Is meat murder?

EATING ANIMALS

By Jonathan Safran Foer

Little Brown and Company

Available at select National Book Store branches

The consumption of flesh for food has always played a central role in a people’s culinary heritage. For our ancestors, it not only supplied them with much needed nourishment, but also served as a cultural repository for the values they placed on food preparation, flavor, and community. For instance, when the Pilgrims first congregated for that landmark Thanksgiving dinner — served with a plethora of wild fowl, game and grain — they partook of the American landscape’s rich bounty that would provide them sustenance for those first, precarious years at the East Coast settlements. In 21st century, urban communities, most dinner parties would go amiss if a roasted animal, handsomely browned and splayed on a carving board, were absent from the menu.

However, the practice of eating meat has repeatedly and increasingly been a source of debate for vegetarians and animal activists, all of whom point out the practices of an industry that elevate profit above quality, animal welfare and consumer health. Is it wrong to eat turkey if there exists its soy alternative, Tofurkey? For the conscientious omnivore, for whom battery farm chicken raises much contention, would it not be more prudent to favor its extravagantly priced yet humanely raised alternative, the mouthwatering Poulet Bresse (which costs around $21 a kilo)? If steaks from corn-fed, gridlocked cows offend the discerning epicure, why not buy beef sliced from the pampered, beer-inebriated animals of wagyu cattle breeders? Or, for the staunchest and most daring of us, why eat meat at all?

Jonathan Safran Foer, the critically acclaimed novelist of the widely loved Everything is Illuminated and the equally compelling Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, poses these important questions and challenges in Eating Animals — a postmodern memoir about vegetarianism furnished with his trademark narrative sparkle and a litter of philosophical patter from legendary non-carnivores like Franz Kafka and Jacques Derrida. For the adventurous cook, it also features a Filipino recipe for “Stewed Dog, Wedding Style.”

It should be noted that Mr. Foer is hardly shy about donning his dietary preferences. In his debut novel, his self-named hero is offered an unending selection of meats by Alexander Perchov’s grandfather, all of which he persistently refuses. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the main character Oskar Schell declares that he doesn’t eat “anything with parents.” Eating Animals, his first work of nonfiction, is even more poised towards outlining his evolving stances on his dietary views.

While this book revolves around the ethics of eating meat, Foer consciously tells us that this is not a “straightforward case for vegetarianism.” Like most works of investigative journalism, it stands as a by-product of mountains of research, observations, and interviews, much of which feature here as honest essays and reportages from cattle and poultry farmers, animal rights activists, and vegetarians. But unlike most memoirs, it departs from convention by including evocative stories and lengthy philosophical discussions, much of which hovers over the visceral horrors of slaughterhouses and factory farming. 

Mr. Foer writes that most chickens have been bioengineered to yield more meat in less time while living cooped up in the “grossly unnatural,” cramped conditions of battery farms, leading not only to reduction in their bone density, but also to bacterial infection, lung and heart conditions, cancerous tumors, and skin diseases. He tells us that pigs are sardined in closed barns littered with “stillborn piglets, afterbirths, dead piglets, vomit, blood, urine, antibiotic syringes, broken bottles of insecticide, hair, pus, even body parts.” He informs us that farmed fish like salmon are raised in filthy tanks infested with sea lice that gnaw their flesh to the bone. And he says that cattle, considered here as the most fortunate among livestock, run through most slaughterhouses being “bled, skinned, and dismembered while still conscious.”

If all this is not gruesome enough, he even suggests that industrial farming plays consumers into a deceptive game that, while copiously providing them with cheap meat, doubly compromises their health and the planet’s ecology. By raising chickens in terrible conditions, farmers cross-contaminate flocks with deadly bacteria like salmonella, campylobacter, and E. coli. Pigs don’t fare much better on the ecological scale. Foer tells us that in communities built close to piggeries, where massive, noxious cesspools are reserved for storing livestock manure, people are constantly sick due to the toxins (transported through air or soil) contained in pig scat.

As a result of these inhumane farming practices, the animals are not only more prone to disease, but also develop certain, hybridized pathogens that have orchestrated several disastrous epidemics like SARS, MRSA, H5N1, and the more recent H1N1 flu. And when animal veterinarians administer medicine to weak-battery farm animals, they are not only artificially prolonging their lives, but are also indirectly passing along drugs that make our bodies vulnerable to bacteria that have evolved to bear the brunt of antibiotics.

Certainly, these facts are startling, and if they don’t proselytize foodies into shunning meat, they at least inform the reader about the flaws of an order that disregards the consumer for the sake of profit. Readers will readily agree about the injustices of a system where “more than half a billion of our tax dollars are given to the dairy, beef, egg, and poultry industries” to provide food to children while “a modest $161 million is offered to buy fruits and vegetables that even the USDA admits we should eat more of.” It is unnecessary to argue about such a case where externalized costs and unhealthy consequences impact society more heavily than the savings levied on our wallets.  This isn’t only an argument for vegetarianism, but moreover, an “argument for another, wise animal agriculture and more honorable omnivory.”

Alas, like most books about vegetarianism, this sincerely written memoir is also given to the kind of sensationalized statements that may distract readers from key points. Sentences like “KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history” (the author’s grandmother, it should be noted, survived the Nazi onslaught) and comparisons of battery farming to heinous crimes like slavery and abortion definitely place into question Mr. Foer’s sense of ethical priority. And while the unmistakably postmodern illustrations on the chapter openings challenge readers to dwell on their accompanying inscriptions, these cutesy effects skew the gravity of the subject and undermine the seriousness of his valid observations. Thankfully, those pages only number but a small fraction in this memoir.

Mr. Foer acknowledges that “nothing establishes friendship so forcefully as eating together,” and even informs us that he, at one point, enjoyed the delights of sushi and steak with friends and family.  He also realizes that “changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting.” But he also recognizes that his conscious decision to jettison meat from his diet is a crucial manifesto on sustainability, on charitableness, and ultimately, on social responsibility. Although Eating Animals remains only a partially tenable argument against the intractable practice of consuming meat, it nonetheless reminds us about the importance of not letting our self-interests supplant the welfare of others.