EATING ANIMALS

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

BACK BAY BOOKS                       2009

PART I

 

Chapter 1: Storytelling

 

Americans choose to eat less than 0.25% of the known edible food on the planet.

The fruits of family trees

• My grandmother survived the War barefoot, scavenging other people’s inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins, and the bits that clung to bones and pits.
• It was my grandmother who taught me that one tea bag makes as many cups of tea as you’re serving, and that every part of an apple is edible.
• Money wasn’t the point. Health wasn’t the point. In the forests of Europe, she ate to stay alive until the next opportunity to eat to stay alive. In America, fifty years later, we ate what pleased us.
• Growing up, my brothers and I thought our grandmother was the greatest chef who ever lived. Why didn’t we question her when she told us that dark food is inherently healthier than light food, or that most of the nutrients are found in the peel or crust?

 

Possible again

• Unexpected impulses struck when I found out I was going to be a father. Fatherhood was the immediate impulse for the journey that would become this book.
• What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don’t hurt family members. We don’t hurt friends or strangers. We don’t even hurt upholstered furniture.
• My not having thought to include animals in that list didn’t make them the exceptions to it. I had to change my life.
• My vegetarianism, so bombastic and unyielding in the beginning, lasted a few years, spluttered and quietly died. I never thought of a response to our babysitter’s code, but found ways to smudge, diminish, and forget it.
• When I went to college, I started eating meat more earnestly. But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. I thought that life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason.
• When I graduated, I ate meat – lots of every kind of meat – for about two years. Then I was set up on a blind date with the woman who would become my wife. A few weeks later we found ourselves talking about two inspiring topics: marriage and vegetarianism.
• There was a gnawing (if only occasional and short-lived) dread that she was participating in something deeply wrong, and there was the acceptance of both the confounding complexity of the issue and the forgivable fallibility of being human. Like me, she had intuitions that were very strong, but apparently not strong enough.
• People get married for different reasons, but one that animated our decision to take the step was the prospect of explicitly marking a new beginning. Jewish ritual and symbolism strongly encourage this notion of demarcating a sharp division with what came before – the most well-known example being the smashing of the glass at the end of the marriage ceremony.
• Eating animals, a concern we’d both had and had both forgotten, seemed like a good place to start. In the same week, we became engaged and vegetarian.
• Of course our wedding wasn’t vegetarian, because we persuaded ourselves that it was only fair to offer animal protein to our guests. And we ate fish on our honeymoon in Japan.
• And back in our new home, we did occasionally eat burgers and chicken soup and smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only every now and then. Only whenever we felt like it. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.
• But then we decided to have a child, and that was a different story.

 

Eating animals

• Seconds after being born, he was breastfeeding. I watched him with an awe that had no precedent in my life and bound me, across generations, to others.
• I saw the rings of my tree: my parents watching me eat, my grandmother watching my mother eat, my great-grandparents watching my grandmother…
• As my son began life and I began this book, it seemed that almost everything he did revolved around eating. Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: it matters more.
• Within my family’s Jewish tradition, I came to learn that food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember.
• There are thousands of foods on the planet, and explaining why we eat the relatively small selection we do requires some words.
• This story didn’t begin as a book. I simply wanted to know – for myself and my family – what meat is. Where does it come from? How is it produced? How are animals treated, and to what extent does that matter?
• What are the economic, social, and environmental effects of eating animals? I came face-to-face with realities that as a citizen I couldn’t ignore, and as a writer I couldn’t keep to myself. But facing those realities and writing responsibly about them are not the same.
• Animal agriculture is a hugely complicated topic. There is this animal, raised on this farm, slaughtered at this plant, sold in this way, and eaten by this person – but each distinct in a way that prevents them from being pieced together as a mosaic.
• Each question prompts another, and it’s easy to find yourself defending a position far more extreme than you actually believe or could live by. Or worse, finding no position worth defending or living by.
• While this book is the product of an enormous amount of research, and is as objective as any work of journalism can be – I used the most conservative statistics available (almost always from government, and peer-reviewed academic and industry sources) and hired two outside fact-checkers to corroborate them – I think of it as a story.
• Facts are important, but they don’t on their own, provide meaning – especially when they are so bound to linguistic choices. What does a precisely measured pain response in chickens mean?
• But place facts in a story of compassion or domination, or maybe both – place them in a story about the world we live in and who we are and who we want to be – and you can begin to speak meaningfully about eating animals.
• Putting aside for the moment, the more than ten billion land animals slaughtered for food every year in America, and putting aside the environment, and workers, and biodiversity, there is also the question of how we think of ourselves and one another.

 

Listen to me:

• “We weren’t rich, but we always had enough. Thursday we baked bread, and challah and rolls, and they lasted a whole week. Friday we had pancakes. Shabbat we always had a chicken, and soup with noodles.”
• “We didn’t have refrigerators, but we had milk and cheese. We didn’t have every kind of vegetable but we had enough.”
• “Then it all changed. During the War it was hell on earth, and I had nothing. I was always running, day and night, because the Germans were always right behind me. If you stopped you died. There was never enough food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating.”
• “The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
• “He saved your life.” “I didn’t eat it.” “You didn’t eat it?” “It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.” “Why?” “What do you mean why?” “What, because it wasn’t kosher?” “Of course.” “But not even to save your life?” “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

 

Chapter 2: All or Nothing or Something Else