A DESTRUCTIVE CULINARY PREFERENCE

COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 11 Jan 2010

Mark Hand – Dissident Voice

When will humans stop eating factory-farmed nonhuman animals? They won’t—unless something happens to curtail the supply of nonhuman animal meat produced by the factory farm system.

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer, (Little, Brown and Company, 2009).

If you’re waiting for governments to pass laws or issue new rules forcing corporations to shut down their factory farms, don’t hold your breadth. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, is an active partner in perpetuating the factory farm system.

On the opposite end, nonprofits and “activists” can take credit for ever so slightly reducing the suffering of nonhuman animals at factory farms. But these groups and individuals will never succeed in completely dismantling the factory farm system.

So, what will it take to rid the planet of this scourge? In his new book, Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes that the factory farm “will come to an end because of its absurd economics someday. It is radically unsustainable. The earth will eventually shake off factory farming like a dog shakes off fleas; the only question is whether we will get shaken off along with it.”

Bingo! Yessiree! Now that’s getting straight to the point. Foer casts the whole factory farm system in a light—whether we will get shaken off along with it—that we typically don’t see in a book released by a major publishing house—in this case, Little, Brown and Company, which is owned by Hachette Book Group Inc., which is itself a subsidiary of French conglomerate Lagardère.

Foer, a newcomer to the “animal rights” debate whose previous books were a pair of novels, explains that factory farming “raises significant philosophical questions and is a $140 billion-plus a year industry that occupies nearly a third of the land on the planet, shapes ocean ecosystems, and may well determine the future of earth’s climate.”

Once again, in the above passage, Foer gets to the heart of the issue. But to be fair, I’ve cherry-picked these passages from Eating Animals to make Foer’s analysis seem more radical—compared to the status quo—than it really is. In promotional interviews, Foer has stated he wanted to reach a wider audience with Eating Animals than previous books on factory farming, which were written by authors with perhaps a more partisan perspective on the topic. Reaching this goal, Foer said, required him to be more of a storyteller, rather than a soapbox orator.

To make the book more accessible to the meat-eating public, Foer ruminates on seemingly innocuous topics—his young son, his dog George and his courageous grandmother who survived the Holocaust by, among other techniques, scavenging for food while trying to outrun the Germans.

The issue of where our food comes from became more important to Foer a couple years ago when his first child was born. As a father, he assumed the responsibility of feeding another human being.

Adopting his dog George led Foer to the realization that dogs are “remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experimental capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling.”

And throughout the book, Foer wonders whether or not he’ll continue to enjoy eating meals with his grandmother and the rest of his family if, as an on-again off-again vegetarian, he refuses to eat her signature dish—chicken with carrots.

But along with the “storytelling,” Foer spends a large part of the book offering just the facts—descriptions in gruesome detail of how humans torture chickens, turkeys, pigs, cows and fish inside the factory farm system. During his research, Foer dedicated a great deal of time speaking with the owners and employees of one particular family-owned slaughterhouse in Missouri. The owner of the slaughterhouse told Foer a story about when he was preparing to kill a cow that had been a “pet on a hobby farm,” the cow started licking his face “over and over. Maybe it was used to being a companion. Maybe it was pleading.” The licking apparently struck a chord with the slaughterhouse owner, but not enough to save the cow’s life. The slaughterhouse owner still killed the cow and had the cow skinned and cut into pieces.

Considering how some of his readers may not care about the suffering of nonhuman animals, Foer also describes how the systemic torture of these nonhuman animals in factory farms affects humans. For example, scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all chickens become infected with E. coli and between 39% and 75% of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Also factory farms are contributing to the growth of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens because these farms consume so many antimicrobials.

“The same conditions that lead 76 million Americans to become ill from their food annually and that promote antimicrobial resistance also contribute to the risk of a pandemic,” Foer writes. “The global implications of the growth of the factory farm, especially given the problems of food-borne illness, antimicrobial resistance, and potential pandemics, are genuinely terrifying.”

Despite his strong reporting of conditions inside slaughterhouses and factory farms, Foer comes across as not fully comprehending the magnitude of the atrocities about which he is writing.

More than halfway through the book, Foer writes: “Whether we’re talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that’s not the question. Is it more important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That’s the question.”

Questioning whether such suffering is “the most important thing in the world” and then answering “obviously not” clearly indicates Foer has fashioned his book for the uninitiated. He seems not to want his uninitiated readers to view him as equating the ongoing systemic torture of billions of nonhuman animals with … something else. Since he never explains what he thinks might be more important, let’s speculate. Does he believe stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons is more important than shutting down factory farms? Does he believe preventing a future underwear bomber from boarding an airplane is more important than shutting down factory farms?

Yes, obviously, humans are committing other terrible atrocities on par or almost on par with factory farms. But I certainly wouldn’t consider putting the ambitions of Iran or future underwear bombers on that list. They’re minor blips compared to what’s happening on factory farms. I would love to learn what Foer believes is more important and why he so easily dismisses the suffering of billions of nonhuman animals and says their suffering doesn’t qualify as the “the most important thing in the world.”

One could easily argue that the suffering of billions of nonhuman animals at the hands of humans is “the most important thing in the world.” In fact, Foer himself comes close to making such an admission, contradicting his earlier statement, when he writes near the end of the book: “Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else? … If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is?”

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Mark Hand is the editor of Press Action, an online publication of news analysis and commentary.

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