Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
A young, self-effacing, quiet, humble novelist from Brooklyn has written a powerful, groundbreaking book that might very well save our lives and the planet, if only everyone would read it.
Don't be afraid. Don't be put off by its title Eating Animals, or assume you already know what's inside it. You don't. I didn't.
Author Jonathan Safran Foer, just 32 years old, draws on his family history (his grandmother survived the Holocaust by scavenging), and his experiences as a young father debating what to feed his first child, in order to shed light on our relationship with our food supply. He took time away from his work as an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, best known for Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, to send this earth-shattering message to the world.
This book is a game changer. Eating Animals offers an impassioned argument against animal cruelty and for a more informed, responsible relationship with our food, the life-giving sustenance we rely on for our existence.
Are you wondering about where this crazy swine flu pandemic originated? Read this book. Wonder why everyone you know is always getting sick, often with weird one-day stomach bugs? Read this book. (Did you know there are 76 million food borne illnesses reported every year?) Wondering why health care costs are soaring, and why every illness and malady - cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity - is on the rise? Read this book.
What we choose to eat matters tremendously, Foer argues, and not just for our own personal health but also to the core of who we are as human beings. While he extensively details the facts about the dangers of eating factory-farmed animals (which includes 99 percent of all the meat sold in supermarkets and restaurants), Foer also points out that the food choices we make now will influence whether our kids and grandkids inherit a healthy or unhealthy planet.
As most people know by now, raising livestock for human consumption is one of the leading causes of global warming. The United Nations reported in 2006 that livestock operations account for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transportation sector.
Making a different choice for dinner is the most powerful individual thing we can do to reduce global warming, as Foer points out. How big a sacrifice is that? To just reduce what we are consuming, say by going meatless one night a week as a starter? Remember our grandparents' dinners. Meat was a special once-a-week treat, for economic reasons and availability reasons. Today we are going in the opposite direction eating it sometimes three times a day, at breakfast, lunch and dinner. The more we eat, the more factory farms have to produce, the further we get from core values of stewardship and morale responsibility.
How we treat our chickens, pigs, fish and cows affects everyone. Whether you eat animals or not, they have an impact on your life in the pollution they create, and the unhealthy impacts they can have on our friends and family members who do eat animals (including asthma, heart disease, cancer and more). Ever noticed how other countries whose diet is not meat-based have much lower incidences of these illnesses?
This isn't about turning the whole population vegan, and Foer doesn't go that far.
It's about moving out of our massive state of denial about how our food is being produced today. In researching the book, Foer says he "came face-to-face with realities that as a citizen I couldn't ignore, and as a writer I couldn't keep to myself."
Foer doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but he poses all the right questions that we should ask ourselves every time we put fork to plate. It is past time to stop being co-conspirators with the industrial agriculture business. We are killing ourselves with what we are eating and what we are feeding our kids. And because of our demand for meat we are aiding and abetting the horribly cruel, unsanitary, unsustainable and pollution-spewing factory farm system. A system completely shrouded in secrecy because if Americans saw the process, they would never take another bite.
I believe this is one of the most important books ever written. Read it, and quickly pass it on to your friends and family. You'll wish he had written it a long time ago. Bon appetit.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Quitting Meat: A Process Of Change
When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. It's a strange formulation, and it's distracting.
Eating animals is making us sick - CNN.com
Natalie Portman: Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals Turned Me Vegan
Jonathan Safran Foer's Nonfiction Book, Eating Animals, Coming in ...
Eating Animals - 50 Things to See, Hear and Do This Fall - TIME
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We are so fortunate to have this debate, for thousands of years hunger has been normal and many have starved. The Roman Empire collapsed in famine, the French were starving when Jefferson was POTUS, only a few generations ago the Irish were starving to death in the Old World famine was the rule. Even today famines kill in China, India & Africa. In the 30's many starved to death on some of the best farmlands in the world in the Soviet Union.
I ranch. I've spent my entire adult life in production ag. As a wife, mother, and a foodie I appreciate your comments. I have also NEVER met a factory farmer. That is a lot of hype. We may be a small percentage of the population, but we are still here. Yes we use new technology, so does your doctor, banker, teachers, and yes journalists. We work hard to provide a safe, abundant, nutritious raw product to you consumers. We care.
There is a whole distribution chain involved with food, processing, transportation, retail. It is important to target the right reforms.
Our family has ranched for 120 years on the same land. We have grasslands that should not be farmed and are in great shape due to controlled grazing. It is a false statement that 99% of beef is raised the wrong way. Most cows spend their entire life on grass. This is the meat that goes into ground beef the biggest selling product in the beef market.
New Yorkers can do something right now to change factory farming methods. There is a bill pending in the New York State Assembly Agriculture Committee that would ban hen battery cages, ban tethering and confining veal to crates, and ban pig gestation crates. See www.ab8163.com.
The bill is hung up in the Agriculture Committee because of opposition by the New York Farm Bureau and the New York Grange (two very powerful lobbies in New York State). The chair of the Committee William Magee is a puppet of the Farm Bureau and votes consistently to protect the profits of big agriculture.
New Yorkers can call their assemblypersons and demand the bill get a fair vote. This is the moment. California did it last November, Maine did it. And a few weeks ago Michigan did it.
New Yorkers should settle for no less.
Rick Tannenbaum
The Hilltop Initiative
www.ab8163.com
"puppet of the farm bureau"? This bill was birthed by HSUS and Wayne Pacelle. I heard him speak and have studied this issue. We are the puppets, this is his "social experiment". The 3 R's-refine, reduce and replace animal agriculture. It was chilling. Reminded me of my eastern european studies in political science at the university.
No...
Not having babies is the most powerful individual thing we can do to reduce global warming.
Let us all be vegan and keep the babies still. :)
The intestinal systems of human beings are not designed to digest meat. Meat putrefies in your gut and becomes toxic. During autopsies on elderly people they have found traces of meat leftover from when they were children! Yogi Bhajan, a great spiritual master, told one of of his meat eating disciples once, "Why do you make your body a graveyard for dead animals?" It simply is not healthy. Not to mention how unhealthy it is for the planet.
LOL!!! That is a bunch of nonsense! It is amazing the silly stuff that folks will believe.
Humans have been eating meat for tens of thousands of years. If it was not working out for us I think we would have stopped a very long time ago!
I agree. People are omnivores - we can eat plants AND animals. The whole point of this book is to eat mindfully. Do we really want to cause unspeakable cruelty to another living thing just to eat it? I do not. I want animals to have happy lives.
Big Meat is far bigger than Big Tobacco with a proportional degree of misinformation.
what a frustrating chain of comments. all anyone is really asking is to have a conscience. think of the animal you are eating, reduce the amount of meat/animal product you consume. that's all - just REDUCE. if we cannot sustain society without factory farming, then society un-sustainable. the weak die off. life is tough. funny: humans are the only species that is above extinction.
Your comment just made me realize I need a big Ribeye tonight. If extending my life doesn't incent me to eat less meat your wining about the poor animals certainly isn't going to.
I love pork, beef, lamb, fish, chicken, venison and elk. Nothing in the plant world comes close to the flavor of a nice hunk of meat with copious amounts of fat. I would rather live a shorter life than give those up.
It seems that every time somebody writes a blog about eating less meat, hordes of "conservatives" and food industry flacks rush in to make comments to misinform and misdirect the discussion.
The author of this blog has not suggested any legislation that would prevent anyone from eating meat. Eating animals is NOT the issue! Your freedom is not the issue. FACTORY FARMING is. Laurie David is not an animal welfare advocate. Climate change is her issue. She *asks* you to eat *less*.
Don't fall for this false choice offered by these factory farm advocates. You can eat less meat and it will make a difference. Even if you do not believe that factory farms contribute to climate change, you can't argue that there would not be less animal suffering. If you eat one less animal, that's one less animal that suffered a miserable existence at a factory farm.
Since I engaged you the most.............just wanted to let you know I am a liberal. Just because one does not completely agree with your cause does not make them one affiliation or another. And living in Texas does not make one Conservative either (just in case you assumed so). Not all Conservatives agree on the same issues. Likewise, not all Liberals agree on the same issues.
"jusÂt wanted to let you know I am a liberal. Just because one does not completely agree with your cause does not make them one affiliation or another."
Thanks. I'm glad you filled me in on your label. I would never have guessed it from when you said: "There are more worthy causes, like lifting death penalty to life imprisonment, like giving gay people their rights, like driving more ozone friendly cars and limiting industries' emissions of carbon gasses"
"As most people know by now, raising livestock for human consumption is one of the leading causes of global warming."
Flatulent cows are destroying the planet.
This argument is absurd. It essentially argues for the extermination of the billions of American Bison as a win for the environment. If you just leave the grasslands vacant of ruminants (remember dead bison) the topsoil vanishes and the grasses die. The so called protected grasslands of this country are in terrible shape because environmentalists are too stupid to connect the dots. If we fully grazed the natural grasslands of this country (which are enormous) with cattle and or bison under advanced rotational grazing techniques it would virtually halt global warming. The dumb cow fart methane argument does not take into account the amount of carbon that is sequestered when the topsoil is built up and thriving through interaction with ruminants.
Of course this only applies to 100% grass fed... never eat that feedlot stuff its totally destroying the world. Find your local sustainable farmers through www.localharvest.org
I'm sorry, but Foer's book is not "ground-breaking." The same information/arguments have been written in many books before his. I think it's great that he wrote this book, and that it's getting so much attention, but I also think it's unfortunate that his celebrity friends and/or supporters continue to assert that the argument he makes is somehow new. Because it isn't, and because such an assertion completely ignores the work upon which his own is built.
Did you already read the book?
Over the weekend.
P.S. Although I had read excerpts from it last week.
Nature ridiculously simplified:
Animals eat meat, humans are animals, therefore we eat meat.
Is reading comprehension an issue for you? The author did NOT even ask you to stop eating meat. In fact, she said "How big a sacrifice is that? To just reduce what we are consuming, say by going meatless one night a week as a starter?"
And therefore elephants, cows, goats, giraffes are not animals!?!
I agree that the confined animal food industry is ethically and ecologically bankrupt. Now what? Everybody eats plants? Not so fast.
Let's start with vegetarians, who eat plant foods, dairy, and/or eggs. Dairy comes from cows, and eggs come from hens. There is nothing ethical about the treatment of cows on dairy farms, or the treatment of hens in the egg industry. Both confine animals, either to rob them of the milk nature designed for calves, or to rob hens of eggs nature designed to be fertilized. Both require the systematic killing of these animals after their productive years are over. While switching from meat to dairy/eggs may reduce the confined animal population somewhat, it certainly does not eliminate the problems.
Vegans eat annual monocrops such as wheat, corn, soy, and oats. Raised conventionally, they require large amounts of artificial fertilizer, toxic pesticides, artificial irrigation, diesel fuel, and agricultural machinery that kills millions of ground-living animals in a horrible way. The majority of these crops are genetically modified, raising potential health issues.
Raised organically, these foods require animal byproducts for fertilization. Where do these animals come from, what are they fed, and how do they die? Can we use human waste? Can organic farming feed our overpopulation?
An eating plan designed by nature (not humans) for our species can be found in "The Original Diet." She designed it to be healthy, sustainable, and kind to plants and animals.
Roy Mankovitz, Director
http://www.MontecitoWellness.com
A very sensible comment. Very objective. Thanks.
I read an excerpt from the book on npr.org and was wowed at how many factual inaccuracies there was in just a handful of paragraphs. I understand his general arguments and enjoy his writing style but seriously, a feral animal is not the same as a domesticated one, a chicken is not as smart as a dog and slaughter houses to not deliberately agitate animals so the meat will taste better, the opposite is actually true and has been for thousands of years of live stock farming.
Factory farming is not a continuation of your proposed idea of "thousands of years of live stock farming." Factory farming is a continuation of a system of capitalism which does not take into regard the treatment of living organisms, the usage of limited resources, or the impact of abusing our planet. All they care about is the bottom line and how efficiently it can be increased. Please understand this and please research FACTORY FARMS. It is a common mistake to disregard the "factory" part of current-day "farms." It really is the difference between night and day.
Likewise, please note that cows, lambs, sheep, and (most far and beyond) pigs are on par with or more intelligent than a dog. How does your dog taste? Why might you consider that question so preposterous? Please take a moment to reflect on why you draw this arbitrary line between eating certain animals and not others.
Speaking as someone who knows dogs, cows, sheep and goats, I must disagree. (My sister raises beef cattle, I raise dairy goats and the occasional lamb and we both use herd dogs.) Cattle may be smarter than sheep, but that's not saying much. They're certainly not as smart as dogs. Goats, on the other hand, are extremely bright. They're quite capable of pulling a few fast ones on my dogs, although it doesn't take the dogs too long to figure out their subterfuges. Of course, that doesn't stop me from butchering the meat kids. After all, they are goats.
I read an excerpt from the book on npr.org and was wowed at how many factual inaccuracies there was in just a handful of paragraphs. I understand his general arguments and enjoy his writing style but seriously, a feral animal is not the same as a domesticated one, a chicken is not as smart as a dog and slaughter houses to not deliberately agitate animals so the meat will taste better, the opposite is actually true and has been for thousands of years of live stock farming.
I will not be able to read the whole book because I do not constantly want to have to throw it across the room. I want to smack Foer's editor in the head with a wet noodle.
So, you're scared to read the book?
One of the real consequences of climate change is that we will see more extremes in every direction.
That means much land which is in crops now may become marginal due to temperature extremes,
it only takes one killing frost to wipe out a crop. Frost will not, however, do too much damage to
pastures used for grazing. (I know, we raise both hay and vegetables in a climate where we can and do have kiiling frost at any time -- this year's was on July 31st).
Responsibly raised rare breeds (we raised Galloway cattle and Fjord cross ponies, both of which are very hardy and easy to feed and manage) may actually make better use of land than crops. Part of animal husbandry includes culling the herd. (What are you going to do with all the extra males, anyway ?) Is it so bad to manage herds when the alternative is to let these rare breeds, with genetic traits we may need in the future, just die out because managing herds involves death as well as birth ?
If the breed is maintained in a strong and healthy state then to me that is a net gain.
It is just not about eating animals or greenhouse gas or industrial farming, etc. When our ancestors discovered meat as food, they prayed for forgiveness to the soul of the animal. The ancient Greeks sacrificed to their Gods. When I grew up, there was no food in the trash can, the farmer knew the butcher and the butcher knew us. Nothing was wasted. There is a reason for that. Food came from the vicinity. Winters were long and cold, there was no fuel for greenhouses. As long as one person starves in the world you eat what you get! That was ethical component. Faith and religion were busy to teach respect to the food. Now they have other business. Our markets are driven by more and more consumption. By the the discussion you are having know happened 30 Years ago in Europe. Americans come in late, as usual. The differences are that food is regional. Farmers are protecting the ethical way, the environment and know their animals by name. The animal waste is used to provide the energy for the farm. Food is protect by purity laws. Here the prices are undercut by bad quality and poison. Our world is toxic. So is the produce. No matter we get poisoned left and right. Farmers even get subsidies. It's politics and hubris, frozen hearts in the freezer section.
When you say farmers, I don't consider the "corporate" farms "farmers". They have so many animals per acre, how healthy are the animals??? It's not only inhumane, but unhealthy to humans. With the vast number of animals per acre, their waste, pollution, is not good for the air, water and land.
Well, I'm an American who's been having this discussion with other Americans for the last thirty years now. Back then we called it "bio-regional" instead of "locavore", but the message has remained the same. (And so do all the factions.)
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