Vegetarianism is the only way to eat, according to Jonathan Safran Foer.
The reason I mentioned the movie is because it is, like so many great movies, based on a novel. The author of the novel is Jonathan Safran Foer, who happened to turn around a few years later and write something completely different: Eating Animals. As you might be able to guess, the two books have nothing contextually in common, yet both are about real-life tragedy. Neither brand of tragedy need embelishing but both focus on the crisis of a specific individual, in ELIC it was Oskar while in Eating Animals it was Safran Foer himself. Both works will affect people to varying degrees, depending on proximity and capacity for empathy and sympathy.
Eating animals is so commonplace, yet it is always controversial. As demonstrated by MIchael Pollan, Safran Foer and countless other authors writing about food ethics, we love to debate and offer our perspectives on the way we procure food stuffs and the things we choose to ingest. Anyone who eats (aka everyone) can participate in the great global debate, whether or not one has any knowledge of where our food comes, how it is made, why we eat it, etc. Unlike hot button issues like abortion or universal health care, there are unlimited factions in food philosophy, devoted to varying degrees of herbivory, omnivory, carnivory, and who knows what other -vorys there are. Who would ever think that eating would become a study in itself?
At first glance, I was worried that Eating Animals would be redundant with what I read in any of Michael Pollan's books. In Eating Animals, Safran Foer wastes no time in telling the reader that it is not a case for the ethical treatment of animals, it is a case for outright vegetarianism. So there was one difference right off the bat. Another difference was that Safran Foer did not offer much by way of historical context for our eating habits, instead focusing on the here and now: the cruelties inflicted upon industrially farmed animals and a system necessitated by the world's unhealthy obsession with meat. There was no black and white "gray" area, to Safran Foer, even omnivory is a compromise and an acceptance that what is cannot be changed. In many ways, reading this book is like ripping a bandaid off of a fresh cut and pouring alcohol on the wound. As cruel as an approach that may seem, it does a lot to spare us from the moral reasoning and internal strife we might have had to face if the choice were left up to us.
Amid all of the carnage, and in defense of this post, I felt slightly elevated in mindset. For one, I used to be a vegetarian, as you'd know if you read one of my earlier Pollan posts. I was a vegetarian for 14 years of my life, so I'm well aware of the sacrifices involved in participating in an "alternative" diet. As a vegetarian, you're always seen as the one whom extra consideration must be given at parties, family dinners, restaurant choices and grocery shopping. For willing and eager meat eaters, the vegetarian is the splinter in their conscience-free consumption, a subtle but nagging reminder of what happens when food becomes overly thoughtful. Surprisingly and refreshingly, Safran Foer points out that vegetarians would not be a bother if everyone were vegetarian, that cooking for vegetarians is a lot less complicated than cooking for omnivores across multiple kingdoms, and that being vegetarian is not only just as, if not more, healthful than eating a varying diet. Safran Foer is the spokesperson hero for vegetarians everywhere, a group that always has to defend itself, whether casually ("I can always eat a salad...") or confrontationally (regurgitating the answer to "Why are you a vegetarian?"). Ominvores never need to defend themselves, but maybe this book is the way Safran Foer has simultaneously empowered vegetarians and put omnivores on the defensive.
When an author is this passionate about a subject, you have to expect that some toes may be stepped on. Safran Foer goes for the juggular and spares no one in eviscerating the meat industry and consumers who put their money where their forks are. Very few people are innocent, and in fact, anyone who raises animals for slaughter and anyone who eats animal products is buying in to a system built on ignorance and cruelty. If you've seen "Food, Inc." you know what to expect from this book, yet some of the passages are even more vivid than any illustrated cartoon slaughter line can depict. There is plenty of blood, guts, crying, screaming, torture, body parts and fear, not to mention crude, primal, animalistic human behavior. Perhaps worst of all is the prevalence of prolonged suffering, physical deformities and emotional manipulation of animals from their birth to death. In many ways it is harder to defend omnivory than it is to advocate for pure vegetarianism, yet how many of us would be willing to give up our culture of consumption even with a little education of what goes on behind factory walls? That's why I credit Safran Foer for his approach. Little sensationalism is needed to expose and communicate what we've chosen and are encouraged to ignore. You can't read this book and feel absolutely nothing. It's a wake up call that you, as a reader, participate in just by continuing to the end without quitting.
Through it all, did it compel me to become a vegetarian? No, I'm pretty sure it did not. The dinner I had the night I finished the book most likely included chicken, and I had a kobe beef burger last night. But it wasn't as though I read the book, closed it and put it and its contents back on the shelf. I feel guilty eating meat, and I've winced ordering and enjoying it because I can't with good conscience ignore what I know. Yet, having read The Omnivore's Dilemma, I'm still fairly confident that there's a happy medium between being a meat-eating glutton and not eating it at all. For one, although eating "organic" or "free range" is only marginally better, I can try to eat local meat as often as possible. In addition, I've changed my diet, anyway. I try to stick to the rule that the portion of meat at any meal should not be any larger than my palm, and that red meat should only be consumed twice a week. Overall, I've been eating less meat, more greens and smaller portions and I feel (and see) changes in the way my body looks already. If I eat less meat every week, in my mind, that many less chickens/cows/pigs can be slaughtered in the future because I'm putting my money where my fork is. I'm not delusional enough to think that eating less chicken will directlly impact the meat industry, but it's a contribution to a long-term habit that will hopefully leave me healthier and the world a slightly better place.
Favorite Quotes:
"We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance."
"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
"Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list."
"More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or "externalize" such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering."
"Shame is the work of memory against forgetting. Shame is what we feel when we almost entirely--yet not entirely--forget social expectations and our obligations to others in favor of our immediate gratification."
"If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our "animal nature." We then repress or conceal that nature, and yet, as Kafka knew better than most, we sometimes wake up and find ourselves, still, only animals."
"War is waged over the matter of pity. This war is probably ageless but...it is passing thorugh a critical phase. We are passing through that phase, and it passes through us. To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape...The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it."
Suffering: "The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at."
"That really changed me, when I realized taht an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death."
"When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than an animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting. I'm not speculating. This is our reality."
"Killing an animal oneself is more often than not a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember. This is perhaps more harmful than ignorance. It's always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep."
"People focus on that last second of death. I want them to focus on the entire life of the animal. If I had to choose between knowing that my throat was going to be slit at the end, which might last three minutes, but I've had to live for six weeks in pain, I'd probably ask for that slit throat six weeks earlier. People only see the killing...How much suffering is acceptable? That's what's at the bottom of all of this, and what each person has to ask himself. How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?"
"Remembering and forgetting are part of the same mental process. To write down one detail of an event is to not write down another...To remember one thing is to let another slip from rememberance...There is ethical as well as violent forgetting. We can't hold on to everything we've known so far. So the question is not whether we forget but what, or whom, we forget--not whether our diets change, but how."
"Vegetarians are at best kindly but unrealistic. At worst they are delusional sentimentalists."
"The idea of a just farm system rooted in the best traditions of animal welfare and the idea of a vegetarian farm system rooted in an animal rights ethic are both strategies for reducing (never eliminating) the violence inherent in being alive, They aren't just opposing values, as is often portrayed. They represent different ways of getting a job done that both agree needs doing. They reflect different intuitions about human nature, but they both appeal to compassion and prudence."
"The ethical relationship of farmers to farm animals is unique. The farmer must raise a living creature that is destined to an endpoint of slaughter for food, or culling and death after a lifetime of production, without becoming emotionally attached or, conversely, without becoming cynical about the animal's need for a decent life while the animal is alive. The farmer must somehow raise an animal as a commercial endeavor without regarding the animal as a mere commodity."
"This is not in the end a complicated position. Nor is it a veiled argument for vegetarianism. It is an argument for vegetarianism, but it's also an argument for another, wiser animal agriculture and more honorable omnivory."
"We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generation that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?"
"Toward the end of The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan writes, 'I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian...Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality tha can be its own form of hubris.' He's right that emotional responses can lead us to an arrogant disconnect. But is the person who makes an effort to at on the dream of innocence really the one to be pitied? And who, in this case, is denying reality?"
"Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity. For some, that irrationality leads to a kind of resignation. Food choices are likened to fashion choices or lifestyle preferences--they do not respond to judgments about how we should live. And I would agree that the messiness of food, the almost infinite meanings it proliferates, does make the question of eating--and eating animals especially--surprisingly fraught. Activists I spoke with were endlessly puzzled and frustrated by the disconnect between clear thinking and people's food choices. I sympathize, but I also wonder if it is precisely the irrationality of food that holds the most promise."
Rating: A
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