Eating Animals

11/26/2009

Maybe Thanksgiving isn’t the best day to have a post on Eating Animals, or on eating animals, but then again maybe it is the best day. Jonathan Safran Foer, an acclaimed novelist, took on the topic in a book that promises to be as spellbinding as the New York Times Magazine feature spun from the book. It drew me in, captivated me with his humor and his insightfully told stories. It was nothing like what I expected. Since I started this blog I have become increasingly aware of food issues as they relate to animals - after all, fish, cows, chicken, and pigs - the main animals we eat at least in North America - are animals (as Foer's vegetarian babysitter told him, "you do know that chicken is chicken?"). Most people, even those who love animals, eat animals. 

Foer was an on-again off-again vegetarian, as was the woman who would become his wife. But after their first son was born, everything changed. “Everything is possible again,” his friend wrote to him. And he started thinking about just what kinds of things was he about to feed to his child. It became more than an intellectual endeavor, but a passion to find out the truth behind one of the biggest industries around. He visited factory farms, family farms, and talked to people on all sides. And throughout the book he tells funny stories, including how his Jewish grandmother had survived WWII scavenging in Eastern Europe, and what food represented to her: “The story of her relationship to food holds all of the other stories that could be told about her. Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joy, humiliation, religion, history and, of course, love. It was as if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.”

And what does he find? Foer says eating animals is making us sick. He shows how chickens and other poultry – including turkeys – in traditional factory farms live in horrendous, inhumane and disgusting conditions, cramped in windowless prisons, walking around in their own feces. They get injected with antibiotics daily, which affects our own health and immunity. Remember the old adage, you are what you eat. Foer brings attention to the fact that most “24-hour flus” are not actually influenza, but one of the 76 million cases of food-borne illness the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated happen in America each year.

“Your friend didn't "catch a bug" so much as eat a bug. And in all likelihood, that bug was created by factory farming,” he writes in a CNN Op-Ed. “If the way we raise animals for food isn't the most important problem in the world right now, it's arguably the No. 1 cause of global warming: The United Nations reports the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.” I brought awareness to this in my previous post Meatless Mondays.

I count myself among one of the people who, like Foer before he wrote this book, is an on-again off-again vegetarian, trying to make conscientious consumer choices. Though I actually have not eaten as much meat as your average American for years, I do still eat it and don’t always buy ethically grown meat. I struggle with the fact that the meat is cheap and I have a family to raise. But when I read statements from a respected nutritionist and doctor such as, “If you truly understood the nightmarish brutality of what happens inside these windowless animal jails and abattoirs that dot the American ruralscape, you simply would not eat this meat,” which is what Andrew Weil wrote in The Moral Ferocity of Eating Animals–it makes me think seriously about how to proceed. Foer’s book turned actress Natalie Portman from a vegetarian to a vegan activist, and as she writes in her Huffington Post piece, “Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.” Have you read this book, or Foer's NYT Magazine piece? What do you think?

Comments

[Destiny Brown]

I really believe that animals should be more respectes. I don't under stand how heartless people abuse and kill these harmless animals. It's so sad, so thats why I have devoted my life

[Melody]

It is so difficult to eat healthy in this country...they make it next to impossible because of the expense involved. If it was just me, I could do it, but like you Wendee, I have a family to feed. I also have a carnivore husband! I guess the best I can do at this point is to make some humane decisions instead of none at all. One step at a time...

[Melody S]

It is so difficult to eat healthy in this country...they make it next to impossible because of the expense involved. If it was just me, I could do it, but like you Wendee, I have a family to feed. I also have a carnivore husband! I guess the best I can do at this point is to make some humane decisions instead of none at all. One step at a time...