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Jonathan Safran Foer: Eating Animals

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

Salon.com interviewed the author of the new book, Eating Animals.  An interesting conversation about factory farming and vegetarianism, suggesting how he differs from Pollan, Schlosser, and Singer.

Excerpts:

It’s an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it’s a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we’re so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force — historically, it’s unprecedented how destructive our farm system is — has taken over America and is starting to take over the world. And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn’t require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices.

One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it’s made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It’s very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor.

The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It’s a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people’s exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they’re the rule.

So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that’s bad; I mean, those things are bad.

First of all, [people] just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time.

Also, here’s the Huffington post column by Natalie Portman that’s referenced in the interview: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals Turned Me Vegan.

Excerpt:

I remember in college, a professor asked our class to consider what our grandchildren would look back on as being backward behavior or thinking in our generation, the way we are shocked by the kind of misogyny, racism, and sexism we know was commonplace in our grandparents’ world. He urged us to use this principle to examine the behaviors in our lives and our societies that we should be a part of changing. Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.

Update (11/8):  Foer’s article, Against Meat, in the NY Times Magazine (10/7)

Related post:  In defense of sustainable meat production