Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer - Part 1

Eating Animals -
Jonathan Safran Foer

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 37

 February 6, 2017 

Book 11 - Eating Animals
by Safran Foer (2009)
 Part 1 - Pages 3-44
Reading Time - 1 hour

I'm writing this before I've even cracked the cover on this book. I'm not sure how it ended up on my list but... there it is. A confession... I am a hard-core carnivore. I love meat of any sort... and seafood and chicken. I've eaten one live cricket (but not a second one!). I love steak tartare (raw ground meat). I love my steaks blue (barely warmed through).

I do draw a few lines though. I don't eat dog or cat and the very thought of it... when we traveled through northern Vietnam... made my stomach turn. I saw how the dogs and cats were held and caged and had an epiphany. This is what we do to our cows, pigs, chickens. Not ours personally... but the ones that come to us all neatly packaged in the grocery stores as steaks and breasts and fillets. Coming back from Vietnam, I tried going the vegetarian route but... only lasted a half a year... maybe.


My philosophy on meat would be something along these lines. I don't think it's wrong to eat meat. I think how we raise and slaughter meat is the problem. We have lost our connection with the creature that gives its life so that we might live. It used to be a farmer would kill his own chicken and his wife would serve it for dinner. There was a connection to the animal, a gratitude to the animal. That has been lost. Could I eat a chicken that I've raised? Mmmm... don't know. Haven't ever tried it. Can I eat a fish that I've hooked, caught and killed. Absolutely. Done that. No issues. Anyhow... there's my preamble... now... into the book.

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Right... we start off with a discussion of the pros and cons of eating dogs. Why not? We euthanize 3,000,000-4,000,000 dogs and cats every year? Why not harvest them as a local and sustainable source of meat? Well... duh... cause dogs and cats are our pets. And they're smart... cats, naturally are smarter than dogs. But what about pigs... who like to play with toys and are easily as smart as dogs? What about chickens? What about fish who apparently have a very sophisticated society under the water? Why is it OK to smack a gaff hook into the head of a fish and not into the head of a dog?

Well... cause we tend to care most about what's close to us. We don't live cheek-a-jowl with cows, pigs or chickens. And over the last few decades, a conversation about eating meat has generally devolved into two polar opposites: eat animals... don't eat animals. Although there are shades of grey in there. Don't eat mammals but eat birds. Don't eat mammals or birds but fish are OK. Don't eat anything that sucks in oxygen (air or water-based) but OK to eat honey, cheese, milk, eggs. The author argues that we need a better way to talk about eating animals.

Because it's not just about eating animals... it's about how our society breeds, raises, transports and slaughters animals. Over 99% of all animals and milk/eggs are factory farmed. That means they are genetically engineered to grow faster on less food, even if that means they can't walk or fly or live longer than 6 weeks. This is not the happy barnyard pictures we envision from our childhood. This is a Factory... with animals as the raw parts and meat as the product. Descartes said we should treat animals as machines. We have taken that to heart with a vengeance. Except... they are not machines.

The author suggests that we struggle with a deep shame... and that shame is the work of memory against forgetting.

The thing is... factory farming is not just limited to "farms"... it happens in the oceans where technology and science can harvest fish far more efficiently than our quaint notion of a fishing trawler. It used to be that hunting or fishing was relatively "fair". One guy with a fishing rod trying to catch a fish. We have turned it into something else. And why?? All because we enjoy meat and we like our meat to be cheap.

"In the name of affordability, we treat food animals with cruelty so extreme, it would be illegal if inflicted upon a dog".

I buy 3 kg boxes of flash-frozen chicken breasts at Save-on-Foods. They're usually $40 but I only buy them when they go on sale for $20. We get 14 or so breasts in a box. That means 7 chickens were slaughtered for that box. Do I want to know what life those chickens had? Do I??

Already, I am going online and researching local sources of eggs and milk and cheese. F*@k the cost. I'm looking at ways in which we can rejig our eating habits. Ditch the grocery store meat/fish. Incorporate more protein-alternatives - legumes, quinoa, happy eggs...

For centuries, meat was a luxury... maybe it's time to consider it that once again.