A Gourmand's Life

.Dis•in•gen•u•ous (dsn-jny-s)


: lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity

At the beginning of his new book, “Eating Animals’, author Jonathan Safran Foer writes, “a straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it’s not what I have written here.” For the next 350+ pages, Foer proceeds to write exactly that, and it is why his book is such a disjointed, rambling failure. Like many animal activists who purport to take on agribusiness and factory farming, his agenda is transparent. The solution to the problem of factory farming is to abstain from meat because it is wrong to eat animals. The fact that the issue and the solution have nothing to do with one another is why Foer consistently fails to make a cogent argument - he bounces from one to the other like bugs on a hot skillet

Foer certainly does a good job of recounting the many ways in which agribusiness has increased efficiencies and yields at the expense of the environment, their workers and the animals. Even if the abuses he details have been recorded previously, they deserve to be kept in the forefront. If there is anything that modern capitalism has proven, it is that once corporations figure out how to reduce costs and increase profits they are very efficient at doing so, no matter what or who gets in their way.

But what came first, the chicken or the egg? Did agribusiness respond to a demand for cheaper and cheaper protein or did they create it? Foer touches on the subject of the low cost of meat without addressing this question, but it is at the heart of the solution. Certainly the only way to even hope to reverse the environmental harm caused by agribusiness is to reduce the demand for, and consumption of, meat to a level where producing it is sustainable.

But even if that proves effective, on whose backs do we carry this reform? In one of the few rebuttals Foer allows in the book, a farmer working for agribusiness writes, “as long as food continues to get cheaper and cheaper in relation to everything else, the farmer has no choice but to produce food at a lower production cost. And when you hear people talking about small farming as a model, I call that the Marie Antoinette model... if they can't afford bread, let them eat cake.”

It is very easy for Foer to preach from his Park Slope ivory tower about meat consumption. It is another thing entirely for poor people trying to feed their family a nutritious meal, for immigrants trying to maintain a connection to their culture, for the small guy with a food stall in Flushing working 18 hours a day to make a bare living. Should they all be expected to pay a lot more for meat in order to reduce animal suffering, or even to preserve the environment, if it affects their health or puts them out of business? This is a fair question – I’m not taking a stand here – but almost everyone who has, vegetarians and omnivores alike, have minimized - if not trivialized - the impact of their answers.

And what about people who like to cook and eat? Foer, like almost all vegetarians, displays almost no appreciation of food. He asks if animal suffering is worth sushi or chicken nuggets, as if putting these two foods in the same sentence makes them equal targets. If there are indeed “culinary arts” should they not be taken into consideration as well? And what of thousands of years of culture as expressed through food? Foer apparently thinks that the Vietnamese and Japanese should give up fish because it would appease his conscience, even if it destroys their culture and diet.

As I mentioned earlier, Foer, despite his disclaimers to the contrary, argues the case for vegetarianism throughout the book, and it is here that he goes off the rails. He persists in making the case for animal intelligence when instinct would easily explain away his examples. He writes, “a cheetah is not intelligent because it can run fast...but its uncanny ability to map space...is a kind of mental work that matters.” Of course, the cheetah does not “learn’ how to “map space” in any discernable way – it is born with this knowledge (as well as incredible eyesight) just as a newborn infant knows how to suckle.

But even worse is the author’s staggering lack of knowledge of evolutionary biology and natural selection. In response to established science - as put forth recently by Michael Pollan and by many others before him – that the domestication of animals involved evolutionary decisions on their part, Foer writes, "species don't make choices, individuals do...most animals, individually are unable to fathom such an arrangement. Chickens can do many things, but they can't make sophisticated deals with humans.”

Not only is Foer this obtuse, but he can be misleading as well. He writes “its often said that nature is cruel...nature is no picnic, true. And it’s all also true that animals on the very best farms often have better lives then they would in the wild. But nature isn’t cruel...neither are the animals in nature that kill and torture one another. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it.” How would Foer defend his position if we replaced the word “cruel” with the words harsh, brutal or vicious? Would he argue that nature is none of those things? As our farmer puts it, “what do you think happens in nature? You think animals die of natural causes? You think they're stunned before they're killed? Animals in nature starve to death or are ripped apart by other animals. That's how they die.”

Yet nowhere in the book does Foer take the time to detail just what it might feel like for an animal to slowly starve to death, or to be eaten alive by another animal, despite the fact that he devotes pages to speculating about how they might feel on the way to the abattoir. Likewise, he neglects to mention the fact that animals raised for food only exist to be eaten, and would be simultaneously wiped off the face of the earth should vegetarianism ever become the rule of law.

Factory farms have created serious problems. They need to be scaled back and phased out. We will all have to make certain sacrifices for that to happen. But like most proselytizing vegetarians, Foer would prefer to throw the baby out with the bath water. Human beings are omnivores; we will not stop eating meat because it is a natural part of what makes us human. By focusing the argument on ethics and morals Foer and his cohorts are distracting all of us from the real work to be done.