The Insufferable Truth About Eating Animals

Last week, Jonathan Safran Foer made his second appearance on Ellen Degeneres' show to promote his book Eating Animals. Written with the same vitality of his novels, Eating Animals is the story of Foer's three year long exploration of the meat industry. I'm so glad he is still promoting this book, because I think it could truly change the way we eat.

I saw Jonathan Safran Foer speak about Eating Animals in November. After I left the talk, I wished he would go lecture at every college in the United States. Instead, he did the next best thing: he appeared on The Colbert Report. The Huffington Post praised the interview between Foer and Colbert, celebrating "two of our culture's most luminous diviners of truth on the same screen."

But what makes Foer's book more truthful than other books on food?

Eating Animals was born from Foer's parental concerns on what to feed his young son, and it is this sincere origin that makes the book worth reading. Foer is a gifted storyteller, and he intends this book to be a conversation about eating. For this reason, I enjoyed the first third of the book. Foer's inclusion of his personal life in his writing, as well as his humorous asides, make him a likeable and trustworthy narrator. For the first hundred pages I couldn't put it down.

And then I could put it down, and I didn't want to pick it back up. I had to force feed myself sections of this book because of the brutal realities it contains. As Foer faces debeaked chickens and pigs boiled alive, his jokes grow feeble. Finally he says: "No jokes here, and no turning away. Let's say what we mean: animals are bled, skinned and dismembered while conscious."

Foer's research is exhaustive (70 pages of footnotes!) and he doesn't skimp on the gory details. At times, I felt that I shouldn't have to read it because I don't eat animals, but that doesn't make me exempt from learning the hard facts about American farming. Foer reports that "99.9 percent of chickens raised for meat, 97 percent of laying hens, 99 percent of turkeys, 95 percent of pigs, and 78 percent of cattle are raised in factory farms." Factory farming is virtually inescapable in the American omnivorous diet, and everyone should know where our nation's food comes from.

Foer took nutrition into account as well. Foer writes about antibiotic resistance and food-borne illnesses caused by factory farming. According to a Consumer Report study, "83 percent of all chicken meat (including organic and antibiotic-free brands) is infected with either campylobactor or salmonella." When he appeared on Ellen back in November, he was asked: "What about protein?" He responded, "The American Dietetic Association, which is the gold standard for nutrition in our country, says that vegetarians have a more optimal protein intake than meat eaters. It's a lie. It's been sold to you. And you should resist it."

Eating Animals exposes other lies we've been sold. Foer finds that comforting words like "cage-free," "humane," and "free range" mean little. Foer describes the life of a "free range" chicken: "Imagine a shed containing thirty thousand chickens with a small door at one end that opens to a five-by-five dirt patch, and the door is closed all but occasionally."  And "cage-free" only means "not in cages." Cage-free chickens are still kept indoors, debeaked, and crammed so closely together that they can't move . These labels are nothing but false reassurances for a consumer's guilty conscience.

Although his book turned Natalie Portman vegan, it is worth noting that Foer himself is not vegan (or at least he wasn't in November). He said at his talk that he is trying to make the transition, but he finds it more difficult that giving up meat. I empathize with that, and this answer didn't bother me. But then he said that the book is called "Eating Animals," not "Eating and Drinking Animals." This is a weak excuse, given what Foer's own book reveals about the farming industry as whole.

Even if you aren't a fan of Foer's fiction (one of my professors recently called him "insufferable") read this book, watch Foer's interviews, listen to him on NPR. Insufferable or not, when it comes to revealing the truths of animal suffering in the meat industry, no one does it better than Foer.

Photo Credit: Morgan Levy