Storytelling: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals

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November 20, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 16 4 min read

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I became a vegetarian when I was 14 years old for a variety of reasons, not all of them necessarily admirable or based on ethics. I was concerned for animal welfare but vegetarianism was also an easier way of hiding my brief and painful eating disorder from my parents and friends, a way to assert my 14-year-old self into a particular brand of neo-hippie fashion, and a way to manufacture an identity at a time when I wanted to stand out and be heard. Also, somewhere deep down inside me, beneath the ornament and artifice, I truly felt that eating animals was wrong.

I returned to meat when I was in college, partially because vegetarianism had suddenly gone out of fashion, replaced with higher protein diets that emphasized the importance of meat, and partially as a means of overcoming my obsession with monitoring and controlling the amount of food I ate. I am more important than a chicken or a cow, I told myself and slowly but surely weaned myself back to enjoying the pleasure of food I had once forsaken. Relearning to eat meat, for me, was an exercise in self empowerment- not self empowerment the way that many books and TV shows in America advertise or market it as a product, but empowerment in the truest sense. This was about survival. If Darwin was right and only the fittest are meant to survive on this planet, then I was going to be the fittest. I relished the feeling of eating meat, of enjoying my place in the food chain (high up there). It was a good decision. I grew healthier and stronger, and I vowed to never look back. On Yom Kippur, whem my entire family was fasting, I refused. I didn’t want to fixate and focus on my eating, even in the name of God or self reflection. In my mind, this kind of reflection, of consideration for my body’s wants and needs, was sentimental and weak, a reflection of a struggle between and among myself, my belief system and the world at large, and I had emerged the victor.

coverIn Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer asks us to do just this kind of reflection. Many reviews of Eating Animals focus on the more practical concerns and issues that Foer raises about factory farming-how our farm animals are overcrowded, over medicated and sick and the implications of this for us, the people eating the animals. For Foer, these issues are important in that they reinforce the urgency with which we must recognize the horrors of factory farming, while showing us that there is nothing natural about the process of eating meat today at all.

While Foer’s patient and inventive way of chronicling the way eating factory-farmed meat impacts us is educational, there is nothing necessarily new about this knowledge that you couldn’t find in any number of mainstream books and magazines advocating a vegetarian lifestyle. It is also not his main argument. To Foer, our ideal method for reevaluating the way we view the food we eat is through the lens of compassion. At the start of his book, Foer insists that “A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing but that is not what I have written here.” and he is right. Eating Animals is, in many ways, a book about reflection and that means asking questions, rather than always providing answers.

The question that ultimately propels this book is whether or not in today’s world, eating meat is necessary and natural, and why we, as powerful and compassionate creatures, aware of suffering, continue to allow it. Foer acknowledges that there are many potential answers to this question, not all of which include vegetarianism. He admires the few (too few in fact) family farms, that still exist in the US, and leaves himself open to the possibility that a more humane manner of raising meat is possible. For someone who presents such a thorough and devastating account of the worst of human food production, Foer is an optimist. He believes that individual choices matter and that we have the power to make these choices daily. The decision to eat or not eat factory farmed meat (which is 99% of the meat available in supermarkets in the US today) is a moral one. He says, “It might sound naïve to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.”

It is precisely these kind of sentiments that make Eating Animals polarizing, and, in some ways controversial. The world is full of too many problems, some readers and critics say, and animals are not important enough to be first on the agenda for moral thought and reflection. But Foer is not asserting that we should abandon all other causes in the interest of adopting a lifestyle which includes humane treatment for animals, merely that we extend that kind of thought to them.

It is a reasonable argument, and it’s a wonder that many take personal offense to the suggestion that the way we are eating is wrong. In contrast to theorists like Peter Singer, who make the accusatory arguement that the way we treat animals is a form of “speciesism,” Foer provides, for readers who choose to contemplate these issues, a remarkably gentle assault of information. He agrees that the food we eat, including meat, is more than just sustenance, a concept he explores by explaining the way his Grandmother, a woman who survived Nazi Europe, obsesses about food. “Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love.”

Eating Animals is a sensitive and brave book and as such will always be met by certain criticisms reserved for things which are sensitive and brave. People will argue that the text is interesting, but naive and idealistic, which is true I think, only if you believe that most people are not sensitive and brave. Foer, however, is optimistic, urging the importance of stories themselves, but also, and more importantly, the retelling of stories, the tremendous power and privilege of being human, of reflecting on the past and being willing to change and make ourselves better people in the future.

Not everyone will share this type of introspection. Many of us haven’t spent periods of our life thinking about the food we eat, where it comes from and why we eat it and for those people, the effectiveness on this text will hinge on how effectively Foer is able to demonstrate the importance of thinking about the meat industry at all. For me, Eating Animals was an opportunity to re investigate two of my earliest convictions – the decision to stop eating meat and the decision to start again. Whatever I decide to do next will be entirely the same, and also an entirely different story.

is a writer living in Washington, DC, She received a BA in Philosophy and English Literature from Brandeis University and received her MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Her thesis was a collection of short stories and essays, entitled, Love and Hunger. She currently teaches writing at George Washington University and American University.

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Reviews

There Is No Redemption Here

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April 12, 2016 | 1 book mentioned 1 5 min read

In 1996, guerrilla leaders and Guatemalan government officials met in Guatemala City to sign a peace accord. After 36 years, the longest war in Latin American history came to an end. The Guatemalan Civil War officially began in 1960, but essentially in 1954, after the CIA — acting on the business interests of Boston-owned United Fruit Company — orchestrated a coup of the country’s first democratically-elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. For the next three and a half decades, a series of dictators ruled Guatemala with the support of the United States government.

A U.N. report published after the war’s end suggested that more than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. Government forces were responsible for 91 percent of these deaths; 83 percent of those killed were indigenous Mayans. Actions taken by the military against the Mayan people during José Efraín Ríos Montt’s 16-month regime, from 1981 to 1983, were retroactively declared a genocide. After the report aired, then-President Bill Clinton delivered a formal apology on behalf of previous administrations, but offered no material reparation.

In a 2006 interview, historian Stephen Schlesinger, author of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, said flatly: “the legacy of Guatemala is sheer horror, and something the U.S. cannot be forgiven for.”

The story of Guatemala’s Civil War has been told in nonfiction accounts rendered by academics, in the testimony of survivors and activists like Rigoberta Menchú; and in a few novels. The facts of the war’s atrocities aren’t hidden anymore. Neither is the story of the United States’ sustained support of governments that tortured and murdered their own people. Though individual books have been lauded for their formal achievements, brave testimony, or astute analysis, Guatemala’s story, like so many others, never seems to gain enough traction to generate actual consequences for war criminals, Guatemalan and American alike. It’s a story that slips out of the stream of American public conversation, just as soon as it is acknowledged.

Enter Kelly Kerney’s second novel, Hard Red Spring. In a robust 400 or so pages, the novel spans the 20th century, reimagining critical moments in Guatemala’s history from the perspectives of four American women. Whether in Guatemala by association or by choice, each protagonist arrives in the country with hope for a fresh start. Gradually, moments of doubt pierce holes in self-perpetuated innocence. At last the stories these women tell themselves — about their own good intentions or the charitable cause of the United States or their church — give way to the weight of unassailable truths.  Each character must confront both her entrapment and her culpability.

Hard Red Spring is an ambitious project. Meticulously researched and written over the course of a decade, it not only retells a century of Guatemala’s history, but dramatizes it — a twinned labor specific to historical fiction. Kerney’s real daring, however, lies in her novel’s emotional aim. She has crafted a story and a set of characters that require her readers to look squarely at what Americans — especially white Americans, the demographic most comfortable in the United States’ myth of moral superiority — will do to maintain our innocence, and what we will do, and have done, in the face of guilt.

Kerney brings us, for instance, into a university in the United States where history is defined as anything that occurred at least 20 years in the past. The distinction exists to keep class material from becoming political. This means a professor lecturing on the history of Guatemala cannot yet discuss the Reagan administration’s funding of José Efraín Ríos Montt’s 16-month regime — the bloodiest epoch in Guatemala’s Civil War.

In a campus bar, a group of undergraduate students react to their professor’s denunciation of United States foreign policy. “If she has a problem with how we do things, she should leave,” offers one student, though the comment is met by embarrassed silence from her peers. “Is self-hatred the only way we can be saved?” another boy asks seriously. “Because that’s all I’ve learned in that class. Self-hatred. If I wrote my final paper on everything I hated about myself I’d get an A.” Caught between scripts of conservative rebuff and liberal apology, the students lack adequate tools to grapple with the meaning of their country’s moral crimes, and what action they might take to counteract them.

Meanwhile U.S. missionaries, NGO workers, and doctors stationed in Guatemala doubt whether they’re helping anyone at all. A doctor from the United States explains his predicament to Lenore, a missionary.
‘It’s the babies,’ he said. ‘I came here to help the babies, but now I don’t think I’m helping’…His expert tone shifted, so that he sounded like an ordinary man. ‘Sometimes it seems if I weren’t here, they wouldn’t be either.’
In such moments, Kerney highlights a dearth of language in the United States to address the web of connection and implication — borne out of an imperial and now neoliberal global marketplace — that distorts any of our well-intentioned actions into a reinforcement of systems of power.

Hard Red Spring gathers momentum as it progresses. The novel’s opening section, set in 1902, lacks a distinct atmospheric feeling of that time period, and occasionally stalls during passages of overwritten dialogue. But as the story moves into more recent decades, its prose grows robust with sharply-imagined detail. The weave of the plot tightens, and building suspense makes for a gripping read. Kerney is at her best in her wry observations of her characters, and in the many masterfully concise one-line quotations offset into the mouths of her secondary characters.

It’s important to note that Kerney has written a novel not only about the Guatemalan Civil War, but specifically about women ensnared in the machinery of that war. She shows us the entrapment of indigenous Mayan women in a system meant to strip them of everything: their dignity, their families, their bodies, and their lives. And she defines the cramped boundaries of power inhabited by more privileged Hispanic and white American women.

The novel’s most sinister characters are its most self-assured men. Even so, Kerney maintains a standard of grim humanity in depicting all of her characters. Men who commit murder have flashes of vulnerability or sensitive insight. Deeply traumatized Mayan women beat an unarmed and — relatively — innocent missionary to death. There is no redemption here, only complication, and a thin cry for empathy for those on either end of horrific acts.

Hard Red Spring completes its story in 1999, over 20 years removed from the present day. Meanwhile, the Guatemalan Mayan community continues to fight against multinational corporations, over land use and the extreme forms of violence and intimidation used to evict Mayan people from their homes. In 2013, domestic protest succeeded in forcing the cancellation of the Monsanto Law, a provision of the 2005 CAFTA-DR agreement that would have monopolized Guatemala’s agricultural processes and threatened food sovereignty.

Neighboring countries also affected by the CAFTA-DR agreement — Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic — face similar aggression from private interest groups — foreign and domestic alike. Earlier this month, renowned Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead in her home, after her years-long opposition to the construction of hydroelectric dams on indigenous property. Don’t let the novel’s end in the ’90s deceive you — the injustices, moral confusion, and power dynamics on display in Hard Red Spring carry through into today’s world.

Over the course of the novel’s 100-year span, a Mayan folktale emerges as a symbolic link between narrative threads. In it, a deer and a jaguar decide, separately, to build their own houses. Passing like ships in the night, they accidentally help each other to build the same structure, and on its completion decide to live in the house together. As time passes the two animals grow fearful of one another. One night there is a sharp noise. Startled, the jaguar and the deer flee in opposite directions, and never return.

The first time this folktale appears in Kerney’s novel, nine-year-old Evie Crowder is nonplussed. She’s accustomed to stories, like the tortoise and the hare, that resolve neatly into allegories.
‘That’s all?’ Evie had asked.

‘What else? That is everything,’ Ixna told her.
Hard Red Spring is not a neat or comforting story either — it’s not built for that. It’s built to explore the truth.

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A Martin Amis Hatchet Job? On Lionel Asbo: State of England

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August 22, 2012 | 1 book mentioned 5 6 min read
The Martin Amis Hatchet Job is, at this point, a sort of minor literary genre in its own right. As a rule, the reviewer will mention at least one (but preferably many more) of the following list of topics: misogyny; Islamophobia; dentistry; patrician contempt for the working classes; sonship of Kingsley; mentorship of Bellow; friendship of Hitchens; enmity of Barnes and/or Eagleton; earliness of success; velvetness of trousers.
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| 1 book mentioned 5 6 min read
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The Young Magician, Practicing His Tricks

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June 24, 2013 | 1 book mentioned 1 6 min read

The precocious teenage poet who narrates parts of Roberto Bolaño’s novel, The Savage Detectives, has an encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric poetry terms, and loves to quiz people on the difference between tetrastichs, zéjels, proceleusmatics, and molossi. But early in the book, this young intellectual has an encounter which is more visceral than cerebral. He is sneaking through the decrepit men’s room of a dive bar in Mexico City when a voice calls his name from within an impenetrable cloud of marijuana smoke.

“Poet García Madero,” the stranger says. “Your penis… It’s hanging out.”

Young García Madero has been fooling around with one of the waitresses in a back room and has just narrowly escaped an encounter with her boyfriend, forgetting, in the rush of things, to put the car back in the garage. And it just so happens that two of his friends, for whom he has been searching all over the city, are ensconced in a corner, hidden behind a billowing chimney of Acapulco Gold. There is more than comedy to the scene. Exposed throbbing adolescent desire is Bolaño’s subject. Here, poetry and sex are linked, and rebellion is the finest muse. The two veiled figures are the founders of an iconoclastic poetry movement, archetypal romantic outlaws who break with every convention and are idealized by their followers like mythic heroes, but they are also just a pair of kids turning their angst into art.

They call themselves Visceral Realists. But they have no dogma, style or poetic philosophy. They simply insist on a complete rejection of authority, literary or otherwise, and they spend most of their time stealing books, going to bars, talking about poetry (not writing it), smoking weed, and trying to get laid. We laugh, but their movement is only kind of a joke. Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and all the other great vanguard Art movements of the twentieth century began by trying to shock established tastes, showing an anesthetized art world what was “real” with a visceral blow. And Bolaño’s avatars draw their inspiration straight from this tradition: they are “detectives” in one sense because they search out and interview aging members of the Estridentistas, a movement active in Mexico during the 1920’s, somewhat akin to Italian Futurism. Most of all, they are chasing after an entirely forgotten poet, who left only a single, mystifying poem/drawing behind her before disappearing into the desert of Northern Mexico, where we imagine a treasure-trove of undiscovered poetry waiting to be found and read.

Readers of Spanish will know that there is no shortage of Mexican poetry yet to be translated, a real-life literary trove of authors who are beloved and classic there, though most English readers will never have heard of them. Bolaño himself has enjoyed more success in the English-speaking world than any other Latin American author in half a century. Since his death ten years ago, more than a dozen of his books have appeared in English, including a number of pieces unpublished during his lifetime, culled from a seemingly bottomless hoard of material. This July, a substantial collection of his poetry translated into English by Laura Healy will be released under the title The Unknown University. New Directions, the publisher, has long been a leading purveyor of books translated from Spanish, including lots of poetry. The Unknown University came out in Spanish in 2007, and it corresponds to a manuscript Bolaño typed in 1993, the earliest pieces of which come from a version subtitled, “poems 1978-1981.” Bolaño had already left Mexico when he wrote these poems. They are not from his “Infrarealist” years. But it is his earliest work published in English to date, and fans of The Savage Detectives will hope to find in it some hints of what the real Visceral Realist poetry was like.

The unprecedented success of Bolaño’s masterpiece – which people will still be reading many years after you and I and everyone we know is gone and forgotten – likely derives at least in part from the way it glorifies and mythologizes the author’s own history. Modern readers like to read fiction as autobiography. We are obsessed with the author’s life, and he becomes a product, a kind of brand. We imagine Bolaño himself as an outlaw poet, just as he meant us to do. The Savage Detectives is designed to invoke this response. That’s why it’s written as a series of eyewitness testimonials circling around the two main characters, but never slipping into their actual voices, a trick which ends up making them seem larger than life. The story is partially true. In 1976, Bolaño wrote a “first Infrarealist manifesto,” reminiscent of Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto. He was part of a group of splenetic young poets who crashed literary gatherings in Mexico City and, purportedly, once even threatened to kidnap the great caudillo of Mexican Literature himself, Octavio Paz. He also published interviews with three Estridentistas in Paz’s magazine, Plural. But the effect of The Savage Detectives is to blur the line between history and fiction, to envelop whatever Bolaño and his friends actually did in Mexico in the 1970’s in a self-aggrandizing, romanticized cloud of smoke – a cloud which is beautifully written, and a lot of fun to inhale too. The careful reader sees that this is a brilliant ruse: Belano the fictional prodigy stands in for Bolaño the author, and we imagine all of his poetry, written so many years ago in a notebook lost somewhere in Mexico, must have been really good.

But it turns out that Bolaño’s juvenile writing reads very much like juvenile writing. Though he was in his twenties when he wrote these poems, many still reek of angsty teenager, and I’m not talking about Rimbaud. There’s some real poetry-notebook stuff here. Think lovesick, embittered recollections of ex-girlfriends, like, “There’s a secret sickness called Lisa.” Think excessively literary invocations of obscure precursors, like “Guiraut de Bornelh.” The Savage Detectives is about angsty teenage intellectuals too, but a measure of ironic distance lets us laugh at them and connect with them. Juan García Madero’s exposed genitalia is hilarious, and we sympathize. He reminds us how shameful and awkward desire is for an adolescent virgin. But the same idea leaves us cold when we find it in a line of poetry like, “I am the penis observed.” The Unknown University is too varied a book to qualify as entirely puerile. Its most recent poems were written fifteen years after its earliest, and many of these newer ones remind us of all the reasons why Bolaño is such a fantastic writer, one of the best of our times. But when asked why he thought he was a better poet than a novelist, Bolaño supposedly said, “The poetry makes me blush less.” Some of the poems here may have the opposite effect on readers.

Yet the way this early collection prefigures Bolaño’s mature work is fascinating: twenty years before The Savage Detectives, he was already dramatizing his teenage literary rebellion in Mexico. His poetry is filled with ideas, characters, and even scenes that will reappear in that novel. Now we can say for certain that Bolaño’s mature work did not appear in a flash, but was the result of many years of gestation and labor, of the author mulling over his material and trying out different forms. The series of “Detectives” poems, “Lupe,” “Self-Portrait at Twenty Years,” “The Last Savage,” and “Roberto Bolaño’s Devotion” are obvious antecedents. Some lines, like, “Death is an automobile out driving the avenues of Mexico City,” seem to describe moments from the novel. Take this passage from, “The Donkey”:
On the outer limits

of the dream, and without quite knowing

Its meaning, its ultimate significance,

I still understand its music:

A cheerful farewell song.
The Savage Detectives is a cheerful farewell song, sung to Bolaño’s lost generation, and you would be hard pressed to come up with a better description of it.

“The Unknown University” refers to Bolaño’s years of toiling in literary obscurity, a story his fans will already know. He has always been a self-proclaimed outsider. It’s part of his appeal. There is an unknown universe waiting to be discovered outside of the doldrums of academia and the staid confines of the literary establishment, he tells us. But this is the same cloud of smoke which enfolds the Detectives, whose heroes drop out of college to write “real poetry.” And we must read their story, at least in part, as an ironic commentary: their romantic rebellion only earns them years of hard living and lost friends, during which time they publish nothing. Even their search for the lost poets of the Mexican avant-garde ends in tragedy, with a crime that forces them to flee Mexico for Europe and literary oblivion. But before the book ends, Garcia Madero does manage to read the long-lost notebooks of that poet who vanished into the desolate, desert towns of Sonora, and on the last page we find another of her cryptic poem/drawings. The ending is as powerful as it is enigmatic. The reader is left on his own to interpret the mystery. It is a testament to Bolaño’s fundamental artistic honesty that buried here, in his own long-lost notebook, we find Cesárea Tinajero’s poem/drawing, written twenty years earlier. He was the master of smoke and mirrors, but he couldn’t lie.

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16 comments:

  3. I think you are wrong on that, D. It is a premise most people are vehemently in disagreement with, and the investigative work Foer did, getting into those factories was very dangerous, and nobody, except, perhaps, PETA, bothers to do investigative journalism like that anymore. I believe those things are what makes the writing of this book brave. Although, some of that bravery is muted by the fact that Foer does not take a hard line stand in favour of vegetarianism, but I think that is because he knows that there are too many people in complete blind denial about the suffering of the animals we eat.

  4. I guess I’m having a hard time believing being a vegetarian in park slope in 2009 is in any way comparable to blacks risking their life and limbs to protest segregation in the 50s deep south. In fact, that seems pretty insulting to me.

    Being vegetarian is fine, but it is not brave. You are not risking anything except some snide comments from your friends now and then, but lord knows you’ll be making as many back at them.

  5. Thanks for your comments, D.

    To clarify, I don’t think that Foer’s book is brave because I agree with it or because I think there is something intrinsically brave about being a vegetarian. To me, Foer’s book is brave because it is highlighting an issue that many people don’t care about or else tend to minimize. Foer is not afraid to face that kind of criticism and I find that kind of commitment to his ideals brave,

    Foer’s quote regarding protesting segregation highlights the way in which every generation tends to be a bit myopic. His argument is that what was seen as a radical act then is now perceived as an ultimate act of justice. He contends that refusing to support factory farming is now perceived as radical, but is actually the right and moral thing to do.

  6. It seems to me that Foer’s book is brave precisely because it has to contend with attitudes like D’s.

  7. Arielle,

    Thanks for your response. I have a lot I’d argue with you, but I might as well save it for my own review (one where I will certainly get negative comments on the internet for and perhaps that will make me brave, eh cooper?). But I would like to address this:

    “It might sound naïve to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950s you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.”

    The above, to me, is totally representative of the smug and intellectually shallow thinking Foer displays in the book. What happened was not people sitting in different seats in a restaurant. What happened was masses of oppressed people risked life and limb to break laws they thought were unjust. It would not have sounded fantastic at all to tell someone in the 1950s, “Oh, can you believe that massive civil unrest might change our laws about race?”

    There is no risk of life or limb to buy a Boca burger. There are no laws being broken. There is simply no comparison. One might as well say “It would have sounded crazy in 1930 to say that a few Americans visiting a beach in Europe would end WWII.”

    Foer is not trying to make an intellectual point there (I hope at least), he is only making an emotional one. A dishonest emotional point I would argue, which again seems representative of the book as I read it.

  8. D.,

    I think we are actually agreeing on Foer’s intent. We just disagree on whether it is a good move or not. As I state in my review, I believe that Foer is ultimately making an emotional argument, one which will alienate some readers, and one which I am personally open to, since I feel like I have an emotional stake at investigating these issues.

    This doesn’t mean I agree with everything Foer advocates; it means I considered this book to be an important and thought provoking read. I don’t consider the personal experience to be antithetical to intellectual honesty- in fact, the whole point of Foer’s inclusion of the personal is to demonstrate the way in which our own experience filters our moral choices.

    I chose that specific quote from Eating Animals because I felt it was polarizing and would probably alienate some readers. I think that’s a deliberate choice on Foer’s part- he is trying to ignite some kind of reaction. I still think that Foer’s main point, in making this analogy, is not to equate animal rights with civil rights, but to compare the tendency of people to think that individual choices don’t matter. During the 1950s there were many people who believed that Civil Rights would never happen…in fact, there are people today who say we still have a heck of a lot to accomplish. I don’t think these are equal issues, but I do think it is an apt analogy. Some people today think that food choices won’t ever be enough to overturn factory farming just as some people in the 1950s did not think that civil disobedience would be enough to end segregation. In hindsight, it is easy to say, “Of course- civil rights naturally happened!” At that time, I don’t think the impact was necessarily clear.

    As far as snobbery goes- I simply did not feel that Foer’s argument has class connotations. Yes, certain types of vegetarian food are more expensive, but lots of vegetarian meals are incredibly cheap and just as healthy. The reason people aren’t running out to eat rice and beans in the US and many other places is cultural. Much of the world enjoys a vegetarian diet. Foer’s claims are not unique to young bourgeoisie hipsters living in New York. Philosophers have been debating the ethical implications of eating meat- how we raise animals, how we kill them, etc….for centuries, all over the world. I think bringing up these issues is valid and important.

  9. Much of the world “enjoys” a vegetarian diet because they cannot afford meat. Meat consumption has been rising dramatically across the globe as meat has become cheaper and more available globally. To say it is merely cultural differences does not seem accurate to me. There is a factory farmer who brings up this point in the book. I think if you want a brave confrontation with the issues of factory farming, which are many and serious, you absolutely must confront the class issues. You can say that it is possible to eat rice and beans and be healthy, but food is not merely energy and that is not what people want to eat and that is why the rich hipster vegetarians spend lots of money on expensive vegan products and meat substitutes.

    Foer’s arguments really do result in a world where the rich can enjoy the pleasures of meat and animal product consumption through family-farm products while the poor are denied yet another pleasure.

    I think this is fine if you want to make that argument, I like bold arguments. But I believe you must actually make it, not simply avoid the entire issue of class.

  10. Hi again, D.

    Forgive me, but I actually grew up eating rice and beans. My mother is from Cuba and I always saw rice and beans as comfort food. It is cultural.

    Your argument is actually supporting mine. Vegetarian food is cheaper than meat. The fact that meat is considered superior to vegetarian cuisine is entirely cultural. There are people in the world who would never eat pork or beef or other types of meat because it goes against their religious beliefs- and you know what? These cultures have great cuisines too.

    Culture can change. More people the world over could be fed if we all adopted a vegetarian diet. Additionally, Foer doesn’t agree that anyone should have the right to the “pleasures” of meat, when that pleasure comes at the expense of ethically raised animals.

    If you don’t want to change your diet because you don’t deem this issue important enough to merit attention, that’s fine. but it’s not necessarily a class issue as you make it out to be. It’s a cultural issue and a matter of taste.

  11. D.

    Seems to me like you’re just being belligerent here. Arielle is simply recounting her experiences as a vegetarian, while examining Foer’s take on the issues pertinent to eating (and enjoying) meat. Actually, given your wholesale rejection of a particular lifestyle, you remind me of those holier-than-thou Park-Slope vegetarians you seem to despise. We can critique other people’s personal choices all we want, but at the end of the day, these kinds of personal choices rarely effect us. What we have here is a thoughtful consideration of a particular kind of lifestyle, no more, no less. Your real beef (pun intended) is with Foer, not the reviewer, so I’d suggest you find a way to contact him.

  12. Bravery, like many things, depends on context. I can not understand how being a vegetarian in Park Slope (or advocating vegetarianism from there) can be called brave. I mean, what is he risking? Is he going to receive death threats by some shady cattle owner’s organization?
    The really irritating thing about Safran Foer is his lack of humility, his profound self-righteousness. Two things that are quite common these days and have nothing to do with being brave.

  13. Beatrix

    My opening comment was probably too harsh, so I apologize for that. For whatever it is worth I do not reject the lifestyle of vegetarianism, whatever that would mean. I have plenty of respect for vegetarians. What I don’t have respect for is unfounded self-righteousness, poor logic and dishonest arguments. It annoys me whether it is Jonathan Safran Foer in this book or your average meat-eater who comes into this debate just to brag about how great fried chicken tastes. I’m rejecting the arguments, not the lifestyle.

  14. Pingback: Book Review: Why SuperFreakonomics has the answers for Eating Animals « Dusty Hum
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  16. This D person, I am thinking has some interest in the meat industry.

    His arguments about false logic are themselves inaccurate and nonsensical.

    The comparison to previous social revolutions is a valid on in that there are also millions of lives on the line here and people are breaking laws and dedicating their lives to perform investigations and work undercover for years. Its easy to speak against animals when they do not have a voice. It’s up to humanity to give them one.

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Reviews

The Diviners by Rick Moody: A Review

Reviews
October 4, 2006 | 1 book mentioned 3 3 min read

It didn’t take long to discover that, as an introduction to Rick Moody’s writing, The Diviners is a poor choice, though at least I know that The Ice Storm, considered by many to be his best work and an exceptional novel in its own right, is still out there. I don’t have to give up on Rick Moody even though reading The Diviners was an exasperating, though occasionally exhilarating, experience.To sketch out the plot, we follow a cast of characters that are all connected, some loosely and some directly, to Means of Production, a New York based production company with a reputation for high-brow films, and its new, potentially blockbuster project, a miniseries called “The Diviners.” The miniseries itself is a cipher, the project has been invented out of thin air by production assistant Annabel Duffy and washed up action hero Thaddeus Griffin, but it is fitting and probably intentional that this novel is centered around a figment. At one time or another nearly all of the novel’s characters get excited about “The Diviners,” often viewing it as the solution for one work-related problem or another. The problem is, it is hard for the reader to get excited about the miniseries or, more importantly, the characters who are obsessed with it.There is something tongue in cheek about all this, obviously, a comment on a bloated culture seeing salvation in a bloated TV production – the novel’s main character, Means of Production head Vanessa Meandro, is quite literally bloated, if we missed the point, addicted to Krispy Kreme and mercilessly mean to boot. All of this action, which includes a number of side plots like an attack on a young gallery curator by a random brick wielding maniac and the descent of Vanessa’s mother into alcohol-fueled madness, is set in the days after the disputed Bush v. Gore election, when our boom economy was beginning to crack and the seriousness of terrorism and war awaited around the corner to put a stop to the frivolity.The problem is that Moody, in his excess — 576 pages, to be specific — comes off as one of those pleading killjoys, like a crusading vegetarian who is unpleasant to eat with or a person who doesn’t watch TV and tut-tuts those who do. Perhaps there is something compelling about the notion that our culture is vacuous, but really, hasn’t this statement been made so many times, and so much more subtly, before?Nonetheless, there is an unmistakable virtuosity in Moody’s writerly abilities. In every chapter he visits us upon another of his characters – some we visit two or three times or more – with set pieces that are inexhaustible in their creativity. One takes the form of a diary entry, another a police report, and another is the internal monologue of an autistic child.Perhaps most grandiose of all is when he alights again on nearly all of the book’s characters as they watch “Werewolves of Fairfield County,” a hit show in this alternative universe. He gives us nearly a blow by blow of this particular episode as we find that almost all of his characters can be joined only as they gaze at the television alone, together. And if that seems like a somewhat trite message, it felt that way too. For such complex, writerly book, the underlying message felt like it too should be complicated, not just one-note angst about our supposedly vapid culture.As the book ends most of the characters are all still chasing “The Diviners” and what it represents, deliverance from their empty lives. All through out the book, the diviner, that ancient holy finder of water, is returned to as a motif, and so it seems fitting that as the book nears its close, several of Moody’s creations are wandering in the desert, finding nothing.

Reviews
| 1 book mentioned 3 3 min read
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Reviews

Janet Fitch In Black & White

Reviews
February 16, 2007 | 1 book mentioned 8 6 min read

“Don’t read this book if you are depressed. Yikes.”–Amazon.com reader review of Paint It BlackJanet Fitch has a new book out, Paint It Black, and so that this dark etching might be properly framed, and hopefully some light then cast in its direction, some background information will prove useful. Fitch’s first book, White Oleander, was selected for Oprah’s Book Club shortly after it was published in 1999 (a movie followed in 2002.) This after Fitch had labored in relative obscurity for years in her home town, Los Angeles.Oprah Winfrey, TV’s well-read matriarch-cum-regent, has anointed more than a few deserving authors over the years.Jonathan Franzen is a member of some standing, though he has openly discussed the stigma of being a Book Club boy or girl. Oprah has moved mountains by moving Americans to read more, more Faulkner, more Garcia Marquez, more Carol Oates, Steinbeck, and – Sydney Poitier? In any case, Oprah has also moved a few books for hucksters like James Frey, a few more for the good people at, oh, Amazon.com. A writer would be right to wonder about the implications of being in The Club, because they are probably not all as easy to recognize and identify as the sudden affirmative media attention – and the accompanying thunderclap of fall-off-your-chair sales figures. For instance, what if the follow-up to your breakout book just isn’t very good? Franzen has had less to say on that subject.Without discernible irony, Janet Fitch once professed to maintain a shrine to Oprah in her home, something besides a television. And why should she not? After all, Oprah’s induction of White Oleander into The Club made Janet Fitch an overnight success, validating years of work. The question is, what reader has a shrine to Janet Fitch, whether the devout Oprah acolyte, or, like me, just someone who picked up White Oleander at the sincere urging of a non-televised friend? And how many of the Fitch faithful will keep the candles burning for her now that Paint It Black is out?It is hard to imagine that, with Paint It Black, support from the Oprah camp – surely the rock on which Fitch’s wing of her publishing house, Little, Brown, rests – will not to some degree erode. More pointedly, Paint It Black will confound the serious reader engaged in a comparison of the book to its predecessor. It’s not just that Paint It Black is a weak sophomore effort. It’s that what preceded it was of such quality, and soared to such great heights.White Oleander does run before some powerful winds. It is written with a soulful savagery, the language never failing to try to capture both the broadest sweep of earthly beauty and the innermost essence of personal pain. The narrator, Astrid Magnussen, is fourteen when she begins her journey down a twisted chain of ever more fantastic and frightening L.A.-area foster homes. Astrid’s mother, Ingrid, a noted poet, is sent to prison for poisoning a man who was her lover. Yet even in prison, where her notoriety and artistic standing seem only to grow, Ingrid Magnussen maintains a profound, almost malevolent influence over Astrid’s life. Central to the book’s success is Fitch’s inspired evocation of the psychological connection between this mother and daughter, in all its complex, contradictory, and adversarial intensity. So, White Oleander not only floats, it slices over water into which other books sink.Of course, White Oleander has its little leaks, and its leaks hint at some of the problems that sink its successor. It is too long – too much ballast, as it were, in the form of at times achingly florid, fulsome prose. In this passage, Astrid’s voice rings with a concise clarity: “Niki and Yvonne had pierced my ears one day when they were bored. I let them do it. It pleased them to shape me. I’d learned, whatever you hung from my earlobes or put on my back, I was insoluble, like sand in water. Stir me up, I always came to rest on the bottom.” But it keeps going, so on the same page: “I had been in foster care almost six years now, I had starved, wept, begged, my body was a battlefield, my spirit scarred and cratered as a city under siege.” Fitch trips herself up when she indulges in such passages, running on (literally) with these broadest of brushstrokes. Then, maybe an author deserves to be spared the criticism of reaching a bit too far if she proves, as Janet Fitch has with White Oleander, that she is capable of rendering a nuanced beauty, and a dignity, out of the often pitiable human condition.Enter Josie Tyrell, protagonist of Paint It Black. She is a humble Bakersfield bean sprout transplanted in the big, bad city. Josie’s Harvard rich kid-turned-artist boyfriend, Michael, has a problem: he has just killed himself. Now Josie must struggle to find out who he really was. It’s tough. Along the way, Josie forms an unlikely bond with Michael’s overbearing, patrician mother, while occasionally navigating her way through the cemetery at Griffith Park, and the wilds of the 1980 L.A. punk scene, as it were, as it was, as it may have been. The book opens with Josie observing how an artist friend of hers, whom she poses for, becomes misty-eyed while listening to a John Lennon album in his studio, Lennon having just been killed. Josie’s take: “people were playing the same fucking Beatles songs until you wanted to throw up.” This is her disposition before she learns of the death of the love of her own life, but in any case, we’re off.The trade winds that propelled White Oleander to welcoming shores have somehow conflated into a perfect storm of literary peril, and Paint It Black is a balky boat. Like that of the former, the tone of the latter is heavy, yet somehow hollow, so that a passage such as the following: “How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one’s capacity to endure it,” which so closely echoes the passages from W.O. cited above, here seems so painfully self-conscious, more of a glance behind the curtain than into the heart of the character on the stage. Fitch relies so heavily on this sort of weight-of-the-world internal monologue; it quickly becomes redundant, like slapping a corpse. Part of the comparative problem is the use of third person in Paint It Black, where White Oleander was told in the voice of Astrid Magnussen, who is, after all, a teenager, not to mention an extraordinarily compelling character. Josie Tyrell, not so much, though Fitch seems literally to want to crawl inside her skin, and maybe should have. It’s tempting to judge third person narration more of a challenge because, unlike first person where the story is one big stream of monologue, the protagonist’s voice does not automatically set the tone. To borrow a hackneyed writer’s workshop phrase, the omniscient narrator must rely more on show than tell.Fitch still shows a lot, a lot of Los Angeles, between Josie’s two spheres, the jaded punk-rock bohemia, slowly choking on its own vomit; and the coldly cultured upper-crust, slowly, well, choking on its own vomit. There’s vomit and excrement in every corner of this town. Witness this exchange between Josie and an exiled German punk rock hellion, Lola Lola:”Americans insist on the superior shit, consuming acres of bran cereal, the better to have big attractive ones. Did you know that all the best perfume has a little bit of shit in it?”Josie shook her head. A little turd floating in the Chanel No. 5.Still with us? Okay then; moving on.Fitch does know L.A. and, like a Joan Didion or a Mike Davis with a novelist’s elan, she reaches yet again for something lofty: a description of the cultural anthropology of Los Angeles itself. White Oleander accomplished this feat so thoroughly that the book could be required reading in such a course of study. But in Paint It Black, the vision, the spheres, never coalesce into something true, or even plausible. Paint It Black is never quite dull, though, and therein lies perhaps the best evidence that the soulful savagery Fitch conjured in White Oleander still burns.At bottom, what awaits people who read and enjoyed White Oleander when they pick up Paint It Black is perhaps just a letdown. This idea has something to do with the reason why White Oleander was chosen by Oprah for The Club, now 55 books strong, or thereabouts. The letdown has to do with confronting a character, a young female protagonist, Josie Tyrell, who, though outwardly similar in some ways to Astrid Magnussen, is in fact fundamentally her opposite. There may come a moment when the reader realizes that Josie Tyrell is categorically unstable, the anti-Astrid. The book as farce is an interesting way to read it. And maybe, just maybe, this is where Fitch jumps the mic on what was almost certain to be labeled an Oprah letdown, a sophomore slump, or what have you, this second novel of hers. Perhaps, shrine notwithstanding, Fitch was discerning when it came to confronting the curse of The Club, and set out to create the anti-Oleander, something cunningly irredeemable. Something for critics to crow about – or not, as the unfortunate case may be. And something for Oprah to ignore.These two books are black and white, and there are exhausted homunculi out there for whom they may someday be read all over.

Reviews
| 1 book mentioned 8 6 min read
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