Earth Equity News

Flesh of Your Flesh: Should You Eat Meat? Book Review by Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker, November 9, 2009 issue. "How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. This inconsistency is the subject of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals (Little, Brown; $25.99)... The task it sets itself is less to make sense of our behavior than to show how, when our stomachs are involved, it is often senseless. 'Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list,' Foer writes... Foer's villains include Smithfield, Tyson Foods, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and rather more surprisingly Michael Pollan. There is perhaps no more influential critic of the factory farm than Pollan, and Foer acknowledges that he 'has written as thoughtfully about food as anyone.' But when Pollan looks at animals he doesn't feel worried or guilty or embarrassed. He feels, well, hungry. 'I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater,' Pollan observes toward the end of his book 'The Omnivore's Dilemma,' shortly after describing the thrill of shooting a pig...

"For much of Eating Animals, it appears that Foer is arguing for vegetarianism as the only moral course... But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society imposes on the planet's fifteen or so million non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on -- death and destruction are embedded in them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on other organisms without being sickened. Eating Animals closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer's point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer's credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us."