In the latest offering from the author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer turns to the nonfiction genre in order to ask an imperative question: What are the health and moral implications of eating animals?
When you think of eating meat, what do you picture? A big glistening roast turkey atop a pile of potatoes, or poultry that can’t walk under their own power and are pumped full of antibiotics just to keep them alive? A juicy pink-middled steak with mushrooms, or a feedlot filled beyond capacity with malnourished cows that gives off an unbearable stench?
While I’m not writing this review to push a particular vegetarian agenda, I do want to push some sensitive buttons that require considered probing. The meat question is one that any responsible person living with the realities of industrialized meat production (and that’s all of us) needs to consider. Does the question about the health and morality of our collective flesh habit make you feel uncomfortable? If so, I’d like to suggest that there are some unpleasantries – to put it nicely – regarding where and how our society’s animal-food is raised, and you know enough to know you don’t want to know more. I’m sorry to break it to you, but ignorance is just not an option here – at least not if you have any concern for the health and wellbeing of your body, of society, of the planet, and of the creatures with whom we share this earth.
Eating meat is basically a non-choice in Western society. It’s rejecting meat that is considered to be the (somewhat unnatural) choice. While I’ve personally wrestled with the question of whether or not to eat meat countless times over the years, it was reading Foer’s latest book Eating Animals that prompted me to actually write about it. It’s just too important of an issue to stay quiet. Ultimately, like Foer, I don’t care what choice you make in the end. I only ask that you consider the information I share here and actually think about it. And then grab Foer’s book and pick up where I leave off.
What makes this book so good? To start, Foer is a storyteller. As a fiction writer, he recognizes this skill and adeptly begins and ends his book with sections entitled “storytelling.” But in this case, Foer isn’t talking about a story born in the depths of his imagination. These are the stories that we tell ourselves and our children, the values we communicate, particularly around the table. He conjures up warm memories of childhood Thanksgivings, and the importance of abundance at these gatherings as his Holocaust-survivor grandmother quietly reveled in the plumpness of her progeny. Surely we can all recall such scenes from family gatherings past, and the culture and ritual surrounding the particular foods that took pride of place on the celebratory tables.
For many people, perhaps the story would end there. But Foer was one of those kids who was deeply troubled when he learned that the food he called “chicken” was one and the same as the barnyard bird. With his “mouth full of hurt chickens,” he vowed never to eat an animal again. Until he did. Thus began a struggle that lasted for decades, embracing a shaky sometimes-vegetarianism that left him feeling uneasy and unsatisfied. While his rational mind rejected the idea of meat-eating, he told himself stories to make it okay to eat some of his dad’s roast bird this time. That is, until the prospect of becoming a father made him take a closer look at the stories he wanted to tell his newborn son.
Like most of us, Foer realized that he didn’t have enough information to make a truly informed decision about a reasonable ethic in regard to meat eating. The fact of the matter is, the majority of Americans (and increasingly other nationalities) don’t really know what meat actually IS today. So he set out to do some good investigative journalism, supported by the most conservative of facts and figures. By and large, what he discovers is beyond disturbing.
The major conclusion he draws is about the unacceptability and inhumanity of factory farms. Ultimately it is less the very fact of eating animals that troubles him than the inability to locate a strong viable alternative to the cruelty of the factory farm. He discusses “selective omnivorism” – the practice of eating meat only when it has been raised sustainably and ethically – and agrees that while it comes from a noble sentiment, it still engenders a conscious forgetting that perpetuates the current system. As he observes, there are no absolutes on this matter: “Perhaps there is no ‘meat.’ Instead, there is this animal, raised on this farm, slaughtered at this plant, sold in this way, and eaten by this person….”
The service he does to our society in writing about the realities of the contemporary meat industry is invaluable. He manages to convey the shocking, the upsetting, the perverse and the downright disgusting practices that have become the norm in livestock production in a clear, compelling voice. This is, after all, the same voice that conjured up scenes of horror and intensity in the all-too-real holocaust story of Everything is Illuminated and captured the emotional landscape of a September 11th orphan in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. And while he explores the environmental devastation, public health abuse, human welfare violations and economic unfeasibility of the current meat production industry, the bottom line in this story is suffering.
Foer’s research makes it clear that 99% of the animals eaten for food in America today suffer unthinkable cruelty from birth to slaughter. And while he makes other points about the myriad abuses and irresponsibility of the meat industry, his ultimate conclusion is that the daily cruelty inflicted upon these beings is unacceptable. He doesn’t advance a moral argument for the inherent “rightness” or “wrongness” of eating animals. While he concludes that his personal morality leans in a vegetarian direction due to extreme unease with even the most humane methods of slaughter, his refusal to dilute the strength of his facts with personal feelings makes for a stronger and more compelling book. The facts alone are enough to make anyone think long and hard about developing a clear ethic around animal consumption.
However, his endeavors to find truly good alternatives to the factory farm system are devastating. He discovers only one producer – Frank and his turkeys – who he feels has developed a truly humane form of animal husbandry. Of course Frank’s form of farming was the norm sixty years ago – it’s a story of a takeover of the industry by the factory model so complete and pervasive that there really is no traditional farming left in America today.
Foer’s book is, above all, a condemnation of the factory farm and what they’ve stolen from and inflicted upon not only animals but also the eating public. We’ve lost dignity, connection to our food, purity, integrity, and health – all in the name of a cheap meal. That’s the bottom line here, isn’t it? America – and, increasingly, the rest of the world – keeps buying the bullshit because they want meat on their plates and they’re unwilling to pay the true cost. Instead they end up paying in public health crises, in environmental devastation, in pollution and global warming and antibiotic resistance and bacteria and in a loss of dignity.
I’m not a meat eater. For me, it’s a philosophical issue: I think that consuming other animals breeds anger, and I prefer to cultivate gratitude. But I don’t mean to sound high and mighty – I continue to struggle with how I feel about eating fish, eggs and dairy, and much of my dietary decision is influenced by the fact that I feel best, physically and emotionally, on a vegetarian diet. But I appreciate that this book, rather than exploring the ethics of meat eating in a preachy tone, takes a good hard look at where meat comes from today and informs rather than moralizes. Foer gives people power by giving them knowledge.
If I take one thing away from this book, it’s that ending the era of the factory farm is imperative. His image of the Thanksgiving table is a powerful one. We can have a bird – one of 45 million – that can’t support itself on its own two legs, that is riddled with disease, that is fed an unnatural diet and pumped full of antibiotics, and that endured tremendous pain due to its unnatural breeding, the horrendous conditions in which in lives, and the treatment it receives – that is, if it even survives to adulthood. Or we can start telling a different story, about why we choose not to eat this bird, not to support this corrupt system. Ultimately, we may end up asking ourselves, “Why did we ever eat that?”
Read other reviews of Eating Animals:
The New Yorker
The Huffington Post (by Natalie Portman)
The Green Fork
The Monthly
Civil Eats
This is Vegan
La Vida Locavore
Interview with The Young and Hungry
