Eating Animals

by Jonathan Safran Foer

Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.

And so she never cared if I colored outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes.

It was my grandmother who taught me that one tea bag makes as many cups of tea as you’re serving, and that every part of the apple is edible.

In the forests of Europe, she ate to stay alive until the next opportunity to eat to stay alive.

When I went to college, I started eating meat more earnestly. Not “believing in it” — whatever that would mean — but willfully pushing the questions out of my mind. I didn’t feel like having an “identity” right then.

I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

there were things she believed while lying in bed at night, and there were choices made at the breakfast table the next morning. There was a gnawing (if only occasional and short-lived) dread that she was participating in something deeply wrong, and there was the acceptance of both the confounding complexity of the issue and the forgivable fallibility of being human.

Why should eating be different from any of the other ethical realms of our lives? We were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.

Within my family’s Jewish tradition, I came to learn that food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable — the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.

And eating animals is one of those topics, like abortion, where it is impossible to definitively know some of the most important details (When is a fetus a person, as opposed to a potential person? What is animal experience really like?) and that cuts right to one’s deepest discomforts, often provoking defensiveness or aggression.

My grandmother’s first words upon seeing my son for the first time were “My revenge.” Of the infinite number of things she could have said, that was what she chose, or was chosen for her.

We didn’t have every kind of vegetable, but we had enough. The things that you have here and take for granted . . . But we were happy. We didn’t know any better. And we took what we had for granted, too.

“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

I didn’t understand — I disliked — people who got excited about dogs. It’s possible that I even developed a subtle prejudice against the blind.

digs up the freshly planted, scratches the newly bought, licks the about-to-be-served,

The protective emphasis is not a law of nature; it comes from the stories we tell about nature.

But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.

The lives of billions of animals a year and the health of the largest ecosystems on our planet hang on the thinly reasoned answers we give to these questions.

There is something about eating animals that tends to polarize: never eat them or never sincerely question eating them; become an activist or disdain activists.

My grandmother said she wouldn’t eat pork to save her life, and though the context of her story is as extreme as it gets, many people seem to fall back on this all-or-nothing framework when discussing their everyday food choices. It’s a way of thinking that we would never apply to other ethical realms. (Imagine always or never lying.)

Shame is both intimate — felt in the depths of our inner lives — and, at the same time, social — something we feel strictly before others.

If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our “animal nature.”

Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.

I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity — a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history — but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

Even by the dictionary definition, humans both are and are not animals.

Common Farming Exemptions make legal any method of raising farmed animals so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry.

Nature is no picnic, true. (Picnics are rarely picnics.)

The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them.

to insist that God cares only about his ritual law and not about his moral law is to desecrate His Name.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find any other issue on which so many people see eye to eye.

Even those who continue to deny that the environment is in peril would agree that it would be bad if it were.

if I weren’t a father, son, or grandson — if, like no one who has ever lived, I ate alone.

I never heard back from Tyson or any of the companies I wrote to. (It sends one kind of message to say no. It sends another not to say anything at all.)

others are as desiccated and loosely gathered as small piles of dead leaves.

factory farming is a middle-of-the-road issue — something most reasonable people would agree on if they had access to the truth.

I decided then and there never to become someone who told jokes when explanations were impossible.

I suppose I wanted a way out of having to change my life.

an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death.

These factory farmers calculate how close to death they can keep the animals without killing them. That’s the business model. How quickly can they be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying.

The image of your motherly protection and care will be used in the second verse of Genesis to describe the hovering of God’s first breath over the first water.

It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

No one fired a pistol to mark the start of the race to the bottom. The earth just tilted and everyone slid into the hole.

Whereas AIDS took roughly twenty-four years to kill 24 million people, the Spanish flu killed as many in twenty- four weeks.

after all, the poultry processors are, as so many factory farmers like to say, simply doing their best to “feed the world.” (Or in this case ensure its hydration.)

We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory — disavowed.

And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers.

In the National School Lunch Program, for example, more than half a billion of our tax dollars are given to the dairy, beef, egg, and poultry industries to provide animal products to children despite the fact that nutritional data would suggest we should reduce these foods in our diets.

For nearly all farmed animals, regardless of the conditions they are given to live in — “free-range,” “free-roaming,” “organic” — their design destines them for pain.

I want to say, “Wow, that’s wonderful!” and have another piece. I want to “break bread” with him. Nothing — not a conversation, not a handshake or even a hug — establishes friendship so forcefully as eating together.

As with all factory farms, the illusion of Smithfield’s profitability and “efficiency” is maintained by the immense sweep of its plunder.