Eating Animals

It’s not often that I struggle for words, wrestle with them, search for them. Generally speaking, I have no issues with taking my thoughts and turning them into sentences, but what about when your thoughts are tangled? I recently read the non-fiction work Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer and it left my mind in knots, numb, hurting, sad and hopeful. You see, the book is about just what it says it is, Eating Animals.

I made a personal decision 10 years ago to stop eating meat; I became a vegetarian.  At first, when people would ask me why, I would give impassioned speeches on animal rights which would be received with an eye roll or a dismissive “good for you!” I felt like I was getting nowhere on changing the world and at 14 that’s a tough blow. Over time my answers turned into, “it hurts my stomach,” or, “I don’t like how it tastes.” I would leave out the rest, “it hurts my stomach because I know how these animals were treated and it makes me physically sick,” or “I don’t like how it tastes because when I eat it all I can think about is that it’s the flesh of something that was once living and was treated terribly, I can’t eat it knowing the conditions in which it died.” People don’t like hearing that and I would save them, and myself from having to hear or say it, from the uncomfortable moments that followed. I was reminded when reading this about the power in advocacy. I can, and did make my personal choice but it’s not enough unless I share it with others.

Eating Animals began when Safran Foer and his wife were expecting their first child. He wanted to know what kinds of food were best for his son. The book isn’t long, about 265 pages of large font but it explores the world of factory farming thoroughly enough that a person can make an informed decision by the end on what they are comfortable eating.

The question is posed, “How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?” He invites you to take the morals with which you live everyday and apply them to the food you eat. Is it nourishing to your body? Not remotely. Meat is now stuffed with broth to give it any kind of flavor, it’s filled with antibiotics, which causes antibiotic resistance in humans, and it promotes obesity, causes global warming, and makes people sick.  Perhaps more importantly to some, is it nourishing to your soul and mind? That’s a question for each to answer on their own and it’s harder for some than others. It’s not wrong to love meat or even to eat it, but it’s not okay to not know what you’re eating and where it comes from, how it was treated in life and death, it’s irresponsible to be ignorant.  Safran Foer says that, “not responding is a response” and perhaps the easiest one to make is to just ignore it, to not care to know.

Don’t worry my meat eating friends, he’s not heavily pushing vegetarianism or veganism right from the start, this isn’t a manifesto, it’s not so much a book against eating meat as it is against factory farming, promoting responsible animal husbandry and being educated on what you are consuming.

I highly recommend reading this book and I wish I could give a copy to everyone I know. It’s the kind you can read in snippets here and there but still has a profound impact. It causes one to examine their beliefs and reassess, which is oh so important to continue to do throughout life.