Jonathan Safran Foer

Like many young Americans, Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. As he became a husband, and then a father, the moral dimensions of eating became increasingly important to him. Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill. Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer "at the table with our greatest philosophers."

Eating Animals

Bekki

Her history with meat was remarkably similar to mine: there were things she believed while lying in bed at night and there were choices made at the breakfast table the next morning.

Like me, she had intuitions that were very strong, but apparently not strong enough.

And nothing inspires as much shame as being a parent. 

Children confront us with our paradoxes and hypocrisies, and we are exposed. 

You need to find an answer for every why - why do we do this? Why don't we do that? - and often there isn't a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn't true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush.

The shame of parenthood which is a good shame, is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. 

My son not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but shamed me into reconsideration.

Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident - except not really by accident, since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods. 

We tend not to think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? 

So with traveled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 pounds of other sea animals were killed and tossed back into the ocean for every one pound of this shrimp.

As we walked to the pasture, Baur explained that farm sanctuary was less his dream or a big idea than it was the product of a fortuitous event.

"I was driving around the Lancaster stockyard, and saw, around back, a pile of downers. 

I approached and one of the sheep moved it's head. I realised she was still alive, left there to suffer. So I put her in the back of my van. I'd never done anything like that before, but I couldn't leave her like that. I took her to the vet, expecting she'd be euthanized. But after a bit of prodding, she just stood right up. 

We took her to our house in Wilmington and then when we got our farm we took her there. 

Most simply put, someone who regularly eats factory farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from it's meaning.

Fish built complex nests, form monogamous relationships, hunt cooperatively with other species and use tools. 

They recognise each other as individuals and keep track of who is to be trusted and who is not.

They have significant long term memories are skilled in passing knowledge to one another through social networks and can also pass on information generationally. 

They even have what the scientific literature calls "long standing cultural traditions" for particular pathways to feeding, schooling, resting or mating sites.

To say that Berlin loved Knut would be a tragic understatement.

Another zoo animal, the Panda Yan Yan, was actually killed by Knuts popularity. Zookeepers speculate that the 30.000 people crowding the zoo to see out overwhelmed YanYan.

If you go to see Knut and get hungry, just a few feet from his enclosure is a stand selling Knut-Wurst made from the flesh of factory farmed pigs, which are at least as intelligent and deserving of our regard as Knut. 

So I entered another farm. And another. And another. Maybe on some deep level, I kept doing this because I didn't want to believe that the things I'd seen where representative.

Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? 

Why doesn't a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?

Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

Some have tried to resolve this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavour of eating animals. This is very silly.

Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.

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