Book #63: Eating Animals

Title: Eating Animals
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

As far as my personal history with meat goes, I'm an omnivore. Other than a few years as a teenager when I gave up beef (Why beef? I think because Upton Sinclair wrote about beef, if he'd written about chickens, I may have been a burgers-only teenager), I've always been an omnivore. But the thing is, I don't really like meat all that much (except for bacon, and the occasional really good burger). On Thanksgiving, I'd much rather eat the stuffing and the sweet potatoes and the pie than the bird. I hate handling raw meat, and really don't eat that much of it (we'll eat meat for dinner about three nights a week). But I've never been convinced to make the jump from a meat eater to a vegetarian, even though I know it would be better for my carbon footprint, for my heart health, yes, for the animals I'm eating.

I've read quite a few food politics books over the last few years (anything recent by Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, to name a few), and the focus has always been on responsible meat eating. Pollan follows his steer, and we read about Kingsolver harvesting her chickens, and while they advocate for thoughtful, conscious consumption of animals, they don't suggest that their readers give up meat entirely. Foer does. He, like me, and many young adults of my age and educational background, flirted with vegetarianism as a teenager and college student, but always came back to eating meat. When his wife got pregnant with their older child a few years ago, he decided (as thoughtful young parents often do, although I wasn't one of them) to analyze why he ate meat to see if raising his son as an omnivore was the most responsible thing for him to do.

The first two-thirds of the book isn't that different from what's out there already. He talks about his associations with meat-- what family dinners mean to him, how his relationship with his grandma is all tied up in her chicken and carrots dinners. He also writes about going to see animals slaughtered, and about conversations he's had with farmers and ranchers who try to raise and harvest animals in the kindest, most sustainable way possible (if the 99% is the horror of the factory farm, these guys are the 1%). Then Foer changes his tune. Up to this point, he's been a journalist of sorts (in a very artsy, Jonathan Safran Foer kind of way), but in the last portion of the book he writes about how and why he's chosen to be a vegetarian, and spends the final parts of the book spreading the gospel of vegetarianism. He's actually pretty darn convincing. If it were just me, in my own little bubble, I think he could almost persuade me to give up meat. However, would that mean my kids would have to give up chicken nuggets and happy meals? Have you ever tried to order a vegetarian meal at McDonalds or Chick Fil-A? It's pretty tough. Over the last week, as I've contemplated giving up meat, at least during the years when I'm traveling back and forth to Provo so frequently (as a carbon-footprint offset) I've realized how many changes I'd have to make to my convenient little lifestyle in order to do it. Am I just too lazy to be a vegetarian? Foer would condemn me, the one who knows better and still chooses to live irresponsibly, over those who remain in ignorance. Where much is given, much is expected, I guess.