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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Watch your mouth, or at least what you put in it

Reviewed by: Jill Wilson

Posted: 11/14/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Jonathan Safran Foer

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Eating Animals

By Jonathan Safran Foer

Little, Brown and Co., 343 pages, $32

There is one fact that keeps coming up in Jonathan Safran Foer's first foray into non-fiction.

It's somehow more troubling than all the other shocking stuff he reveals about the factory farming industry: more than the literal rivers of crap produced at pig farms; more than the casually brutal treatment of animals; more than freshly slaughtered chickens being plunged into "fecal soup" (11 per cent of which is considered an acceptable amount to be allowed to soak in and plump up the meat).

No, the fact that shows the true short-sightedness and unsustainable nature of the factory farming system is this: today's turkeys cannot breed.

Genetically designed to be too top-heavy, too sick, too fast-growing, they can't reproduce naturally; new chicks must be produced by artificial insemination.

That's the most unholy revelation in this wide-ranging, personal and effective exploration of how meat gets to our mouths -- and whether it should at all -- by the Brooklyn-based author of the 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated.

Foer is not covering new ground here -- the execrable conditions at slaughterhouses (for animals and workers alike), the huge environmental impact of factory farming, the poor (and in many cases, dangerous) quality of the food they produce; all of this has been well documented by authors including Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Temple Grandin and Peter Singer.

Where Foer differs is in his approach. After he wavered for most of his life between omnivorism and vegetarianism, the birth of his first child inspired him to take a closer look at what he was putting in his son's body.

The result is a book that is one part philosophy, one part journalism, one part personal journey and one part family history.

As anyone familiar with Foer's novels will know, he's deeply invested in the ideas of memory and connection. In Eating Animals, he spends a lot of time talking about the importance of food to family and how it ties us to our pasts, but argues that a wilful "forgetting" of what happens on farms does not compensate for all the happy meal-related memories we have; it's time to start creating new stories, he says.

And like his post-modern novels, Eating Animals isn't structured in a conventional way. In among the accounting of the horrors of today's farm system -- many of which he observed first-hand in covert midnight visits to farms -- Foer includes first-person accounts by factory farmers, animal activists, PETA members and heritage turkey farmers.

A glossary, personal anecdotes and graphic elements -- a rectangle on the page shows the space a layer hen has to live in -- make the book highly readable.

Foer is at pains not to be smug about his personal choices or to hector readers, but he is saying, in no uncertain terms, that a person who eats meat is a lesser human being than he is -- less caring, less enlightened.

He may very well be right, but it's a tone that's occasionally off-putting, one that brings into focus all the polarizing arguments that swirl around vegetarianism.

When the Jewish author talks about the painful -- and to his eyes, unnecessary -- ritual of branding cattle, you can't help but want to ask him if he had his son circumcised. (To be fair, it's a reaction Foer predicts and puts down to shame -- why would a reader feel the need to be defensive unless she felt she were doing something wrong?)

There are some facts that can't be argued with, however: the factory farm is a model that any thinking, feeling person must find repugnant, and the food that comes from it is disease-ridden or pumped full of antimicrobials that are lowering human beings' resistance to disease -- including the pandemic flus that are being cooked up on those very factory farms, such as H1N1.

Eating Animals will not convince everyone to give up meat, but it should certainly give pause to those who won't shake hands without applying antibacterial sanitizer but who happily chow down on juicy salmonella-spiked chicken breasts.

Jill Wilson is a Free Press copy editor.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 14, 2009 H9

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