On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 animals in a lifetime and nearly one third of the land surface of the planet is dedicated to livestock. Such statistics alone make it entirely logical to conclude that what’s wrong with the system is connected to what’s wrong with our world. But reason alone does not change hearts and minds so Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book is very welcome.
I should say that in my case he was preaching to the already converted. I am proud to say that I have been a vegetarian for 35 years; proud and, after reading the result of Foer’s thoroughgoing research , very relieved.
While I did not need to read it to convince me that eating meat is wrong on ethical, environmental and health grounds, I’m glad I did because it adds a lot of factual (and stomach churning) weight to what I feel in my heart to be the correct way to live.
My own dislike of meat stretches back to when I was around ten. I remember watching my dad twist the neck of a chicken and then being repulsed at the thought of eating the same bird for dinner the following evening. I also recall retching over the stench of a rabbit being gutted in the kitchen sink.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think I was fortunate that,, being brought up in the country, I was at least able to make a direct connection with what I was eating and the live equivalent. Nowadays, the vast majority buy a prepared and sanitised version from the supermarket without needing to trouble about the where the animal came from. Ignorance is, however, no excuse.
Foer’s American Jewish background is quite different from mine. He was relatively happy to maintain what he calls a “diet of conscientious inconsistency”, eating meat and fish every now and then, yet feeling vaguely guilty about this. Having a child made him think more rigorously about his eating habits and more specifically what food was right to serve up to his son. He came to the conclusion that: “We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is at the centre of our plates”.
Above all, he wanted to be able to make informed decisions rather than fudge the issues. He writes : “Nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed”.
He is glad to have been raised in the tradition of killing animals according the kosher dietary laws which state that animals should be raised and killed humanely and not subjected to unnecessary suffering. This contrasts starkly with his accounts of the horrific , yet routine, practices that take place on factory farms and in slaughterhouses. He ruefully comments that “like pornography, factory farming is hard to define but easy to identify”.
The whole truth about what goes on is largely hidden behind closed (and locked) doors and it’s not hard to understand why factory farmers are unwilling to be more open about their working practices. As Foer observes: “the power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do”.
This is, after all, a business model in which the animals are mere commodities. For this reason it is regarded as legitimate to use “Frankenstein genetics” to calculate how quickly they can be made to grow or to study just how tightly they can be packed and how sick they can get without dying. With heavy irony Foer reflects on the turkey production methods: “Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy waste coated room is not very healthy”. Since they are products that will be killed anyway, the industry has no scruples over the fact that they can barely move and cannot follow their natural instincts.
Interviews with those who run family farms show that a small minority of animals are kept more humanely and slaughtered in accordance with the statutory guidelines. But such businesses are few and far between and rapidly fading out as the demand for quantity and cheapness shows no sign of abating. Foer makes plain that multinational firms like Smithfield makes its huge profits as a “reward for the worst conceivable practices” as what he calls the “new sadism” goes largely unchecked.
Instead of children reading stories of frolicking lambs, cute piglets and happy cows they should be asked to reflect, as Foer does in vivid detail, upon the consequences of the fact that farmed animals in the United States produce 130 times as much waste as the human population. That is a lot of shit!!
Foer’s writes straightforwardly, compassionately and humorously; applying his exceptional storytelling gifts to these highly topical and emotive issues.
At the start of the book, he says that it was not written merely to argue that we need to change our diets : “A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it’s not what I’ve written here”. However, by the end , he dispenses with such objectivity and makes this articulate and impassioned plea:
“Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? If contributing to the suffering of billions of animals that live miserable lives and (quite often) die in horrific ways isn’t motivating, what would be? If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is? And if you are tempted to put off these questions of conscience, to say not now, then when?
The next time anyone asks me ‘why are you a vegetarian?’ my temptation will be to get them to read this book and then ask ‘why are you not a vegetarian?’
