Book Saloon: Eating Animals
I confess I expected to like Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals, better than I did. First of all, the New York Times book reviewer dismissed it, always a good sign, and his two previous novels had received wide acclaim. Secondly, books like “Fast Food Nation” had already permanently changed my eating habits for the better, but I thought after I had lately succumbed to the occasional price-driven mystery meat, I could use a booster shot of meat-nausea. As far as that part goes, it worked, but just barely, because little of the material was new to me.
It started out promisingly enough, Safran Foer has that wonderful combination of wry humor and uber-introspection that made Woody Allen famous, and certainly contributed to a love life few would have bet the farm on. I chuckled delightedly on the airplane to read Safran Foer’s disclaimer about animal empathy, which somewhat echoes my coyote-wearing own.
I spent the first twenty-six years of my life disliking animals. I thought of them as bothersome, dirty, unapproachably foreign, frighteningly unpredictable, and plain old unnecessary. I had a particular lack of enthusiasm for dogs…… As a child I would agree to go to friends’ houses only if they confined their dogs in some other room. If a dog approached in the park, I’d become hysterical until my father hoisted me onto his shoulders. I didn’t like watching television shows that featured dogs. I didn’t understand- I disliked - people who got excited about dogs. It’s possible that I even developed a subtle prejudice against the blind.
He had me going for a minute, and then he said all that changed and he became a dog person. Men. What grabbed me next, and what I even shared with snoopy row-mates on the plane, was his quite original and sweeping analysis of the fish “industry,” whose practices, if committed on land, would make the worst factory farm look like a petting zoo. An entire page of type is committed to a series of the species of fish slaughtered as “bycatch,” for the noble cause of obtaining a humble can of 99-cent tuna, but the horrendous loss of marine life from such fishing was quickly overshadowed by the appalling filth and inhumanity of “acquaculture,” which is merely a waterlogged version of the antibiotic-saturated torture of an industrial chicken farm. I found out a lot about those from the book, including the fact that such MBA-concocted atrocities are such a recent, but now universal, development in all animal “farming.” Safran Foer describes this in typically stark and arresting terms, comparing chicken’s newly reduced and artificial lives to those of humans, were they to be treated the same way, “To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be 300 pounds in ten years, eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.” Would even Jeffrey Dahmer find such children tasty?
Unfortunately, money quotes like these all occur in the first half of the book, and the second half is dedicated largely to enlightening but rather futile discussions with decent and relatively humane animal farmers, and the overly personal quest concerning meat-eating Safran Foer has embarked upon as a new father. He’s seeking a truth many have already found, and he makes a lot of important points along the way, but in the end we are back where we started. The animals we eat are, with few exceptions, brought to us in a way that both shocks the conscience and turns the stomach, and eating them is not just dubiously safe and declasse, but dreadfully harmful to the planet and our future. Point taken.
But I was waiting for the second punch: as humans, as stewards of the earth, and merely as people, we all need to do something, and to be honest, Safran Foer’s principled eschewing of eating animals is a start, but doesn’t go far enough. The grotesque exploitation of animals and the unfathomable damage that exploitation creates boils down to, in the end, a rather conservative prescription to protect one’s own as Safran Foer is doing with his new son. He ends up vaguely supportive of more humane farming, and deeply hostile toward the current industrial system, but curiously devoid of a broader call to political action beyond choices made at the checkout counter. I mean, we’re talking about epidemics, extinction, and the most revolting of biological experiments, and all we’re supposed to worry about is what we feed Junior?
Even as he vows to protect his new family from this scourge, he leaves the rest of us wondering if that’s all we can do, and, of course, when are the next funny parts? Safran Foer is definitely onto something, but it would have taken more than 270 pages to get there.
At the rate we are cleaning out the oceans, we will soon be left with fish farming for any sea food. So what is described in the book will be what we are left with. The number of middle class and the poor that depend on fish will be very small. Like huge agri-farms, the big boys will dominate and through technology provide few jobs.
Dogs give unconditional love and as a boy I really appreciated and needed that love. Dogs help a lot of lonely people cope. I take it that after you reached 26, you changed how you viewed dogs. Was it one particular dog that caused the change?
That was a quote from Safran Foer about dogs. Personally, I am indifferent to dogs. I like some, dislike others, but I wouldn’t want one for myself.
I confess that I’ve never been a dog person and never will be. My daughter’s family has a new dog, and he’s adorable, but I’ll still never be a dog person.
I do like to eat fish, though. But mostly I confine myself to sardines, since they are small and less likely to contain mercury. But most people that I know don’t really care for sardines. I think they prefer not to recognize a fish shape.
I could never make a proper Caesar salad without mashed sardines and a potentially salmonella-ridden coddled egg.
Did you read the Seminal post about keeping warm with global warming? Interesting stuff about critter fibers….
No, I missed that one. I’ll have to see if I can find it. Was it very recent?
Just catching up on all the latest blob entries, as my computer contracted a strange trojan and after I cleaned it (or thought I had), I got the infamous Black Screen of Death (BSOD) on my Vista. Oh, that was fun. I tried everything, save sacrificing a goat, and finally I got it to boot up again. After reading about many such cases recently in Vista O/S computers (and I know, I know, get a Mac), there were as many fixes as problems. I guess I’ll have to live with the browser hijacker until I find a fix that won’t crash my system.
On topic – I am not a big animal lover, although I used to like dogs when I was a kid. I had a dog-walking service. Ha! Now, I am indifferent to them, some I don’t like. I meet dogs in my job all the time when I go to people’s houses to show them insurance. I should probably write a blob post about some of the dogs I’ve met doing in-home sales.
Years ago, late 80s, I read John Robins book “Diet for a New America” that covered pretty much this whole subject. It changed my life. I became vegetarian before it was de rigeur. I started to eat some poultry products in the mid-90s because I was slightly anemic and I couldn’t give blood anymore, so I upped the iron a little. It wasn’t until last year I ate a little bit of red meat from time to time, and then only the smallest of steaks.
I worked as a meat cutter for a few years when I was in high school and I was so sick of the smell of raw meat and blood, I couldn’t bear to look at it. I never eat deli meat for that reason!
I have mentioned before in these comment sections that the biggest problem I have with the meat industry is not the inhumane practices (not that I’m cold-blooded, but it’s not my first concern) but rather the horrible pollution, waste of resources and devastation to the rain forest results from raising cattle.
We don’t need to eat meat. At least not very much.
A buddy of mine is trying to convince me that I don’t need to get a Mac next time, and I didn’t believe him. I was at my brother’s house today, and he had recently got his younger son a barely used MacBook on Ebay for $500….. If this baby ever tips over and I’m more than usually penurious, I’ll go that route, I think.
I worked in a restaurant in college that served a lot of fresh fish; I remember being stunned at the size of some of them (the bigger they were, the more likely they would be crew chow, so I ate a lot of big and rather scary fish… most were tasty). It was always a bit disconcerting to walk into the kitchen and see a mermaid-size tail sticking out of the garbage can, or someone slitting open a six-foot shark that looked just like Jaws.
I’m not exactly a PETA member;( it’s been frightfully cold this past week so I’ve been putting on a mink vest, a coyote coat, rabbit hat, and fox scarf just to go out on the balcony for a smoke) , but I do think that the cruelty part plays a role in my revulsion about meat, in addition to the environmental concerns. Fur-bearing animals could never be treated so poorly or their pelts would look like crap….
In case your buddy wins, I would be very curious to hear about your experience switching back. I honestly never have heard of such a case.
Once you go Mac you never come back – or so they say
On the meat topic – as much as I enjoy buying rib eye steaks at $4.99 per pound, I often think meat should once again be more special. I certainly love the taste of a perfectly slow roasted leg of lamb or a marinated tri-tip and so on. I don’t think any book will ever keep me from indulging. However, the frequency of occurrence can be negotiated.
In Europe, meat always was more expensive and hence less of it gets consumed. It is almost a philosophic question to ask whether low income families in the US still need to eat more meat than most people on the planet. Modern farming technology makes it financially feasible and the holy market forces make it available but as with the subsidized low cost of gasoline, none of the environmental long term damages or other hidden cost get factored into the price of a pound of meat.
The problem is that over time expectations of indefinite availability manifest themselves and no politician can dare touching them.
In the case of oil, we just send the boys to the middle east and if three darkies a day bite the bullet, so what?
Who and when is biting the bullet on environmental damages caused by large scale industrial farming? I certainly hope not the rich people in this country. That would be Unamerican and ungodly (which is the same thing). After all god bestowed the wealth on them because they went to church a lot and finished their plates loaded with meat…..
Re: “dreadfully harmful to the planet and our future”
Silly Libtards! No common sense!
Harm the planet? Humanly impossible!
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http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_050908/content/01125110.guest.html
God’s Creation Is So Complex and So Massive, We Are Insignificant
May 9, 2008
RUSH: Folks, I know this is common sense to you and me, because you and me, we know that all these climate occurrences are natural, and not one of them is artificial. Meaning we’re not causing it! We couldn’t cause it if we wanted to, is the point. Can we make it cooler when it’s burning hot out there? Can we make it warmer when we’re freezing our tushes in the winter? We can’t do this.
There is not a human being alive who, if given a chalkboard or a computer, could sit down and put together the mathematics and whatever else is necessary to create this climate. So on what basis do we think we can change it? So much of this is just common sense. But to understand the global warming hoax I am convinced one has to have a more than rudimentary understanding of liberalism. One has to be willing, open-mindedly, to accept that science has been corrupted by politics.
Science is not pure. We’ve always thought that it was. We’ve always thought that science was immune to political and ideological concerns. But it isn’t. In fact, science has now become — quote, unquote, science — has become a home for displaced socialists and communists to advance their agenda of anti-capitalism wherever they can. A lot of people don’t want to believe that. See, I try to approach it on a commonsense basis. Oh, yeah, we can destroy the planet, right?
There is not a human being on this planet who could be teleported somewhere else in the universe, earth wiped out, and this smart human being, “Okay, recreate it. Here’s your chalkboard, here’s your computer, here’s the software, you go design just the climate. I’ll handle everything else.” God says, “You do the climate.” Folks, there is not enough knowledge, there is not enough understanding; it could not be done. And of course this is obvious.
I’m not trying to be profound here. The reason I bring it up is there is no way on earth we could create this. There isn’t a way we can change it.
Are you one of these people that’s bought into this silly notion to unplug your toaster and all of your electronic appliances when you’re not using them? You might want to do that to save electricity, that’s fine. But if you’re doing it to save the planet, you have a serious vanity problem, or worse: Your life is meaningless and you’ll be talked into any scheme or hoax to believe in in order to make you think your life has a purpose, such as saving the planet. You’re simply helping a bunch of socialists tear down the greatest capitalist system on the face of the planet if you go along with this rotgut garbage.
- – Rush Limbaugh, May 9, 2008
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Ah…. Just this morning Sarah Palin and Rich Lowry were in the newspaper saying the EXACT SAME THING Rush said about global warming. I guess we’ve all been imagining things.
CH, this and the preceding part of your paragraph reminded me of Chris Hedges’ Liberals Are Useless post:
Generally speaking, there is a dispiriting flaccidity to much of the reactions byself-identified liberals/progressives to a whole host of issues–and by this I don’t mean the loud and justifiably angry responses from blogs–from continual war to torture to health care to “animal husbandry” (and isn’t that a polite term), etc.
I don’t why this is so; a belief that one person’s efforts are for naught? Or perhaps a secret fear of the loss of creature comforts made possible by the very practices we publicly abhor (or say we do)?
Anyway, thanks for the post on an important and interesting issue.
I read Hedges’ post; I didn’t entirely disagree, but I think the problem is that, as far as elected officials go, there are only about ten liberals. Baucus, Lieberman, and Stupak, for instance, are only the worst of people posing as Democrats who have no liberal values. Much of the “liberal” blogosphere is infected with mindless Obamabots, and the media parrot the most pathetic absurdities of the right without question. In such an environment, liberals are useless.
Is Baucus the worst of the worst, or just one of the worse?
Here’s a link to a table rating and scoring U.S. senators on a “Greenwald” scale. (Well actually it’s an “Inverse Greenwald” scale.)
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/7013
Any one-dimensional score is bogus of course . . . Marcy (emptywheel) has been showing lots of love for Jay Rockefeller, lately, on health care, but she still hates him on FISA. So now she has two different nicknames for him – - “Jello Jay” when he’s bad and “Jay Rock” when he’s good.