It’s a dog eat dog world out there among the born-again, food-loving, animal-caring literati. Barbara Kingsolver, Alisa Smith, JB MacKinnon and Michael Pollan have recently woken up, in print anyway, to the deplorable state of American agriculture. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals is the latest jeremiad to hit the book stands, and it is a depressing book in almost every way.
Safran Foer was converted to vegetarianism after the arrival of his dog and the birth of his son. He had been an on-off vegetarian for a number of years, but these twin events caused him to think more deeply about the food he ate, and investigate where it came from. One is tempted to ask why it took him so long when the evidence has been there for decades. Safran Foer tells us nothing that hasn’t been written about, filmed and documented dozens of times before, but that doesn’t prevent him from oozing the self-congratulation of the
newly converted.
However, the case that he builds against factory farming is unanswerable. Factory farming is utterly disgusting in all its parts. There is no justification for it in any country, let alone one the size of, and with the wealth and the obesity problems of, America. Once he gets past the opening autobiographical sections, written in a gratingly winsome style, and anger begins to suffuse and pare down his prose, he argues with formidable force. Successively describing the treatment and suffering of chickens, pigs, salmon and cattle, he paints
a devastating portrait of the systematic cruelty and sinister secrecy of
US agro-industry.
At the same time, he is at pains to give another side to the agricultural story, providing pen portraits of more ethical producers and farmers. And this is where the confusion begins. Is Eating Animals a personal journey, a rant or an even-handed debate? Safran Foer never seems to make up his mind. Worse, a startling naivety and smugness run through the book, undercutting the thrust of the argument. There are sections when his ruminations read like the grumbling of a philosophy student.
At times he posits a distance between best-practice, traditional farming and factory farming, while at others they become synonymous. And although he is scrupulous in acknowledging that vegetarianism may not be everybody’s cup of tea, he nevertheless subverts this apparent reasonableness by reminding the reader on every possible occasion that he is one and, by implication, so should we be.
More disturbingly, he only considers a world where people are in a position to make choices about what they eat. Eating Animals is written by a well-educated, well-fed person for well-educated, well-fed readers. Nor does he contextualize his argument. It never ranges beyond the confines of the US. He doesn’t seriously examine why people might want to, or have to eat meat, or what meat means to individuals or societies. He proposes no solutions other than mass conversion to vegetarianism, although it doesn’t seem to occur to him that the damage done by factory farming doesn’t begin and end with animals but embraces all foods.
Most damagingly of all, he says “It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to figure out what’s cruel and what’s kind, what’s environmentally destructive, and what’s sustainable.” But it is precisely because we have abrogated our responsibilities that the excesses of factory farming have flourished.
The contemporary model of market-driven capitalism has created monsters that governments can no longer control — food companies which can thumb their noses at standards and regulations. We have been bribed by the false promise of cheap food, we have acquiesced in the name of convenience. As individuals acting collectively, in theory we do have the power to end industrial agriculture, but in all likelihood we will remain slaves to this pernicious system because it suits us.
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