Pasturism

A proposed name for folks who eat only high-welfare animal products.

Recently I’ve been considering re-incorporating some high-welfare animal products into my diet.¹ This would probably mean eggs and dairy that meet A Greener World’s (AGW’s) ‘Certified Animal Welfare Approved’ standard, or (maybe) Global Animal Partnership’s (G.A.P.’s) Level 5/6 standards for laying hens and dairy cows. I trust these a lot more than some company saying their products are free-range/pasture-raised/organic/whatever.

Alas, not all standards are equal. For example, I care about beak trimming and chick culling; Vital Farms, which sells pasture-raised eggs that are certified humane and are available at my local supermarket, trims and culls. There’s a Gresham’s law problem for animal welfare standards: weak ones that ask little drive out good ones that ask more. Consumers don’t really care about the specifics. But I care.²

Looking into where I might get high-welfare eggs & dairy yesterday, I learned two things.

It’s hard to find these products online

G.A.P.’s website doesn’t have a “find products here” option. AGW’s does, but it looks like I’m either joining the Park Slope Food Co-op (and last I checked they were so oversubscribed I couldn’t get an interview) or eating goat cheese from a few places that are pretty far away. Whole Food sells Certified Humane products, and when you walk in to their downtown Brooklyn location, you see a ton of information about G.A.P.’s standards, but on their website, nothing:

And likewise, there’s no way to filter out eggs or dairy by welfare certifications, practices, etc. I found the same thing on Instacart and FreshDirect. You can search “certified humane” but it’s not clear if the returned products actually are.

What I actually want is this:

By Geoffrey McKim from Bloomington, IN, USA - Chickens seeking shade, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3981994

Related:

There’s no consensus social identity/community for non-vegans who prioritize animal welfare.

Vegans, vegetarians, ex-vegans, flexitarians, and reducetarians all have their own subreddits. By contrast, people who only consume high-welfare meat and/or animal products (MAP) lack a flag to rally around. One candidate is ethical omnivore, whose subreddit has 17 members, and also a nice-looking but semi-dead website (their last blogpost was in 2022). But ‘ethical omnivore’ means different things to different people, as Claude sagely points out:

courtesy of my friend Jacob, who asked the robot this question after we talked about this yesterday.

Case in point: the ethical omnivore website talks a fair bit about regenerative agriculture and hormones, which are not on my radar.

I think we need a new term for people who eat only high-welfare MAP. I submit:

Pasturism

Some virtues:

1. It’s pleasing to the ear, evoking the pleasure of pastoralism/country life.

2. It conveys a core fact about the diet, which is a preference for animals raised on pasture. Pasturists can debate how long a calf should stay with its mother, but we are basically going to agree that it shouldn’t be zero days — they’re mammals! they have the same instincts you do! — and that they should spend some time in a naturalistic environment together. A pasture.

3. It gives us something to point towards. Cage-free is better than caged, but pasture-raised is better. Unmutilated and pasture-raised is even better. For similar reasons, we’d probably abjure feedlots as well.

One drawback: it doesn’t convey much about what fish or fish products to eat. (My personal answer is no fish, although I do currently eat mussels/clams/oysters.)

Other possibilities?

1. humanetarian (pronounced humane-a-terrian) but A) I think that’s too similar to ‘humanitarian’ and B) it kind of sounds like you eat humans.

2. pastoral-vegetarians for folks who do very specifically what I am considering — eggs and dairy but only the high-welfare variants — but I’d like a slightly broader tent.

I think this has potential.

1. My intuition is that eggs and dairy from high-welfare farms are ethically permissible. Your beliefs may vary. For the most part, people whom I look to on these issues don’t really discuss it. For instance, Michael Huemer (pinch-hitting for

Bryan Caplan

) writes: “Now I haven’t addressed whether it is permissible to buy meat from humane (e.g., free range) farms. My view is that that is mostly a red herring, because almost all meat comes from factory farms, which are unbelievably awful. We should first try to get people to stop doing the clearly, unbelievably horrible thing that almost everyone is doing almost every day, before we start worrying about some much more debatable and much rarer practice.”

2. I first heard this last year at the Animal Welfare Economics Working Group’s annual meeting at Brown, but I’m forgetting who said it. It’s a good insight though!