For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s CAFO’s vs. Free Range page.


via Youtube

Dan Honig got his Master’s degree in Bioethics, after studying philosophy and environmental ethics. Now, he co-owns Happy Valley Meat Company, a high-quality beef supplier.

When Dan Honig was getting ready to slaughter a steer for the first time, he expected to feel devastated.

He was, after all, mostly vegetarian, eating meat only a few times per year. He’d double-majored in Philosophy and Environmental Ethics, and got a Master’s degree in Bioethics at New York University. During that time, he’d studied the ethics of meat-eating and animal welfare, and even written his master’s thesis on the subject. “I thought I’d be sniffling, thinking,
I don’t want to kill you, I don’t want you to die,” he said. Instead, “I felt no remorse.”

Today, Honig, 25, is still mostly vegetarian. “The American food system is as wrong to animals as if I hit you in the face” he told me. “It’s a system of mass torture. It’s bad for the animals and it’s bad for us. It’s caused our obesity epidemic and drug-resistant microbes.” Honig, however, is also the co-founder, along with Alex Dimin, of Happy Valley Meat Company, which supplies beef to some of New York City’s most modish restaurants including Colonie and The Pines in Brooklyn and The Meatball Shop in Manhattan. He sees his business as part of the ethical answer to factory farms.

Honig was always an unlikely butcher. He grew up, not on a farm, but in suburban Malapan, NJ, where killing a steer is not on the typical teenager’s list of chores. He began his education at Franklin & Marshall, but was academically apathetic. Then he read On the Road by Jack Kerouac. “I hated it,” he said, “but it introduced me to Nietzsche.” Nietzsche, in turn, was Honig’s gateway drug into philosophy. Restless in Franklin & Marshall’s bucolic setting, Honig transferred to NYU both for its urban location and its philosophy department’s reputation as the best in the country.

There he found the urban excitement, the intellectual stimulation, and the moral seriousness of his studies finally lit the academic fire under him, and he decided to pursue graduate work. To get a Bioethics Master’s Degree at NYU, students must complete an internship. Even though his undergraduate studies had led him to be a vegetarian, he decided to intern with a small pork producer. He was curious to see firsthand what an alternative food system looked like. In the interview for the internship, it was when Honig mentioned that he was a vegetarian that the pork producer became interested in hiring him.