Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Eating Animals' Book Will Fundamentally Change the Way You Think About Food

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It's an ad for a product. How very Republican.

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Last week I went and videotaped my neighbors as they slaughtered their 37 meat chickens. They have about a dozen egg layers and some ducks, but they are not for eating. Their meat birds were well taken care of, had about 50 square feet of yard, plus a small shack for them to get out of the weather. They ate chicken feed, but also table scraps (not the meat, but all the vegetable trimmings).

They hired a mobile husband-wife team to do the 'processing'. 3 chickens go in and 10 minutes later three ready-to-eat naked and gutted birds come out (and straight into the freezer). I recorded the entire process.

We are going to do another shoot where we compare their home-grown meat chickens to the store-bought genetic monsters, a side-by-side comparison.

If you are going to eat chickens, this is the best way to do it. I ate one last night and there is simply no comparison between these real birds and the franken-monsters that you get at the supermarket. Real chickens have great flavor, are not chewy, and the meat falls off the bone.

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Back in the '80s, I was a huge Smiths fan. I've got nearly all their cassettes, but missed the opportunity to see them in concert in 1986. Their 1985 album, Meat is Murder, was on college radio stations everywhere. In an era when rock and pop seemed swamped in causes, the Smiths added their weight to (lead singer) Morrissey's support for animal rights.

"I think as long as human beings are so violent towards animals, there will be war," he argued. "It might sound absurd, but if you really think about the situation it all makes sense. When there's this absolute lack of sensitivity where life is concerned, there will always be war."

Back in 1985, Morrissey struggled to articulate a dualistic persona with a classic example of verbal doublethink: "Personally, I'm an incurably peaceable character. But where does that get you? Nowhere. You have to be violent...It seems to me now that when you try to change things in a peaceable manner, you're actually wasting your time and you're laughed out of court," he argued. "...the only way we can get rid of such things as the meat industry, and other things like nuclear weapons, is by giving people a taste of their own medicine."

Ask Morrissey about the terrorist bombing of butcher shops in England, and he still coldly replies: "One dead butcher isn't such a great loss."

Peter Singer warned about this kind of thinking in Animal Liberation: "We may be convinced that a person who is abusing animals is entirely callous and insensitive; but we lower ourselves to that level if we physically harm or threaten physical harm to that person. Violence can only breed more violence...The strength of the case for Animal Liberation is its ethical commitment. We occupy the high moral ground and to abandon it is to play into the hands of those who would oppose us."

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Wonderful! I have been hoping for a new Jonathan Safran Foer book and hadn't even considered nonfiction. I can't wait to get my hands on it.

He's a precious gift to American literature and his characters are precious gifts to the reader.

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One cannot be human without submitting to some of one's own ideology. I am a veggie, and on so many levels the idea of eating animal flesh repulses me, makes me sad, and even makes me angry, but I do not, for whatever reason care to attack those who do partake of meat. I feel like diet is not just about physical sustenance, but spiritual as well. Thus, it is not for me to prescribe for another his or her spiritual path. I struggle with this. I do not like to hear people talk so longingly of ribs and steaks and wings, etc. But these stories bring home the moral and environmental consequences of these types of choices. Meat farming as it is conducted by 99% of the industry is awful, destructive, immoral, utter carnage, and yet happy smiling people go to the Outback, then to church and back again, and think there is no hypocrisy. They recycle and drive Priuses and buy happy meals, and think there is no more they can do. There is so much bad information out there, so many lies about how meat is so important to our diet, and people blindly accept these things. So few could kick a puppy, yet so many turn there heads as we mutilate our swine. And yet, my son loves meat, and I allow it. It is not for me to force my will, but live my life as well as I can. Perhaps by example others will follow.

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Is he asking the wrong question?

In other words, instead of asking "How imperfect is something before its too imperfect?", a question often asked by anti-death penalty activists, perhaps we should be asking, "At what cost do we eat?"

That is to say: can we accept the cost of animals feeling some pain before death? can we accept the cost of animals living in a life of pain before dying?

I, personally and for my family, disagree with where the author draws the line. I can accept the cost (financially and morally) of eating meat, but so-called "humane" meat from "non-traditional" animals.

I try to stick to deer, bison and wild birds. Monocultures like corn, soy, beef, pork and chicken sustain factory farms, produce great environmental costs, a reduce biodiversity.

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I believe that most people are compassionate and reasonable and capable of emotion.

I want to believe that we could be better.

I want to know that my life means something and that I make a difference, that I am not just here.

Part of that difference is standing up for those who do not have a voice and protecting those who are caused to suffer at the hand of others.

Having endured an abusive childhood, I know what it feels like to be confined, to suffer, to feel afraid.

I don't want to inflict that on any being and I will not stay silent while I know it is happening.

I protect animals out of a shared feeling of wanting to be free; free from suffering, free from being confined, free from fear, free from someone taking my life.

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"Global hunger could be directly attributed to meat-eating." ---Chrissie Hynde

Half the world's population does not receive an adequate amount of food to eat. Ten to twenty million die annually of hunger and its effects. The Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that, "Forty thousand children starve to death on this planet every day," or one child every two seconds.

The livestock population of the United States today consumes enough grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of the oats. Less than half the harvested agricultural acreage in the United States is used to grow food for people. Most of it is used to grow livestock feed.

Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, in his 1977 book, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, pointed out that 220 million Americans were eating enough food (largely because of the high consumption of grain-fed livestock) to feed over one billion people in the poorer countries.

The world's cattle alone, not to mention pigs and chickens, consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people. It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. According to Department of Agriculture statistics, one acre of land can grow 20,000 pounds of potatoes. That same acre of land, if used to grow cattlefeed, can produce less than 165 pounds of beef.

In his book, The Hungry Planet, Georg Bergstrom points out that protein-starved underdeveloped nations export more protein to wealthy nations than they receive. He calls this "the protein swindle." Ninety percent of the world's fish meal catch, for example, is exported to rich countries. One-third of Africa's peanut crop winds up in the stomachs of European livestock. Half the world's cereal crop is fed to livestock and the United States annually imports one million tons of vegetable protein from Third World nations--just to feed its farm animals.

Bergstrom writes: "Sometimes one wonders how many Americans and Western Europeans have grasped the fact that quite a few of their beef steaks, quarts of milk, dozens of eggs, and hundreds of broilers are the result, not of their agriculture, but of the approximately two million metric tons of protein, mostly of high quality, which astute Western businessmen channel away from the needy and hungry."

Jeremy Rifkin, author of a dozen influential books and President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, writes in his 1992 bestseller Beyond Beef:

"Cattle and other livestock are devouring much of the grain produced on the planet. It need be emphasized that this is a new phenomenon, unlike anything ever experienced before.

"Contrary to popular belief, the poor are getting poorer each year...Increased poverty has meant increased malnutrition. On the African continent, nearly one in every four human beings is malnourished. In Latin America, nearly one out of every seven people goes to bed hungry each night. In Asia and the Pacific, 28 percent of the people border on starvation, experiencing the gnawing pain of a perpetual hunger."

"In the Near East, one in ten people is underfed. Chronic hunger now affects upwards of 1.3 billion people, according to the world Health Organization--a statistic all the more striking in a world where one third of all the grain produced is being fed to cattle and other livestock. Never before in human history has such a large percentage of our species--nearly 25 percent--been malnourished.

"The transition of world agriculture from food grain to feed grains represents an...evil whose consequences may be far greater and longer lasting than any past examples of violence inflicted by men against their fellow human beings."

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I get soo tired of reading about agriculture from people that have little hands on experience. The editors of Alternet seem fixated on turning us all into vegatariuns. Any of you interested in this subject (we all should be ) could do a bit of research on your own. I suggest looking at Holistic Resourse Management or Grassfed is Best or Salad Bar Beef or Permaculture, etc. There is so much positive taking place in the world of agriculture it is a shame that so much is written about the evils. Sure factory farms are horrible but there are alternatives. The positive movements see nature as a cooperative entity not something conquer. Nature is made up of all sorts of life both vegatable and animal. They work together. The best farms I've seen use this concept to produce an abundance of human food. Becoming vegatariun limits the producer's ability to work with nature. Without animals land cannot renew itself. I guess I am being a bit vague but I am tired. Working outdoors with my draft horses is exhausting.

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I'm not sure what makes Foer's work so edgy. It seems like he combines Pollan's highlighting on humane and environmentally sound farming practices (in The Omnivore's Dilemma) with John Robbins' exposure of the cruel, environmentally damaging, and health-jeopardizing practices common in industrial farming (Diet for a New America). It's great that there are new voices out there continuing to hammer home these points, but there's nothing really new about what he's saying, not for those of us who have been reading on and exploring these issues for some time.

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It is as plain as day once you admit it to yourself. People who refuse to eat meat for moral reasons do so because they are able to see the sentience in others who look different from themselves, while those who eat meat have built a wall between those who look and act as they do and everyone else.

It is the exact same process that allows all of the great wrongs of this earth, whether slavery, genocide, religious war, nationalistic war and now economic and resource war.

Most people have a very poor imagination and are literally unable or unwilling to feel compassion for beings even superficially different from themselves, such as other humans with different color skin or a funny accent. With these people just forget about trying to get them to empathize with animals.

And then there is institutionalized religion and its teaching that animals were placed on this earth for our amusement. That sounds harsh but I have talked to so many of these people and when push comes to shove this is what they truly believe in their heart - that animals are no more sentient than a pile of rocks, even insisting that they do not feel pain "like we do".

There is a lot of posturing by these folks but as I say, for the average American this is how they feel about animals.

Here in nutjob central, Ohio, they just overwhelmingly passed a Constitutional Amendment that allows big agri-business bosses to sit in judgment of their own practices and treatment of their livestock - no interference from state government is allowed and the state must enforce what they decide. This was quickly put together in response to The Humane Society's success in several states to require very minimal humane standards, such as allowing the animal enough room to turn around - I kid you not, this was too much for the "good people of Ohio" to allow!

I feel like I am trapped in some kind of zombie hell in the Midwest, USofA...

And so this country goes...

peace,
Paul

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he's a wannabe. i've been pure veg since 1976. gimme a break. some dude is on and off veg for 20 years, pops out a few puppies then decides to write a book about going veg and saving the planet. IT's BEEN DONE. woo hoo foer is making a crap load of $ on his book but so many of us were veg before he was even born.

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Nice to see someone else who is familiar with HRM, Grassfed, Permaculture and the whole range of soil conservation and renewal possibilities out there. Manageing Wholes is another place to get additional information as well as the Soil Carbon Coalition. All crop production, especially grain for all uses and table veggies, relies on regular tillage to produce the quantities needed for a reasonable supply of food. Bare ground is subject to erosion and once the soil is gone it is hard to make more.

"Without animals land cannot renew itself" is a concept the vegetarians do not understand.
Grasses and related grazing plants provide invaluable tools for land conservation(holding the soil in place) while growing a quality food source.
Grasses and grazers evolved together and need each other.
Ruminants are the original vegetarians and they can utilize vegetable matter that humans cannot, turning it into good food for humans.
We probably ought to stop thinking that Nature made a mistake when designing the system.

Sir Albert Howard, recognized as the leader in the organic, sustainable agriculture concept and the inspiration to J.R. Rodale, also noted in the early 1900's that "Nature never attempts to farm without animals". His thesis included the nutrient return to the system that only animals can provide in a way that rebuilds fertility over the long term.

If we don't relearn the techniques Nature developed to keep the land productive we will surely starve when our petroleum based ag. system crashes due to lack of petroleum.

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