly in front of us. It has to be this way. If we understood the true extent of human suffering in the rest of the world, we would never be able to buy anything or complain about our circumstances; we would never be able to be happy or content with anything, because life is so hard for other people. Because this knowledge would ruin our lives, we convince ourselves that it’s not real. All of it is relegated to a statistic, a mere fact, and set on a shelf next to all the other things we know are true but not real. This is the only way we could function in life.

But the biggest factor in our chronic unawareness is how far removed we are from all of the suffering. Most of it is in other countries, and the biggest problem America has—poverty—we are very good at hiding. The poor people do not live on the same streets or go to the same stores as the rich people; as the leaves fall from the trees, the homeless communities with their brightly-colored tents are ordered to evacuate the forests near the river; and the projects are always far from a major highway so travelers will never see the worst of it.

You have to go looking for it. It will not come to you. But it’s there.

Without a doubt, my favorite fast-food hamburger is the Whopper Junior from Burger King. It has no equal among dollar-menu sandwiches. The lettuce, onion and pickles are joined with the mayonnaise in perfect balance. The Whopper Junior also noticeably lacks mustard, and though I enjoy mustard, the choice to only use ketchup on this sandwich was a good one. This all fits between two sesame buns, adorning an all-beef patty with artificial charbroil flavoring and fake grill marks which contains meat from an average of a thousand different cows, some of which were pushed with a forklift into the slaughtering house because they were too sick to walk.

I enjoyed the Whopper Junior until I found out that last part, watching the documentary Food, Inc. and reading the book In Defense of Food (both of which I recommend). After seeing what happens in those meat-packing plants and reading about how the industry really works, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat one with the same enthusiasm. This is the burden of knowledge.

Let me stop here and switch gears. As soon as I hear someone talk about “the hidden side of the system”, the conspiracy alarms go off and I assume a skeptic’s posture for the remainder of the article or conversation. I assume that most others are the same way. So rather than linking to videos and using sensational language to explain that it really is all that bad, I’ll use only a few general facts along with observations about human nature to demonstrate why it should be all that bad.

1. Humans are sinful. We are rotten to the core, and we will corrupt any system if we have the opportunity and are able to avoid consequence. (I could stop here.)

2. The industry is mostly hidden. Everything they do is behind closed doors, in food processing plants without windows. In the rare cases that a non-employee is allowed inside, photographs and video cameras are strictly prohibited. Because of this, they are not accountable to their customers. I am not allowed to see what happens to my chicken from the time it is hatched to the time it arrives in the store.

3. Their oversight is powerless. In 2001, a court decision revoked the USDA’s authority to shut down a plant for failing too many health inspections. Though there are bills in the Senate to restore this authority, none have been passed yet. Because of this, the USDA cannot enforce its own safety standards, and the meat-packing industry is not accountable to anyone.

4. It’s a business. Any well-run business has one primary objective in mind: to make money. Everything else is secondary. The food industry does not exist to feed people; they exist to maximize profits by way of feeding people. It follows that such factors as nutrition and long-term health are less important than the immediate impact on profitability. The people in charge will tend to make the most cost-effective decision, even if it is at the expense of health.

This is not unique to the meat-packing industry. These four criteria—sin nature, lack of accountability, lack of authority, and love of money—can be used to predict the integrity of any system, whether it’s a business, a non-profit, a church, or even an individual.

Why does all this matter? Joel Salatin, a very outspoken “back to basics” farmer in Virginia, takes this perspective:

God actually loved us and provided a salvation experience for us that shapes the way we should, with the same grace and appreciation and respect, honor the creation that God made. It’s in respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig that we create our ethical and moral background for respecting and honoring the Tony-ness of Tony and the Mary-ness of Mary. And so it’s how we respect and honor the “least of these” that creates a theological and philosophical framework for how we respect and honor the creation that God made.
(From an interview in Sojourners Magazine, December 2009)

In other words, if they don’t respect the pig then they won’t respect the person who eats the pig.

This is reality. And yet, like all things that break the status quo of my life, it will probably fade back to normal after a few months, as TIME separates me from the experience. I will be reminded of the harmony of the lettuce, pickles and onion in a Whopper Junior, the mayo, the ketchup with no mustard, and I will convince myself that it couldn’t be as bad as I thought it was. But it still is.