Eating Animals

by Jonathan Safran Foer

H1, H2, and H3 — the three types of hemagglutinin that commonly attack humans — are specialists in binding to our respiratory systems, which is why the flu so often begins in the human respiratory tract.

The muscles and fat tissues of the newly engineered broiler birds grow significantly faster than their bones, leading to deformities and disease.

Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird’s carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the same water known as “fecal soup”).

According to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), poultry is by far the largest cause. According to a study published in Consumer Reports, 83 percent of all chicken meat (including organic and antibiotic-free brands) is infected with either campylobacter or salmonella at the time of purchase.

Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.

These excessively stressed animals have the industry worried, not because of their welfare, but because, as mentioned earlier, “stress” seems to negatively affect taste: the stressed animals produce more acid, which actually works to break down the animals’ muscle in much the same way acid in our stomachs breaks down meat.

Alas, problems with PSE pork continued to increase, and pigs remained so “stressed” that even driving a tractor too close to their confinement facility caused animals to drop dead.

Nothing — not a conversation, not a handshake or even a hug — establishes friendship so forcefully as eating together. Maybe it’s cultural. Maybe it’s an echo from the communal feasts of our ancestors.

The principle behind such rules is simple: pigs need the companionship of other pigs that they know to function normally. Just as most parents would want to avoid pulling their child out of school in the middle of the year and placing her in an unfamiliar one, so does good pig husbandry dictate that farmers do what is possible to keep pigs in stable social groups.

For corporations like Smithfield, it is a cost-benefit analysis: paying fines for polluting is cheaper than giving up the entire factory farm system, which is what it would take to finally end the devastation.

Table fellowship has forged social bonds as far back as the archaeological record allows us to look. Food, family, and memory are primordially linked. We are not merely animals that eat, but eating animals.

To write down one detail of an event is to not write down another (unless you keep writing forever). To remember one thing is to let another slip from remembrance (unless you keep recalling forever).

Still, to say that something is less offensive than a pig or chicken factory farm is to say as little as is possible.

Being vegetarian is a flexible framework, and I’ve left a mental state of constant personal decision making about eating animals (who could stay in such a place indefinitely?) for a steady commitment not to.

For me to conclude firmly that I will not eat animals does not mean I oppose, or even have mixed feelings about, eating animals in general. To oppose beating a child to “teach a lesson” is not to oppose strong parental discipline.

the meat industry portrays vegetarians as terrorists.

Because we’re taking their lives for food, I think they’re entitled to experience the basic pleasures of life — things like lying in the sun, mating, and rearing their young.

And I think that’s essentially what all of us hope for: a good life and an easy death.

Nature is so economical. Even if an animal isn’t hunted, it is consumed soon after its death.

Sure, a small (or even large) group may want to go veg, but people in general want meat, always have, always will, and that’s that. Vegetarians are at best kindly but unrealistic.

The meat industry understands that the more people know about what happens on the kill floor, the less meat they’re likely to eat.” Well said.

We don’t need the option of buying children’s toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabeled side effects. And we don’t need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.