Nederlandse titel: Dieren eten
Publié en français: Faut-il manger les animaux?
It's has been a very long time since I've read a book that has had such an drastic and immediate impact on my life. Eating Animals has been an instant international bestseller and has received great praise, but I hadn't heard about it until I've read an interview with the author in a Flemish newspaper. Although the book is full of facts and figures - it comes with nearly 300 footnotes and a full index - it is written as a novel, which makes it easy to read. It's also full of philosophical reflections that make you feel uncomfortable as a reader... because most of the facts are things you already knew, and most of the reflections are thoughts that you and me have had already at some point in our lives - but only to choose to forget all of it afterwards. But if you read all the facts and reflections bundled in one book, suddenly it's not so easy anymore. So, what is the book really about?
People love animals. Millions own a dog or a cat. Millions maintain freshwater aquariums... A majority of owners report that one of the reasons they enjoy keeping pets is that they consider them part of the family.
People also love to eat animals. Most of them are raised under conditions that are, as everybody knows — or, at least, have no excuse not to know — barbaric. Until now, I was - like many people - only annoyed by the way they are killed. I'm not anymore.
Facts: chickens typically spend their lives within four walls, in cages or not, with thousands of other chickens and generations of accumulated waste. The ammonia fumes from their rotting excrement lead to breast blisters, leg sores, and respiratory disease. Bred to produce the maximum amount of meat in the minimum amount of time, they often become so top-heavy that they can’t support their own weight. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung upside down, and dipped into an electrified bath known as “the stunner.” For pigs, conditions are little better. Shortly after birth, piglets have their tails chopped off; this discourages the bored and frustrated animals from gnawing one another’s rumps. Male piglets also have their testicles removed, a procedure performed without anesthetic. Before being butchered, hogs are typically incapacitated with a tonglike instrument designed to induce cardiac arrest. Sometimes their muscles contract so violently that they end up not just dead but with a broken back. I've let out the part on cows and the cruel details of industrial fishing... - not that they are less shocking.
How is it that people, so careful if it comes to their pets, are so indifferent toward the animals they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. This inconsistency is the subject of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals”.
Foer was just nine years old when the problem of being an “eating animal” first presented itself. One evening, his parents left him and his older brother with a babysitter and a platter of chicken. The babysitter declined to join the boys for dinner.
“You know that chicken is chicken, right?” she pointed out. Foer’s older brother sniggered. Where had their parents found this moron? But Foer was shaken. That chicken was a chicken! Why had he never thought of this before? He put down his fork. Within a few years, however, he went back to eating chickens and other animals. During high school and college, he converted to vegetarianism several more times, partly to salve his conscience and partly, as he puts it, “to get closer to the breasts” of female activists. Later, he became engaged to a woman with a similar history of relapse. They resolved to do better, and immediately violated that resolve by serving meat at their wedding and eating it on their honeymoon. Finally, when he was about to become a father, Foer felt compelled to think about the issue more deeply, and, at the same time, to write about it. “We decided to have a child, and that was a different story that would necessitate a different story,” he says.
Foer ends up telling several stories, though all have the same horrific ending.
One is about shit. Animals, he explains, produce a lot of it. Crowded into “concentrated animal feeding operations,” they can produce entire cities’ worth. Imagine, Foer writes, if “every man, woman, and child in every city and town in all of California and all of Texas crapped and pissed in a huge open-air pit for a day. Now imagine that they don’t do this for just a day, but all year round, in perpetuity.” Not surprisingly, the shit in the ponds tends to migrate to nearby streams and rivers, causing algae blooms that kill fish and leave behind aquatic “dead zones.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency, some sixty thousand km of American waterways have been contaminated by animal excrement. (In Europe it's probably a bit better, but still very similar).
Another of Foer’s stories is about microbes. In the U.S., Foer reports, people are prescribed about 1,3 million kilos of antibiotics a year. Livestock are fed nearly 13 million kilos, according to the drug industry. By pumping cows and chickens full of antibiotics, farmers have been instrumental in producing new, resistant strains of germs—so-called superbugs. Officials at many health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control, have called for an end to the indiscriminate use of antibiotics on farms, but, of course, the practice continues.
A third story is about suffering. Intuitively, we all know that animals feel pain. (This, presumably, is why we spend so much money on vet bills.) “No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face,” Foer observes. And yet, he notes, we routinely eat fish that have been killed in this way, as well as chickens who have been dragged through the stunner and pigs who have been electrocuted and cows who have had bolts shot into their heads. (In many cases, the cows are not quite killed by the bolts, and so remain conscious as they are skinned and dismembered.)
And here are some other random things to think about:
Americans choose to eat less than 0,25% of the known edible food on the planet, modern industrial fishing lines can be as long as 120 km - the same distance as from sea level to space (for the amount of kilos of shrimp we eat, at least up to 50 times that amount of fish is thrown back in to the sea, alive... or dead!), animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all the transportation in the world combined, and is the number one cause for global warming... Did you know that industrial chicken only has 400 cm2 of space (half a A4) for its entire life? Or that the average American eats 21.000 animals during his lifetime? And when is the last time you've actually seen birds like chickens or turkeys FLY?
Reading this, you would think that Foer is advocating for vegetarianism as the only moral way to go. But it's a bit more complicated then that. He also deals with the social and cultural aspects of eating meat, and the health issues of a strictly vegetarian diet. In short: he makes you think for yourself. Towards the middle of the book he meets a non-industrial farmer, and empathises. But given that bio-farming doesn't even make 1% of the whole meat-industry and the "bio"-label hardly means a thing... he personally chooses for vegetarism. But he leaves it finally up to the reader to decide for him/herself.
And so do I. But not without a link to an interview with the author, and to a German documentary (dubbed in French, for Arte - merci Isma!) which provides a bit of video footage to the questions raised in the book. Pretty disturbing stuff...
