I have just finished the recently published book by Jonathan Safran Foer Eating Animals. Foer is the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated, which has won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. This is his first work of nonfiction.
Contrary to what you might expect from the title, Foer is not a vegan activist or a PETA member. Quite the opposite. He admits he used to love meat, he would become vegetarian many times just to start eating meat again some time later. But then he became a father. Facing the choice whether his son should or should not be given meat led him to conduct a three years research, which resulted in writing Eating Animals.
As he puts it: 'This story didn't begin as a book. I simply wanted to know - for myself and my family - what meat is. Where does it come from? How is it produced? What are the economic, social and environmental effects? Are there animals that it is straightforwardly right to eat? Are there situations in which not eating animals is wrong? If this began as a personal quest, it didn't stay that way for a long. Through my efforts as a parent, I came face-to-face with realities that as a citizen I coudn't ignore, and as a writer I couldn't keep to myself.'
The main topic of the book is factory farming, which has completely dominated the meat industry in the last few decades. The problem is that most people have no idea what factory farming actually means. When we hear the word 'farming', most of us still have the image of a local farmer who owns a small number of pigs, chickens or cattle, takes care of them, knows each of them, tries to make their lives happy and their deaths as easy as possible. We tend to think that factory farming means more or less the same thing, just on a bigger scale. Unfortunately nowadays such farms exist only in the commercials paid for by the factory farming industry. This is because that's exactly the image they want us to have when buying meat. Eating animals tells the terrible truth about how the life and death or animals in factory farms look like.
Did you know that literally all the chickens and turkeys you buy have nothing to do with the numerous poultry species that still existed 50 years ago? The ones used in factory farming today have been genetically designed in such a way that they grow extremely fast within a very short period of time. They are usually killed when they are a bit more than 1 month old. Even if they weren't, they wouldn't survive much longer - their bones are deformed, their immune systems too weak. Even to reach the 39-42 days before they are killed, they need to be fed a lot of antibiotics and other drugs (that are later eaten by the consumers - this is why treatments with many antibiotics are less and less efficient, we are becoming immune to them).
As for the conditions in which the animals live, I will just quote a short paragraph here from the description of Foer's secret visit to a chicken farm: 'Because there are so many animals, it takes me several minutes before I take in just how many dead ones there are. Some are blood matted, some are covered in sores. Some seem to have been pecked at; others are desiccated and loosely gathered as small piles of dead leaves. Some are deformed. The dead are exceptions, but there are few places to look without seeing at least one.'
If you think this kind of life is miserable, you might find it extremely difficult to learn how the death at factory farms look like. Here's a passage from the chapter about slaghterhouses for cattle:
'At a typical slaughter facility, cattle are led through a chute into a knocking box - usually a large cylindrial hold through which the head pokes. The stun operator, or 'knocker', presses a large pneumatic gun between the cow's eyes. A steel bolt shoots into the cows skull and then retracts back into the gun, usually rendering the animal unconscious or rendering death. Sometimes the bolt only dazes the animal, which either remains conscious or later wakes up as it is being 'processed' (...). The effectiveness of the knocking is also reduced because some plant managers believe that animals can become 'too dead' and therefore, because their hearts are not pumping, bleed out too slowly or insufficiently (...). As a result, some plants deliberately choose less-effective knocking methods. The side effect is that a higher percentage of animals require multiple knocks, remaining conscious, ot wake up in processing.
No jokes here, and no turning away. Let's say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned, and dismembered while conscious. It happens all the time, and the industry and the government know it. Several plants cited for bleeding or skinning or dismembering live animals have defended their actions as common in the industry and asked, perhaps rightly, why they are being singled out.'
But Eating Animals is not only about the unimaginable suffering at factory farms. It also investigates the effects factory farming has on our environment. It describes in great detail a problem that most of us would prefer not to think about, namely what happens with all the waste produced by factory farms. Did you know there's basically no waste-treatment facilities for most factory farms? All the shit (let's not be afraid to use this word), together with pieces of dead animals, urine, blood.. directly pollutes the fields and waters, killing hundreds of fish species and causing serious health problems for the people living in the area. As for the very urgent problem of climate change, according to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector - cars, trucks, planes, trains and ships - combined.
Foer also writes about the few family-run farms left in the United States. They are struggling to survive, while trying to provide the best possible life for the animals they raise (as for the death, it is more complicated - they have no choice but to use the big slaughterhouses, where they have very little influence on how their animals are killed). This is an alternative to those who cannot imagine living without meat. Unfortunately as long as people want to buy cheap factory meat, these small family farms will remain an extremely insignificant margin of the whole meat production industry.
Reading Foer's book is not easy. But in my opinion it is necessary if we want to make conscious choices that affect not only our lives, but the lives of billions of animals every year. And once you have read the book and thought about all the things you have learnt from it, it is up to you to decide if it's going to change anything in your life. Just please bear in mind that we are responsible not only for our actions, but also for what we choose not to do.
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