Book Review: Eating Animals

Books about industrialized factory farms make me sad, ashamed, angry. Horrified. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer made me all of those things, but it also made me laugh, entertained me, and in the end it gave me a number of reasons to hope that things will change.

The book is generating a big buzz, and I strongly recommend it. If you eat meat, love eating meat, and want to continue eating meat, I'd especially recommend it because it is stuff you particularly should know, both for yourself and the world. (If I’ve lost you already and you read no further, it all boils down to what we all are re-awakening to: support your local farmers.)

What Foer does so effectively is bridge the gap between meat eater and veg-head by showing the full impact of industrial-scale farming. He goes beyond animal welfare to our own health and the health of the planet. The effects of this scale of farming are of equal importance regardless of your dietary choices. He discusses, among other things: the origin of avian and swine flu from factory farms; how the meat is from stressed, sick, medicated animals (it is less profitable to raise healthy animals); the shockingly unsustainable levels of pollution (just one company, leading U.S. pork producer Smithfield, produces the same waste every day as does all of New York and California’s populations – and of course it isn't treated); and greenhouse gas producing emissions (animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined).

So, even if you don’t give a pig’s curly tail about animal welfare, there is much else to be concerned about.

Eating Animals is a provocative title. It plainly expresses the truth underlying what we prefer to state as “eating meat”. The animal part, the part that was once alive and could look us in the eyes, we might not think of at all, or we might take comfort in assuming the animal had a good life, a happy, comfortable life, and a swift end. That's what farms used to provide, up until very recently. They still exist, of course, but in such diminishing numbers that in the United States, according to Foer, 99% of meat eaten is now industrially farmed. (I don’t know the corresponding stat for Canada, but suspect and hope it is lower.) Increasingly we know that the image we have in our heads of an idyllic farm is a far cry from the reality that the majority of farm animals now live. As Foer puts it, "We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film."

Farms like we imagine them to be - which are ethical, sustainable, and proud of the quality of life they provide to their animals - would welcome you seeing their facilities and animals. I live in a region with a lot of small farms like this and I hope it stays that way. In contrast, the majority of meat comes from ridiculously high-volume facilities that are locked up like Fort Knox because they don't want you to see the show, and that's telling.

Until I was about twelve, I lived on our family farm, and our animals had a good life. I talked to them, scratched their heads, gave them names. And then we ate a lot of them. I hid when it was time to kill the chickens. My chickens, as I thought of them. I couldn't face it then, and I can't face it now. But at the same time - and this is important to me - I greatly respect my father for having the courage to do the dirty work of killing, motivated by love for us, to get them on our plates. He tells me now how awful he found it, how he dreaded it for days leading up to it. I realized on some level very early on that to match his integrity, for me it would have to be in the opposite way - by not eating what I couldn't face.

Even so, it took me years to go from occasional meat eater who didn't want to refuse anyone's dinner offerings, to vegetarian. Then, of course, because nothing is ever that simple, about five seconds later I realized that all the reasons I didn't want to eat meat applied just as much to non-meat animal products like eggs and dairy. These choices I make, my votes in how to live my life, feel right to me, and are an ongoing journey. I face my own inconsistencies when I eat cheese, when I feed our pets, or when I smuck a bunny into oblivion on my way to pick up a veggie pizza.

I'm not even entirely comfortable with the labels of vegetarian or vegan, because to me they are trumped by the fact that I will always remain an omnivore. More to the point, many veggies, in their passion, have done a disservice by painting it as an all-or-nothing proposition. (Case in point: Foer’s runaway bestseller is likely to create more change than any other single person is possible to accomplish, yet I’ve read reviews that blast him for not being vegan. Boot to the head!) Foer contrasts this with people’s actions towards other eco-friendly initiatives. No one is an all-or-nothing environmentalist; we just try to do our part and our best to improve. In any movement, ten people who change by half are far more impactful than one who is pure and perfect.

Meat eater and vegetarian respecting each other's choices, like my Dad and I do, is the necessary bedrock of the solution that this book offers. If all farms were like we all want them to be and used to be, then the story would end there. If you can look a pig in the eye and then enjoy it on your plate, I have nothing to say to that. But if you assume the pig had a certain kind of life in making that transaction palatable, then you are likely being horribly misled. Killing animals for food isn’t pretty, but most people accept it when it is done in a certain way. But are these factories - where suffering is offered in place of a healthy life, and so many unsustainable and damaging costs arise from the “cheap” meat they produce - acceptable?

One of the first things you find out when you stop eating meat is that many people will give you "advice". For the piles I’ve received, I feel justified in offering some back: Find out more about where your food comes from, and based on what you find, support what feels right to you. This book goes a long way to providing the motivation to do that.