What’s his beef?
Of all the unpleasant things you might discover while reading Jonathan Safran Foer's engrossing, if gross, examination of factory farming and the morality of eating meat, the worst is your own indifference to animal suffering. Foer - author of two novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, both of which have much to say about the suffering of our own species - is clearly appalled by the things we do, and pretend we don't do, in the name of dinner. I was horrified to find myself reading with barely a flinch about the "technologies of war" used for industrial fishing, and the methods by which US egg farmers dispose of 250 million useless male birds each year (electrocution, suffocation, maceration in what Foer describes as "a wood chipper full of chicks").
Foer traces his gut reaction back to a vegetarian babysitter he had as a child, who "lacked whatever restraint it is that so often prevents a full telling of this story". The arrival of his own children compelled him to take his beliefs for an even fuller intellectual workout: researching the numbers, reading the philosophy, visiting farms and slaughterhouses, breaking into chicken barns with activists. Though Foer is a vegetarian, and his personal disgust at the sheer nastiness of the meat industry is always bubbling away just beneath the surface, Eating Animals is less a case for giving up meat than it is a long, hard look at the way we farm.
Determined solely by the pressure to increase profit margins, the scale of industrial farming is so vast that it is hard to comprehend, and the suffering it entails is wholly routine. The practices employed are not just cruel, Foer argues; they are unsustainable. They are an environmental disaster - contributing more to global climate change than transportation does, emptying the seas of wildlife by using industrial fishing methods such as trawling - and a philosophical nightmare. Foer follows Jacques Derrida in arguing that "what we forget about animals, we begin to forget about ourselves". By pretending we are completely distinct from all other animals, we "deny important parts of our humanity". Plus, factory farming is just a bit horrid. Anyone for chicken plumped up by a nice long soak in a farming by-product known as "faecal soup"?
Painfully earnest? Unquestionably. But Foer, even as a writer of fiction, is earnest, and he tackles this subject with all the accumulated zeal one would expect of a new convert and a new father. He calls the book "as objective as any work of journalism can be", but emotion does get the better of him - piglets at a family farm are castrated, while those at an industrial unit "have their testicles torn out, again without pain relief". But then the meat-eating debate is an emotive one, and the abstainers aren't necessarily the sentimentalists. Given that meat is delicious, isn't the person who eats it because he or she feels like it more sentimental than the one who "remembers that there are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else"?
Eating Animals is written in a diluted version of the highly stylised, tricksy prose that has brought Foer praise and excoriating criticism in equal measure ("Extremely cloying and incredibly false", ran one damning headline). And there are gimmicky moments here: take the five solid pages filled only with the repeated words "influence/speechlessness/influence/speechlessness/influence . . .". Yet, anchored by facts and figures, these linguistic games are generally less cutesy than they can be in Foer's often whimsical fiction, and they make his arguments against factory farming - the gist of which any British reader interested enough to pick up the book is likely to be familiar with already - feel fresher and more powerful. "BULLSHIT", reads one passage arranged as a series of dictionary entries. "1. The shit of a bull. See ENVIRONMENTALISM. 2. Misleading or false language and statements such as BYCATCH" - the next entry on the list, meaning the huge quantity of fish wasted through modern fishing methods.
Despite such moments of literary playfulness, Foer's tone generally hovers close to outrage - less fun, but hardly unjustified. Even the most dispassionate reader would be hard pushed not to squirm at the sadism of industrial pig breeders "ramming an iron pole a foot deep into mother pigs' rectums and vaginas". Will Eating Animals stop you eating animals? Not all by itself. But you might think twice before you go back to KFC.
Alyssa McDonald is assistant editor of the New Statesman
