I'll probably never abandon this blog entirely. It's been in existence for over nine years now, and even though I often go many, many months without writing anything, I keep coming back to it.
Just recently I decided that I'm really excited about the richness of my reading life right now, but I'm also feeling a little limited in my ability to process what I'm reading. After some thought, I've come to the conclusion that writing about what I read, as I used to, will go a long way toward remedying that.
So here goes. It's probably no coincidence that I am feeling more of a need to process than usual because I've just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, and boy. This is not the kind of book a thinking human being can read and then walk away from unchanged. The question is, how should I be changed? What are my steps forward?
First, a brief word about the author. Foer is one of my favorite novelists because of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book that I deeply cherish. Its main character, Oskar Schell, is real and heartbreaking to me in a way that only a handful of characters ever have been. Foer hasn't written a whole lot since then, but he did follow it up with Eating Animals, which I bought not long after it came out in paperback. I didn't really know that much about it, but it was by Jonathan Safran Foer, so that was good enough for me. Despite my affection for him, this book has been sitting on my shelf for several years, partly because I always own many books that I haven't read, and partly because I was a little afraid of it.
I was right to be. The title is both a verb followed by a direct object (something we do) and an adjective followed by a noun (something we are). Yes, it's a book about eating meat versus being a vegetarian. I really like meat. I really did not want to have my carnivorousness challenged. And it was.
Foer's main objective in this book is to be objective: he presents the facts about factory farming, which are damning. The suffering animals undergo for the express purpose of spending a few brief moments on our tongues is vastly out of proportion. And 99% of the meat we eat is factory farmed. I am sure there are individuals capable of reading these accounts and feeling nothing, but I am not one of them. Foer also provides a very balanced look at the challenges facing farmers and the meat industry; several of the people he interviews get the opportunity to express their own thoughts on the situation without commentary from the author. It's refreshing, and it's not what I expected. Ultimately, though, Foer does not shy away from the central message he hopes to communicate: vegetarianism, with a willingness to support sustainable farming of animals, is the only possible choice.
The call to vegetarianism is based on many different presuppositions, some of which I agree with, and others of which I do not. Here are some of the objections I have:
1. Animals and humans are not the same. Foer and others who appear in his book frequently refer to the notion that humans, too, are animals. One uses the term "species bias," which is evidently a real thing in intellectual circles. Species bias seems like an okay thing to me, because humans and animals are NOT THE SAME. They should therefore not be treated in the same way. I understand that from an anatomical and perhaps social standpoint, humans and animals have more similarities than differences. But on the deepest level, the most important level, they could not be more different. Humans have souls; they are made in the image of God; animals do not and are not; that is the end of the story for me. I say this as someone who really loves animals. I totally adore my cat, but there is no part of me that thinks she and I are the same. Just because we both breathe on our own, walk on our own, express loyalty and feel fear, that does not make us the same. So I don't believe that our decision to eat or not eat animals should be decided based on that premise. It holds no value for me.
2. There are so many more important things to get worked up about. I really really struggle with the fact that many animal rights activists are not pro-life. What is the point of fighting so hard to protect animals when one is unwilling to fight on the behalf of the unborn? The cognitive dissonance that must create fascinates and confuses me. Foer quotes a man who works with PETA, an organization not known for their commitment to pro-life ideology: "Saying that meat-eating can be ethical sounds 'nice' and 'tolerant' only because most people like to be told that doing whatever they want to do is moral." That sounds really familiar to me. And if he really feels that morals and ethics matter more than making people feel good, then why wouldn't he speak out just as strongly against abortion? In my mind, we should be caring more about human lives than animal lives.
3. I'm not convinced that my personal choices really make that much of a difference. Foer's book tried to convince me that they do, but it actually had the opposite effect for the most part. This book demonstrates that the culture of factory farming is the result of many, many choices made over the years and decades, first by individuals, then by corporations, and now by our culture. We so strongly desire cheap meat that we are willing to turn a blind eye to whatever long-term costs our demand for that meat might incur. The costs are many, and they are horrific. The agribusiness industry has pitiful standards for the humane treatment of animals, and the descriptions Foer provides are stomach-churning. Be that as it may, if the culture has decided what it wants, my decision to abstain from meat will be a drop in the very large bucket. I like the taste of meat a lot, so why would I give it up, however strongly I feel about treating animals ethically, when I know it will have next to no impact?
4. As factory-farmed meat gets cheaper and cheaper, ethically-farmed meat gets more and more expensive. It has to be that way because a family farmer has to outsource a lot of the work he needs done, most notably the slaughter of his animals. Foer's book tells the story of a turkey farmer, "the one truly independent poultry farmer left," who faced a crisis when the slaughterhouse to which he sent his birds was bought by a corporation. The farmer, Frank Reese, couldn't continue to use it knowing that the standards for treatment would plummet. But his only other choice was to slaughter the birds himself, then leave them to rot, because the USDA would never approve the sale of birds killed in that manner. (This is what is known as irony, given what the USDA does approve.) The story has a semi-happy ending, as there was ultimately enough demand for Reese's birds that he was able to work together with others to design and build a small slaughterhouse on his farm. But because Reese cannot offload many of his costs onto the corporations that fund factory farming, his meat is much more expensive. I can buy chicken breasts for as low as $2.50/pound at my local grocery store. Reese's birds, sold on the Heritage Foods USA website as ground meat only, run more than $17/pound. I can buy a lot less meat on my grocery budget that way.
I thought long and hard about each of these objections as I read Foer's book. I've decided that the first three are logical fallacies. Just because animals are not like us, just because there are more important causes to fight for, and just because everybody isn't doing and it likely never will, doesn't mean that I shouldn't care about how animals are treated or that I should not invest time and money in their ethical treatment. While our world sometimes feels like a triage center, it isn't. A person can care about many things at one time. I believe that God created animals and that we are responsible to treat them well. I don't see a mandate against eating them in the Bible; in fact, in the New Testament God directly communicates with Peter to tell him that all foods are "clean," meaning even the old Jewish law about which meats were acceptable to eat was no longer in effect. But the Bible also says that creation groans, awaiting the coming of God's kingdom, and I think we do have a responsibility to alleviate that groaning as much as possible, given that it's out fault, not theirs. That's a responsibility I take seriously.
So I can't really use my philosophical objections to go on eating meat. On to the practical one. This is still the thing that legitimately stands in my way. I don't feel like I can give up meat altogether because I have tried that, and my body did not respond well. My only choice, based on what I now know from this book, is to make better choices about where I purchase meat. I don't know how this will affect what I eat at restaurants. If I'm going to truly make a commitment to doing the right thing, I shouldn't eat at most of the restaurants I like anymore. That sucks. I haven't made up my mind about it yet, though I feel the ideological inconsistency in my ambivalence: if I truly believe that factory-farming meat is wrong, and if I personally want to make choices in line with that belief, then any deviation from it is wrong. But I think I can at least make changes in where I shop. Whole Foods, which is right across the street from the King Soopers where I normally shop, has really high standards for the meat they sell. All farmers have to submit to regular audits and meet strict requirements for humane treatment of their animals. I will spend a little more on meat from now on, but it is, as they say, a small price to pay. I'm glad to know that I'll be doing my part to tell factory farmers just what I think of their practices, and that my future children will be eating foods that don't pump their bodies full of antibiotics and disease.
This is still a really hard thing for me to understand and think about, but I hope I won't stop. It feels too important to stop, even if there are other more important things to worry about.
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