Still Eating

Jonathan Safran Foer wrote a book about why we eat animals, and I read it while eating a tortellini with ham and cream sauce. That should tell you something about how these things go.

The book starts with his grandmother and her chicken soup, which is smart because you can’t quite hate industrial farming when you’re thinking about someone’s hands in a kitchen. Foer breaks into turkey factories, talks to farmers who name their cows, writes about mutated chickens drowning in their own waste and pigs beaten with metal rods before the grinder. The moral case is there. The data is there. The evidence that eating meat is choosing to participate in large-scale cruelty is undeniable.

And it’s undeniable that none of this stopped anyone from eating meat. It didn’t stop me. I read through the argument—all of it, the whole coherent moral case—and then went to dinner and ordered chicken. Not out of defiance or carefully considered philosophy. Just indifference. The same indifference I feel toward most things that don’t directly affect me day to day. The book couldn’t overcome the simple fact that I wanted to eat meat more than I wanted to feel good about not eating it.

But something stuck anyway. Not a conversion—I’m not vegetarian and I won’t be. But a small awareness that there’s a difference between doing things mindlessly and doing them despite knowing better. I eat less meat now, or I think about it more, which probably means something. It’s not much. But it’s something, and Eating Animals gets credit for that small persistent nag that maybe I don’t have to be completely thoughtless about it.

The book’s real strength isn’t the argument, which anyone paying attention already knows. It’s the detail and specificity, the refusal to let you abstract cruelty into statistics. You can ignore numbers. You can’t quite ignore the grandmother, the specific image, what it actually costs. Whether you do anything about that is another question, and Foer’s smart enough not to pretend he has the answer.