Jonathan Safran Foer — the Jewish author of “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”— takes his first crack at non-fiction in his new book “Eating Animals” (Little, Brown, $25.99).
Perhaps the most powerful sections of the book — one part memoir, two parts investigative reporting — are the times when Foer invites us into his personal struggle with the ethics of eating meat.
Foer recalls his grandmother telling him of the last days of World War II, when she was constantly on the run, never knowing where her next meal would come from.
Toward the end of the war, she came upon a kind farmer, who “went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
Foer told her, “‘He saved your life.’
‘It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.’
‘If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.’”
After a brief introduction explaining the impetus for the book (the birth of his first child and the inevitable questions about right and wrong he would have to answer), Foer spends the next 100 or so pages detailing the brutal conditions that produce the neatly packaged food we buy at the grocery store.
In particular, he takes aim at factory farming, the method by which an overwhelming majority (99 percent) of meat is produced. This includes 99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, and 78 percent of cattle. Few alternatives exist. If you don’t know what you’re eating, odds are you’re eating factory-farmed meat.
Foer describes one night when he broke into a California factory farm with a veteran animal-rights activist (the only way to enter besides undercover). They tried one locked door after another (who locks a farm door?) until entering an open shed that housed thousands of turkey chicks.
Once inside, it took Foer several minutes to realize that many of the chicks were not sleeping but dead. Or covered with sores or blood, or emaciated or deformed. He watches as the woman he came with kills a trembling chick who cannot open its eyes.
Later, the activist tells Foer, “If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly?
“Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.”
The most pressing question Foer poses — one that reappears throughout the novel — is ‘what matters?’ Foer presses the reader to examine the decisions he/she makes and the often-unconscious implications of those decisions. The purpose of the book is to raise awareness of the impacts of as simple and routine an act as eating.
Foer writes, “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.”
Many of the decisions that we make in our lives are made without a consciousness of their implications, only of their familiarity or ease. Even having read 100 pages about the implications of eating animals, I still can’t bring myself to alter my eating. A lifetime of habit stands between knowledge and action.
But at the end of the book, Foer works to bridge that gap, explaining why it’s not OK to just keep on eating the same way we have all our lives. If we don’t follow what we know is right, then why are we better than the animals we eat? As Foer’s grandmother said, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”
Eating lies at the center of our lives — we socialize around it, garner our energy from it, and frequently, sometimes obsessively, talk about it.
But there is something more, as well. Foer suggests that our choices of food tell deeper truths about our society. We hold the ultimate power over the lives of our livestock. No one is forcing us to conduct slaughter humanely. If we do not at the very least acknowledge animals’ suffering or deaths, despite our desire to eat meat, then what does that say about how we will treat human beings?
How we treat animals is the ultimate test of our ethics.
Of the Noahide Laws (commandments for all humanity), one seems very out of place. Six of the seven deal with the monumental principles underlying the relationships between G-d and man, or man and man (e.g., the prohibitions against murder and blasphemy), whereas the prohibition against removing a limb from a living animal has to do only with man and animal.
The law may seem arcane, but, as Foer relates, undercover activists have documented many cases where still-alive animals were processed; the practice is fairly widespread, though not officially sanctioned.
Indeed, the law has wider ramifications: it teaches us to be cognizant of animals’ suffering and treat all of Creation with the utmost respect. As related above, if we do not treat animals with respect, our remaining ethics are nothing more than a farce. We have to draw the line somewhere.
At the end of the book, Foer recalls sitting down to the first Thanksgiving with his son. He asks whether omitting the traditional turkey would somehow demean the holiday or instead bring it to a new level.
Foer and his family choose the latter. We would all be well served by looking at our own lives and own habits through the same critical lens.
Keith Lewis is a senior at Nicolet High School.
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