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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The Past as Destiny, The Place as Self: Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul

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July 28, 2009 | 1 book mentioned 4 min read

Lacar Musgrove Lacar Musgrove is the associate non-fiction editor of Bayou Magazine, published by the University of New Orleans, where she is pursuing an M.F.A. She has a B.A. in English from Boston University.Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City is a strange and fascinating self-portrait.The first time I read Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul was on a train from Istanbul to Bucharest at the beginning of a two month journey through southern Europe. I’d been living in Istanbul for a year and a half and was interested in the book not as a memoir but as a book about Istanbul. It’s a strange way of writing a memoir, as entire chapters are dedicated not to Pamuk’s life but to Western and Turkish writers and artists who have depicted Istanbul though painting and writing. Pamuk writes of viewing himself and his city through Western eyes, sometimes borrowed, sometimes, he suspects, his own, recognizing his education and intellectual life as westernized.I was delighted to find many of Pamuk’s observations of Istanbul echoing what I had perceived through my Western eyes. I was particularly amused by this:It snowed on average between three and five days a year, with the accumulation staying on the ground for a week to ten days, but Istanbul was always caught unawares, greeting each snowfall as if it were the first.I cannot tell you how true this is. When it snowed my first winter there and my students refused to come to class, I thought it odd. But the next year it happened again, and the people of Istanbul reacted with the same surprise. It happens every year, and every year they are unprepared.The second time I read Istanbul was for a graduate non-fiction survey course, and it was the inclusion of this title on the reading list that solidified my decision to take the course. Upon deeper study, Istanbul revealed itself as an intricately woven portrait of place, memory and self. Pamuk’s narrative of his childhood and adolescence is confessional and his tone humble as he guides the reader with exquisitely subtle steps through this portrait. He handles the portrayal of his adolescent self in crisis with the same clarity and compassion with which he depicts a fallen empire city struggling with decline. Pamuk invites you into the hüzün, the collective melancholy of the city’s people, but does not break your heart with tragedy. Rather, he allows you to bathe in the comfort of it, to feel the resignation, the longing for a more glorious past as he describes old houses one by one going up in flames, the wealth of the city flowing from the old Istanbul families to the newly rich, a city unable to cling to the past but also incapable of defining a future: paralyzed.So what does this book have to offer one who has never been and may never go to Istanbul? You’ll have to look deep to find it. This is a book about extracting one’s identity from the world, about finding the line between self and society and occupying the place where each is served, finding stasis. In a self-portrait in which self and place are inseparable, Pamuk’s struggle is that of reconciling the two. The history, the geography, the buildings, the people tell him who he is. He recognizes himself as, rather than a unique individual, a character shaped of the collective experience. The habits and possessions of his family are not unique, his hüzün, his melancholy, is not his own but the collective hüzün of Istanbul, his life is not only his life but the life of the city. Young Orhan, however, occupies not only Istanbul but a secret inner world, the solitary world of his daydreams, which he expresses, in childhood and adolescence, through drawing and painting. He is tormented by anxiety and guilt over the separation of this inner world, and when painting no longer serves his need to bring the inner world to the outer, he hits a crisis which is only resolved when he learns to occupy both worlds simultaneously through writing, a moment in which he, unlike Istanbul, manages to disentangle himself from the past, “warmed by the flame of my brilliant future.”Through its theme of inner and outer worlds, the text explores the tension between our sense of self and our sense of how others see us. “Once imprinted on our minds, other people’s reports of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember.” We know ourselves through our own memories as well as the memories of others. At the beginning of the opening chapter he writes, “This book is concerned with fate.” Pamuk fancies himself unique in his struggle, but I would say his metamorphosis is common if not universal, at least in modern Western societies in which the individual is expected to cultivate a discreet identity and is responsible for harnessing his “true” self in order to fulfill a destiny.I understood Pamuk’s point of view through my own experience, not with Istanbul but with returning from Istanbul to Louisiana, my home and my family and grappling with my claim to this place and its claim to me. Having come to view Louisiana through the eyes of an outsider and myself as separate from it, I found myself confronting the truth of my own identity’s inseparability from place and my need to not only claim but defend it. I empathize with Pamuk’s sense of shame knowing how the rest of the country views our poverty, the ignorance of our citizens, the corruption of our government, the state of our infrastructure. Through confronting the connection between my identity and this place, I can accept this melancholy and embrace and the promise of the past’s claim on my destiny.

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A Life on the Rocks: Steve Toltz’s ‘Quicksand’

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October 28, 2015 | 1 book mentioned 1 6 min read

There’ll always be a place for the sad sack in fiction, heroes of topsy-turvy Bildungsromans who regress or stall rather than develop. Call them protagonists of the comic or the failed coming-of-age tale, which has its obvious forbears in a work like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy but also in the merciless irony of Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. In the classic version of the Bildungsroman, the hero seeks to define himself in a variety of ways — personally, educationally, professionally, romantically, or creatively if he happens to be an artist. The hero of the comic Bildungsroman tends to resist, or fail to achieve, these definitional ends. It is full of outsized characters who never quite fit into the narrative bounds imposed by the form: “Where will you ever end?” Ignatius Reilly is asked in The Confederacy of Dunces, a question that homes in on the particularly expansive comic spirit that refuses to conform or be confined to established conventions.

The same question could be put to Aldo Benjamin, who at one point in Steve Toltz’s Quicksand pleads, “My kingdom for a terminus!” Aldo is one of the two failures in the Australian novelist’s latest, an eminently successful novel about “the pilgrim’s frustrating lack of progress.” There’s a touch of Reilly in Aldo, but given Aldo’s mixture of libidinousness, thanatos, and linguistic virtuosity, Philip Roth’s priapic puppeteer Mickey Sabbath comes to mind as a closer precursor. Like all good comic characters, Aldo, a hapless entrepreneur, proves difficult to contain or circumscribe, not only because of the profusion of his misadventures but because he fancies himself as a real-life Tithonus, a “poor deathless, imperishable creature.” After a string of failed suicides — “suicide’s block” he calls it — Aldo thinks he has inadvertently caught a case of immortality: “In the face of forever, the contours of one’s life slacken and become not just poorly defined, but permanently resistant to definition.”

This indefinition proves a challenge for his friend Liam, an incompetent policeman — “I hit the siren. It startled me, as usual” — and failed novelist who is writing a book about him. Liam, noting that “[Aldo’s] existence needed room” and that “[h]e can’t tie up all his loose ends because he has an odd number of them,” eventually “[comes] to terms with the fact that there may be no place for every random anecdote and strange story about Aldo in my book.” There is a Whitmanian copiousness to Aldo evidenced in his “absurd” endurance despite and through “forty years of death throes” or in the host of oddly specific phobias he believes he has inherited from his ancestors:
…fear of unraveling rope bridges, fear of causing an avalanche by sneezing, fear of accidentally procreating with a half sister, fear of being shot in the face by a hunter…
Those fears never materialize, but pretty much every other nightmare scenario does as he is shuttled between the prison and the hospital, “two overpopulated hells.” (As he wryly reflects in the midst of one of his ordeals: “Even my subconscious hadn’t the temerity to go so far as to render me paralyzed at a rape trial.”) And yet like Mickey Sabbath, Aldo persists. He is a man of stubborn, and occasionally exhausting, exuberance. “My charm wears off like a local anesthetic,” he concedes after delivering over 140 pages of riveting, mordantly funny, and self-pitying testimony-cum-autobiography — the “short version” — to a beleaguered jury of his peers.

In her review, Lionel Shriver oddly objected to this bravura section by saying its “length strains credulity,” as if courtroom scenes have ever had more than a passing resemblance to realism. (I bet she’s fun to watch The Good Wife with.) Shriver’s critique ignores the novel’s logic of excess, which is established in the very first scene. We first see Aldo, paralyzed from the waist down after his latest accident, drinking at a beachside bar with Liam. Aldo has just come up with one of his idiosyncratic business ideas (e.g., peanut-allergy divining wand), but won’t, or can’t, tell it to Liam without first surrendering to his patience-testing compulsion to riff:
‘You know how we are such optimists that even out Armageddons aren’t final?…You know how people used to want to be rock stars, but now they just want rock stars to play at their birthday parties?…And how when someone’s coping mechanism fails, they just keep using it anyway?…And how businesssapiens are always having power nightmares?…Bad dreams during power naps…You know how when people talk of First World problems they forget to mention Alzheimer’s and dementia?…You know how unrequited love has no real-world applications?…’
These are selections from about 25 “you know” questions, all leading up to the final unveiling of his grand idea: disposable toilets, a fitting invention for a master bullshitter who always finds himself mired in the muck.

The toilet invention provides one clue, and the title a more obvious one, that Quicksand is a story of precipitous decline. Aldo is “not just the falling clown, but the falling clown who other falling clowns fall on,” a man whose life only gets worse after being erroneously charged with rape when he is still a virgin. From then on, he is constantly on trial (another dubious sex crime, murder(s)), in debt, or recovering from suicide attempts, my favorite being the “irreproachably considerate” plan he devises to take sleeping pills and slide himself into a hospital morgue drawer. Liam is slightly discomfited by watching “…a man on a decline from so low a starting point,” but also recognizes the narrative potential: “The only people worth watching are those who have reached rock bottom and bounced off it, because they always bounce off into very strange orbits.”

Aldo may be “a disaster waiting to happen, or a disaster that had just happened, or a disaster that was currently happening.” However, to be singled out for such a fate is its own kind of election. Etymologically, disaster means ill-starred, the empyrean heights determining the trajectory of mortals spiraling downward. Whether he is a modern-day Job or a tragic Greek hero who “locked eyes with the wrong god,” Aldo is a marked man both figuratively and literally. The history of his scars reveals a partial record of his singularly bad luck: “…motorcycles, skinheads, wrong turn, stray billiard ball, ambush by a part of thorns, Molotov cocktail, car antenna, gravel rash, cigar.”

Liam, on the other hand, is unmarked, a man whose own sad tale is eclipsed by that of his brilliantly inauspicious friend. Both lost sisters during adolescence, both have been “dodging success with drone-like precision for nearly two decades,” and both have not been “changed by [their] life-changing experiences.” However, Liam’s quiet desperation is ordinary. When Liam visits Aldo in the hospital after one accident, the latter instantly sees that he has the upper, or rather lower, hand: “His sad face conceded that my downward spiral had crushed his downward spiral. Ah, the pyrrhic victories of old friendships.” They spar with, aid, use, or bore one another during a friendship that is unbreakable despite, or rather because, there remains something “permanently unexpressed between” them.

We learn less and less about Liam as the novel focuses on its “natural subject,” Aldo, so that when Liam is surprised to discover that “people in general think I’m a ridiculous human being,” we do not know enough either to doubt or credit this general view of him. What can’t be called ridiculous is his devotion to Aldo, which is the only thing that keeps him from being a cipher: “You’re a good friend to Aldo,” his former teacher tells him. “That doesn’t make up for what you lack, but it’s not nothing.”

Which isn’t to say that Liam is selfless in his devotion. Like every other artist who comes across Aldo in the novel, he wants to “cannibalize” his life. An inveterate manipulator, Aldo is also an inveterate muse and obliging model; he lets himself be painted and photographed by Liam’s “copious rivals,” a group of bohemians residing in an artist’s colony, even describing his own features to a police sketch artist just for the fun of it. Portraitists circle him like vultures, sensing that his rotten life will provide artistic sustenance. “If they are artists, the truly unfortunate have a wealth of material,” reads an aphorism from Artist Within, Artist Without, Liam’s and Aldo’s vade mecum written by their old high school teacher, Mr. Morell. But what of the “truly unfortunate” supplying the material?

“Unused talent exerts downward pressure on the spirit,” is another of Morell’s nuggets. But squandered talent isn’t quite what drives Aldo, and consequently Liam, down to the level “where things get primordial.” Rather, it’s precisely by deploying his talent, which happens to be for erring, that sends the “King of Unforced Errors” back to the elemental: a barren rocky island at a remove from the society in which he was so incongruous. This tragicomic Bildungsroman fails as it should, spectacularly, its “half-human, half-crustacean” hero devolving in splendid isolation as, back on shore, the world goes calmly on.

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Telling the Truth in Vietnam: The Spy Who Loved Us by Thomas Bass

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April 27, 2010 | 1 book mentioned 2 5 min read

Like at least several members of my generation, my understanding of the Vietnam War is limited to a kind of shivery awful reverence felt in the presence of veterans, or when looking at photos of the great and glorious war dead.  My impressions are a mélange of movie stills (Willem Defoe), novels (Fallen Angels), songs (Adagio for Strings), photos (Eddie Adams), legends (friend’s dad’s Zippo collection), and, it must be said, Walter (The Big Lebowski).  I feel like this can’t actually be the case, but I simply do not remember learning anything about the Vietnam War in school.  I have read The Quiet American, but I had no idea what it was about, and I have read Tim O’Brien stories, which feature young men who had even less of an idea. Unfortunately for them, they still had to go and get themselves exploded, physically or otherwise.  Cue the Adagio, cue the hairs on the back of my neck.

Given my pathetically skewed and Forrest Gump-y understanding of the Vietnam War, I was very pleased to see The Spy Who Loved Us: The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An’s Dangerous Game, which was written by my former college professor, Thomas Bass, whom I consider to be a huge fucking deal, not only because he writes books and was in The New Yorker, but because he taught a class wherein we read Neuromancer.  I’ll start my review with a digression, which is that there is a major problem with nonfiction books, regarding what to call them.  The truth being what it is (that is, stranger than fiction), nonfiction books with titles that accurately present the facts either sound absurdly melodramatic or tremendously boring. Some nonfiction books try to circumvent this by choosing titles of impossible vagueness, but that can end up worse.

Taking a short gander at the limited selection of nonfiction books in my home at the moment, I see a book called Rebel Land, a somber-looking read about Turkey with a title which could nonetheless pass as the forgotten third in the Gone With the Wind franchise (after Scarlett).  The Spy Who Loved Us attempted to solve the problem with a modest sort of pun, but puns tend to put everyone on the defensive right away.  I don’t know how to fix the problem (“Vietnam: WTF?”), I am just noting its existence.

James Bond references notwithstanding, The Spy Who Loved Us is, in fact, about a spy who loved us, “us” in this case being America, and the spy being Pham Xuan An, Reuters and then Time correspondent and go-to journalist in Saigon, who, while loving us and filing articles for the American news complex, spent his nights planning the Tet Offensive and writing messages to the North Vietnamese in invisible ink.  It’s a hell of a story.  In fact, it took me longer than usual to read, because there was much to process.  This book is not Vietnam 101, so I had to fill in some things on my own.

Given that the book is not 101, my hope of understanding the conflict remains unrealized, although I now have a better sense of how hard it might be to fully understand anything at all.  What I learned about the actual events are as follows:  the French were there, and felt very strongly that they should continue to be there, and espoused a (befuddling under the circumstances) enthusiasm for Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.  The Japanese, were there, Chinese were also there betimes, and sometimes Koreans.  Vietnam told France to go away, but Americans were like, no, no, France stays (even though they apparently liked the Vietnamese when they were fighting the Japanese while France was collaborating furiously).  Then the Americans, for no reason that I can understand, started coming over for long visits and someone called Lansdale decided there was to be a war.  There was the North, which were the Communists, and the South, which were the non-Communists, except for the Vietcong, who were also Communists.  The Americans were with the South, and did something involving Catholics and puppet government.

Thomas Bass provides lots of background, but mostly to explain the education and evolution of Pham Xuan An, who, showing remarkable fidelity during several decades that would seem rife with near-constant turncoating, was a devoted (and heavily decorated) Communist. Through various channels, An worked in Intelligence for the South Vietnamese, and then as basically the most important journalist in Vietnam.  He seems to have been friends with literally everyone, but he was also a spy.  I know from John Le Carré that spies exist in nebulae and shades of gray, often simultaneously holding two incompatible views, and An was apparently no exception.  He seems to have been a moral spy, as moral as anyone could be during war.  In spite of spying, An, purportedly provided genuine assistance and objective reportage for every major news presence in Vietnam.

The thrust of the Bass’s book as I read it is that An was a purveyor of truths, as a spy and a journalist.  If journalism can be said to change the course of human events, An worked in two opposing ways to end the war, one directly, with a clear national objective, and the other obliquely, by reporting the ugly facts to the world outside (even if the ugly facts were subsequently rewritten by the Henry Luce/Time machine).  An’s story has breathtaking implications on a variety of fronts, which is clearly why Bass invested years and quite considerable effort to write this book (considerable effort admirably concealed, I should say; The Spy Who Loved Us reads like a book, and not a dissertation, always a threat in nonfiction).

The Spy Who Loved Us was well-researched and well-told by someone who obviously cares quite a bit about the material.  Reading it reminded me that I need to read more nonfiction, because history is full of incredible stories, and I know hardly any of them.  For example, I did not know that the CIA has admitted to orchestrating news stories like, a lot.  That a Quaker fellow self-immolated in front of McNamara.  That spies were incrementally cut into pieces to reveal their information, and that sometimes they didn’t.  That the man holding the gun in the Eddie Adams photo wasn’t such a bad guy to begin with.  That journalism is a byzantine nest of loyalties and codes of behavior.  That America lost the Vietnam War.

I will likely continue to ascribe certain cultural symbols of America’s Vietnam with a schmaltzy sacrosanctity (sleeveless jean jackets, empty helmets).  I sound facetious, but I think for people who experience history second- or third- or fifth-hand, for whom events have slim or no personal relevance, it is easy to make objects and images the locus of a lukewarm national sentiment. This book reminded me that the Vietnam War took place in Vietnam, not a tropical corner of America, and that Vietnam was full of Vietnamese people, who suffered horribly and made complex series of decisions, and for many of whom the end of the war was a victory wrested from a hundred years of occupation.  Throughout the The Spy Who Loved Us there are a number of people, American and Vietnamese, who describe An as the ultimate patriot, but it’s not as though the Vietnam War was simply Vietnam against the colonial and neo-colonial oppressors, it was between Vietnamese people as well.  And they all died in spades, so it seems likely there are people out there for whom An’s life and work would be a great source of rancor.  I don’t know.  It’s a lot to think about.  And it should be; war should always be a lot to think about.

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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.

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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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