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For weeks I've walked around debating Jonathan Safran Foer in my head, trying to put my finger on what it is that irritates me so deeply about his new book, Eating Animals. Getting to the root of this animus has been particularly tough, because Eating Animals is an unwieldy hybrid of two different narratives—one I like very much, and one I find wrongheaded and staggeringly condescending.
So let’s start by disentangling the two. The central and admirable point of Eating Animals is to critique industrial agriculture and, as a case against factory farming, this book is both timely and stirring. Although Foer's descriptions of agricultural atrocities may be familiar, he brings literary celebrity and a bracing moral urgency to the topic, arguing that our eating habits should reflect our ethics and that if we disapprove of filthy, overcrowded chicken factories, we should never buy another Perdue broiler. I agree.
But Foer does not stop there. Eating Animals is also a meditation—sometimes whimsical, sometimes strident, often personal—on animal husbandry and carnivory more generally. Here, Foer’s ignorance and biases are matched only by his arrogance. When he began writing this tome, Foer lived in New York City and, by his own admission, had never touched a farm animal. He had also been an off-and-on vegetarian since a childhood babysitter told him she shunned meat because she didn't "want to hurt anything." ("Without drama, or rhetoric, she shared what she knew," Foer explains. It’s a sentence you might read in a story of a spiritual conversion in the Himalayas.) He describes, at length, his dawning appreciation of animals after adopting a puppy off the street in Brooklyn when he was in his late 20s.
“I simply want to know—for myself and my family—what meat is,” Foer writes in an introductory chapter. Actually, what he really wants is to tell the rest of us what meat is. And it is hard to imagine anyone less qualified.
From the age I could sit in a saddle, I knew what meat was. My grandfather and great-grandfather were ranchers whose land was suited for little but running cattle. (A vegetarian could not live off the land in the Uintas.) From earliest memory, I accepted that a steer was also a steak the way I accepted that water was also steam. It seemed neither mysterious nor tragic. Animals died all the time in rural Wyoming, frequently for reasons that had nothing to do with us.
Into his 70s, my grandfather rose before dawn to irrigate pastures, fix fences, bale hay, bring calves into the world, inoculate them, doctor them, buy them, sell them, brand them, castrate them, drive them to the feedlot. Every Sunday afternoon, my grandmother cooked "a good little roast" that was eaten with a reverence afforded no other food. I am aware that almost none of us have that connection to the chicken salad we order at the Cheesecake Factory or the meatloaf in our suburban kitchens, and this is a big problem. But my grandparents knew down to the penny the cost in human labor and animal suffering of every good little roast. Can Foer really say the same for his tofu?
SNL: Equal Opportunity Objectifiers
Jon Hamm spent most of the Saturday Night Live episode he hosted last night shirtless.
Confessions of a Woman Comedy Writer
Allison Silverman accepts one from New York Women in Film & Television (and tells us why it's rare).
Comments
Well isn't that convenient, Jennifer?
By: jnt | Thu, 12/24/2009 - 11:17
Jennifer,
You end your rant by waxing nostalgic about the "relationship" between humans and animals and how that "relationship" can only be saved by humans CONTINUING to consume animals.
Can you not see how absurd and completely self-serving that argument is? The only "relationship" humans have with 99% of the animals killed for food in our country is one of complete and utter dominance without mercy. It is a one-sided "relationship" of greed and abuse so heart-wrenchingly sad that most people cannot even stand to consider it. Let alone have the courage to write a book about it.
Let's face the truth here: We are enslaving and killing animals for our own pleasure and profit. Nothing more.
Even the conservative American Dietetic Association has confirmed that a vegan diet is healthy for all life stages. We are fortunate to live in a country of plenty and therefore there is NO REASON to consume animal products other than pleasure. And there is no reason to raise and kill them other than profit.
And frankly, Jennifer, those are not very morally compelling arguments.
It is no less ethically troubling to discriminate against and abuse a being based on his/her species than it is to do so based on his/her race or sex. As Alice Walker wrote, “The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.”
And yet, during times of the struggles for women's rights and abolition, there were people, like yourself, who argued that the "relationship" between women and men, between whites and blacks must be "preserved" at all costs. Generally they were people who (also like yourself given your family history), are financially invested in the maintenance of that abusive and unjust "relationship."
These trivial and self-serving motives are crystal clear. And clearly without conscience.
Eating animals
By: cojee | Mon, 11/30/2009 - 20:39
Thank you, Jennifer Reese, for what I deem to be well-written, fair articles, which I read in The Week (11/27/09). Thank you also, Smalltownliberal. I descend from 4 generations of cattle ranchers (most of whom have lived strong into their nineties and some over 100 years). I remember my tender-hearted dad tell sadly of being informed mid-meal that he was eating his calf, but it didn’t stop him from eating beef or any other meat. I remember being 13 years old, standing at the fence of my favorite pasture, watching a Hereford steer savoring the virgin prairie, and thinking that it was his lot in life to be eaten and mine to eat him; but that yes, “a good life, a sudden death” – I would willingly have traded places then and there. I remember the Indians saying, “Deer, we are sorry to hurt you, but the people are hungry, and we ask your forgiveness for taking your life so that we may live.” Were I to be found in the territory of a larger and hungry carnivore, it would not care whether I am sentient nor would it apologize. I would be dinner forthwith, and I would not call it unjust. This is the Sacred Hoop of which Black Elk spoke, the circle of life established by the Creator and from which, in many ways, most humans have removed themselves. They refuse to be a part of the earth even with their dead bodies; they poison them with embalming fluid and seal them in concrete. Humans complain about our tainted food sources and yet have strewn such pollution that the unsuspecting animals as well must consume mercury, radiation, and all manner of other contaminants. Factory farms are the result of overpopulation and industrialization, which are caused by our living out of harmony with nature. I listen to harangues by vegetarians and vegans who condemn carnivores and omnivores, expounding that not eating meat will solve all the world’s problems -- spiritual, economic, health, aggression, etc. What I hear is humans so completely removed from the reality of the natural world that they have no idea how out of balance this way of life is and what the problems actually are, what caused them, or how to fix them. I work in a wildlife research institute and once lamented to a parasitologist that parasites were killing my tropical fish. Dispassionately, she replied, “Everything has to eat. Everything.” If you wish to be veggie or vegan, and you can, then by all means do so. I have no quarrel with you. For myself, I am part of the earth; as long as other carnivores and omnivores eat meat, then so will I -- and be grateful for each living thing that gives its life for me, knowing that there but for fortune (for now) go I.
Straw man
By: sugar_k | Fri, 11/20/2009 - 15:10
I haven't read the book so I can't speak to whether JSF is as annoying/hip/urban/squeamish/girly as Jennifer Reese says. But the interviews I've seen with him sound pretty sensible: he's not arguing the abstract principle that it's wrong to eat animals so much as exposing the realities of what it means to eat meat in America (the kind of factory-farmed meat that makes up 90+% of our meat supply).
Funny how the defenders of meat-eating are all among the precious few who only eat pasture-raised happy beef or chickens that scratch in the dirt. If you have access to these products, great. But unless you're going way out of your way when you shop for meat, you're fooling yourself if you don't think animal cruelty is part of your food supply. If you're fine with that, then fine. Nobody's coming to take you to jail. You should just be aware of it, that's all.
In the meantime, veg*ns like me (for environmental and health reasons more than animal-rights ones) could really use a fast-food place or two that would serve some nice pea soup or a soyburger amidst the meaty hordes. I'm convinced that a lot more people would give up meat if veg*n foods were easier to find.
i grew up on a farm too...
By: snivelly | Wed, 11/18/2009 - 17:55
In the rural South, my family raised and slaughtered hogs and chickens. And that's why I'm a vegetarian now. I got to know those animals as individuals. I'll say it: I loved some of those pigs. And maybe we would have needed them to survive in my grandparents' day (though there were plenty of vegetarians around at the turn of the century) but by the time I came up in the 70s, hog slaughtering was a vestige of another time and one I'm glad my family has given up. Because even though we had only a few animals at a time, the way those animals lived and died was tragic and shouldn't happen if not absolutely necessary.
My siblings and I are all either vegetarian or vegan now, though with cheap factory farmed meat available, my parents eat far more animal products than the generation that preceded them...at great cost to their health, by the way.
For all that vegetarians are written off as city-slickers like Safran Foer, I know plenty of rural vegetarians, and I think it's intellectually dishonest of the author to claim that only she, as a member of some cattle-prodding class, has the authority to discuss the ethics of eating animals.
Like the other commentors, I wish the author had taken on some of the substantive arguments in the book, rather than giving free-range to her personal vitriol. If she were to look around, I think she'd find that these issues are being discussed in serious ways by thinkers all over the world, just as they have been for all of recorded history. Surely they read Plato on the prairie too?
No good answers, but less meat isn't so bad
By: teaspoon | Wed, 11/18/2009 - 10:41
Like Foer, I have been an on-and-off vegetarian for many years. When it comes to the American diet, there are few good choices among many bad ones. My people have hunted, fished and practiced subsistence living for thousands of years. The non-native sides of my family have gardened and raised small farms. I grew up with the unique experience of having access to fresh and ethically (on a scale of comparison) obtained food. My choice to be vegetarian was a personal boycott of the factory farm system that is intertwined in the American diet. I have never been opposed to small farms and hunting wild game; but that is not sustainable for the entire meat-eating population. It's such a non-win battle and I have become completely worn down with these ethical dilemmas. I would never recommend that anyone become vegan or vegetarian without great personal consideration. But ask yourself: would it really hurt you to eat pre-packaged meat a little less?
huh?
By: catech0lamy | Tue, 11/17/2009 - 09:46
My small Texas town has a farmers' market every Friday and Saturday, where I can buy non-factory farmed meat (as well as vegetables, baked goods, etc.). But I should still avoid it because not everyone has this luxury? Not a chance.
disconnect
By: Smalltownliberal | Mon, 11/16/2009 - 14:19
The important thing to remember when reading this article is that humans are human. We will all make judgments based on our own experiences, whether we were raised in the city or country, as a vegetarian or omnivore, or as a liberal or conservative.
Personally, while I understand empathizing with the animals and the need for humane practices, but there comes a point when it gets ridiculous. Somehow the animal has to die so we can eat it. People have, for all time, eaten meat. It is, after all the only source of vitamin B-12. What we have forgotten is our place in the circle of life. I know it sounds corny, but its true. Both commercial farming practices and vegetarianism seek to remove humans from this circle, either by pretending it doesn't exist or that we are somehow above such a thing because we are sentient. Would anyone think that a predator is cruel because it kills it's prey? As long as the animal lived under good conditions and is butchered humanely my conscience is clear.
+ Let us suppose that
By: Jonathan Laden | Sun, 11/15/2009 - 03:02
+ Let us suppose that tomorrow, every man, woman, and child on Earth became a vegan.+
Oh, the horror, not to mention the strawman. This is like arguing that once the US government shifted from encouraging to discouraging smoking that we'd have thousands of tons of unsold cigarettes that we'd have to burn, thereby polluting everyone's lungs just the same. It's a zero probability event, and a distraction from a reasonable discussion about the issues. (Since we currently kill livestock so young, a societal tapering of months would actually work out just fine, in any event.)
+ This is the end result of veganism: the virtual extinction of many species of domesticated animals.+ Only if you assume there must be millions of chickens and cows, as opposed to the many many species that have only a few thousand individuals living.
Our planet's ecosystem desperately needs some rebalancing.
+We can assume, I think, that nonsentient animals and plants exist to propogate their species. +
Interesting philosophical perspective. I argue that there is such a thing as a negative quality of life, especially for "nonsentient" animals who don't compensate by reading great literature and reading facebook. Ergo, living under factory farmed conditions to propogate the species is not a good for that animal ever. In what moral sphere would it be superior to torture puppies than to decide not to breed your dog in the first place? It's the same argument, and it makes no sense to me.
I'm sure we'll agree to disagree. I think there are better arguments possible than the ones you state and I reacted to.
Castration
By: kreadchicago | Thu, 11/12/2009 - 17:33
Nagatuki, thanks for referencing my comments. To respond: Yes, animal activists advocate for routine castration or neutering of male dogs and cats. However, there is a huge difference in how this is done for pets vs. for “food animals.” In the US, it is perfectly legal and most common for castration to be done not by a vetrinarian, but by farm workers, and without any anesthesia. It would be illegal animal cruelty to inflict this same procedure on a cat or a dog. For them, a veterinary surgical procedure with anesthesia is mandated.
Nonetheless, my point wasn’t really to debate whether or not ripping the testicles off of cows is cruel or not, but to point out that the author dismisses the question of brutality rather breezily. And in doing so, with the bizarre comment about bulls’ “underage daughters,” she commits the anthropomorphic error that animal advocates are so often accused of – inappropriately applying human standards to animal behavior.
Not to overdwell on that one paragraph – but it is a microcosm for the problems so many commenters have had with this whole essay: It simply is not convincing, is cliché-ridden, sentimental and naive. As others have pointed out, she claims Foer is annoying, but why? Because his grandparents failed to be ranchers? Because he lives in a large city? Meanwhile, her own arguments are weak and sentimental. She’s more qualified than Foer to write about meat why? Because he did research (inferior), whereas she’s drawing on childhood experience with her grandparents (superior). That’s what makes her preachy, to my ear.
I suspect Foer’s book really got to her on some level, and that bothers her.
Thought experiment
By: Rocket88 | Thu, 11/12/2009 - 17:29
Let us suppose that tomorrow, every man, woman, and child on Earth became a vegan.
What would be the status of the cows and chickens currently in existence? They no longer occupy any meaningful role in the "natural" ecosystem; wild cows and chickens simply do not and cannot exist in any meaningful numbers. So humanity could either (a) simply slaughter the cows and chickens currently in existence, since if everyone was a vegan there would no longer be a commercial reason to pay for their upkeep, or (b) create some sort of domestic farm animal retirement homes to allow all these cows and chickens to live out their remaining years, die of natural causes, and be turned into compost.
Either way, these two species become essentially extinct in the span of a few years. This is the end result of veganism: the virtual extinction of many species of domesticated animals.
We can assume, I think, that nonsentient animals and plants exist to propogate their species. In so doing, they yield other rather incidental side effects, which -- through the process of evolution -- we have come to value greatly. The repeated propogation of diverse plant and animal species creates an ecosystem which, writ large, makes life on Earth possible.
Cows and chickens are not about to re-enter whatever ecological niche their distant ancestors occupied. I cannot imagine that eliminating the existence of entire species is "better" for the animals than propogating them so long as humans find them useful. I have no problem with eliminating factory farming. I recognize that switching to more humane means of putting dead animals into the human food supply will result in less meat, at higher prices; I have no problem with (and indeed have adopted) a diet which involves small quantities of animal products on fewer occasions.
But it seems foolish to argue that we should demonstrate our ethical concern for cows and chickens by eliminating them as a species.