A Look At Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer lulls you into Eating Animals with a story about his grandmother:

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. (3)

After the g'ma story, the gloves come off. I wanted to stop reading this book so many times and I was relieved when I came to the end.

Where to start?

With factory farming? Tuna "bycatch?"

The fact that animal agriculture is one of the main reasons for climate change?

Language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are often used to misdirect and camouflage as they are to communicate. (45)

As Foer points out, don't believe the hype about your free-range chicken since the chicken might have had access to a small door but probably never wandered out.

If you didn't' get enough information about Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in Michael Pollan's The Omnivores's Dilemma, there's more information here. I also learned about CFE (Common Farming Exemptions):

Common Farming Exemptions make legal any method of raising farmed animals so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry. In other words, farmers -- corporations is the right word - have the power to define cruelty. If the industry adopts a practice -- hacking off unwanted appendages with no painkillers, for example, but you can let your imagination run with this -- it automatically becomes legal. (51)

I did like Foer's account of sloppy slaughter at a kosher slaughterhouse. The Jewish community did not stand by silently.

I remember seeing Foer on The Ellen Show and he said that if you want to tour a grape factory it's usually not a problem but try to gain entry to a slaughterhouse and you won't get very far. Foer wrote many letters to Tyson Foods. The author appealed to them from his status as a new father but his letters went unanswered.

I can't remember where I read it in the book but Foer says that most of us know that if we see footage from a slaughterhouse it's going to be akin to a horror movie. The author includes incidents of animal torture in the book and he recounts one instance where a worker literally rubbed brine into the wound of animal. And when workers aren't doing sadistic things to animals, they just might urinate on the production line.

Other things that you'll read about in Eating Animals:

Artificially Low Meat Prices

Branding

Broilers vs. Layers

Chickens Injected With Broth

E. Coli

Fecal Mists

Frankenstein Genetics

H1N1

Salmonella

Social Hierarchy of Pigs

Unhappy Meals

Foer covers a lot of ground and, during the course of his research, he talks with many folks in the industry, including a vegetarian farmer, PETA member, factory farmer and turkey rancher.

In the end, Eating Animals makes me not want to eat animals -- at least not ones that are factory farmed.

I started reading Koren Zailckas' memoir Fury but I think that I need to switch gears. I'm in need of something lighthearted. Suggestions???