Eating Animals Jonathan Safran Foer Read Online

  Copyright

Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Safran Foer

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ISBN: 978-0-316-08664-6

Also by Jonathan Safran Foer

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for Sam and Eleanor,

trusty compasses

Contents

Copyright

Also past Jonathan Safran Foer

Storytelling

All or Zero or Something Else

Words / Meaning

Hiding / Seeking

Influence / Speechlessness

Slices of Paradise / Pieces of Shit

I Do

Storytelling

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.

The Fruits of Family unit Trees

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother's house. On the way in, Friday night, she would lift me from the footing in 1 of her fire-smothering hugs. And on the way out, Dominicus afternoon, I was again taken into the air. It wasn't until years afterward that I realized she was weighing me.

My grandmother survived the State of war barefoot, scavenging other people'south inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins, and the bits that clung to bones and pits. And so she never cared if I colored outside the lines, as long as I cutting coupons forth the dashes. And hotel buffets: while the rest of us erected Golden Calves of breakfast, she would make sandwich upon sandwich to swaddle in napkins and stash in her bag for lunch. It was my grandmother who taught me that one tea bag makes as many cups of tea as y'all're serving, and that every part of the apple is edible.

Money wasn't the point. (Many of those coupons I clipped were for foods she would never buy.)

Health wasn't the signal. (She would beg me to drink Coke.)

My grandmother never prepare a identify for herself at family unit dinners. Even when at that place was nothing more to be done — no soup bowls to be topped off, no pots to exist stirred or ovens checked — she stayed in the kitchen, like a vigilant baby-sit (or prisoner) in a tower. As far as I could tell, the sustenance she got from the food she made didn't require her to consume it.

In the forests of Europe, she ate to stay live until the next opportunity to eat to stay alive. In America, fifty years later, nosotros ate what pleased u.s.. Our cupboards were filled with nutrient bought on whims, overpriced foodie food, food we didn't need. And when the expiration date passed, nosotros threw it abroad without smelling it. Eating was carefree. My grandmother made that life possible for us. Just she was, herself, unable to shake the desperation.

Growing up, my brothers and I thought our grandmother was the greatest chef who ever lived. We would literally recite those words when the food came to the table, and again after the first seize with teeth, and one time more at the end of the meal: "You are the greatest chef who ever lived." And still we were worldly plenty kids to know that the Greatest Chef Who E'er Lived would probably have more than than 1 recipe (chicken with carrots), and that nearly Great Recipes involved more than than two ingredients.

And why didn't we question her when she told us that nighttime nutrient is inherently healthier than calorie-free food, or that most of the nutrients are plant in the peel or crust? (The sandwiches of those weekend stays were fabricated with the saved ends of pumpernickel loaves.) She taught usa that animals that are bigger than you are very expert for you, animals that are smaller than you are good for y'all, fish (which aren't animals) are fine for you, then tuna (which aren't fish), and so vegetables, fruits, cakes, cookies, and sodas. No foods are bad for you. Fats are good for you — all fats, e'er, in any quantity. Sugars are very healthy. The fatter a child is, the healthier it is — especially if information technology's a male child. Lunch is not ane repast, but three, to be eaten at 11:00, 12:30, and 3:00. You are ever starving.

In fact, her chicken and carrots probably was the most delicious affair I've e'er eaten. Merely that had little to practice with how information technology was prepared, or even how information technology tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. Nosotros believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than nosotros believed in God. Her culinary prowess was one of our family's primal stories, similar the cunning of the grandfather I never met, or the single fight of my parents' marriage. We clung to those stories and depended on them to define us. We were the family that chose its battles wisely, and used wit to go out of binds, and loved the nutrient of our dame.

In one case upon a time there was a person whose life was so good there was no story to tell about information technology. More stories could be told about my grandmother than most anyone else I've ever met — her otherwordly childhood, the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her clearing and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her absorption — and though I will 1 day attempt to tell them to my children, nosotros most never told them to one another. Nor did we telephone call her by whatever of the obvious and earned titles. We chosen her the Greatest Chef.

Perhaps her other stories were also hard to tell. Or perhaps she chose her story for herself, wanting to be identified by her providing rather than her surviving. Or perhaps her surviving is contained inside her providing: the story of her relationship to food holds all of the other stories that could be told about her. Food, for her, is not nutrient. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, organized religion, history, and, of course, love. Every bit if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.

Possible Once again

UNEXPECTED IMPULSES STRUCK WHEN I found out I was going to be a father. I began tidying up the house, replacing long-dead lightbulbs, wiping windows, and filing papers. I had my spectacles adjusted, bought a dozen pairs of white socks, installed a roof rack on top of the car and a "dog/cargo divider" in the back, had my first physical in half a decade . . . and decided to write a book most eating animals.

Fatherhood was the immediate impetus for the journeying that would get this volume, but I'd been packing my numberless for virtually of my life. When I was two, the heroes of all of my bedtime stories were animals. When I was iv, we fostered a cousin's dog for a summer. I kicked it. My male parent told me we don't kick animals. When I was seven, I mourned the expiry of my goldfish. I learned that my male parent had flushed him downwardly the toilet. I told my father — in other, less civil words — we don't flush animals down the toilet. When I was 9, I had a babysitter who didn't want to hurt anything. She put it but similar that when I asked her why she wasn't having chicken with my older blood brother and me: "I don't desire to hurt annihilation."

"Hurt anything?" I asked.

"You lot know that craven is chicken, right?"

Frank shot me a look: Mom and Dad entrusted this stupid adult female with their precious babies?

Her intention might or might not have been to convert us to vegetarianism — just because conversations about meat tend to make people feel cornered, not all vegetarians are proselytizers — but beingness a teenager, she lacked whatever restraint it is that so oft prevents a full telling of this particular story. Wi

thout drama or rhetoric, she shared what she knew.

My blood brother and I looked at each other, our mouths full of hurt chickens, and had simultaneous how-in-the-world-could-I-have-never-idea-of-that-before-and-why-on-world-didn't-someone-tell-me? moments. I put down my fork. Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken as I type these words.

What our babysitter said made sense to me, not only because information technology seemed true, but considering it was the extension to nutrient of everything my parents had taught me. We don't hurt family members. We don't hurt friends or strangers. Nosotros don't even hurt upholstered piece of furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that listing didn't make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world'due south workings. Until I wasn't. At which indicate I had to change my life.

Until I didn't. My vegetarianism, so bombastic and unyielding in the beginning, lasted a few years, sputtered, and quietly died. I never thought of a response to our babysitter'south code, only found ways to smudge, diminish, and forget it. Generally speaking, I didn't crusade hurt. Generally speaking, I strove to exercise the right thing. More often than not speaking, my conscience was clear enough. Pass the craven, I'grand starving.

Marking Twain said that quitting smoking is amidst the easiest things one can do; he did it all the fourth dimension. I would add vegetarianism to the list of like shooting fish in a barrel things. In loftier school I became a vegetarian more times than I tin now remember, most oft as an effort to merits some identity in a globe of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom's Volvo'south bumper, a broil sale cause to fill the cocky-conscious half hr of school intermission, an occasion to become closer to the breasts of activist women. (And I continued to remember information technology was wrong to hurt animals.) Which isn't to say that I refrained from eating meat. Merely that I refrained in public. Privately, the pendulum swung. Many dinners of those years began with my father request, "Whatsoever dietary restrictions I need to know about this evening?"

When I went to college, I started eating meat more than earnestly. Non "assertive in information technology" — whatever that would mean — but willfully pushing the questions out of my heed. I didn't experience similar having an "identity" correct then. And I wasn't around anyone who knew me every bit a vegetarian, then there was no issue of public hypocrisy, or even having to explicate a change. It might well have been the prevalence of vegetarianism on campus that discouraged my ain — 1 is less likely to give money to a street musician whose case is flood with bills.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my outset seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I idea life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how abrasive this made me.

When I graduated, I ate meat — lots of every kind of meat — for well-nigh two years. Why? Because it tasted skillful. And because more important than reason in shaping habits are the stories we tell ourselves and i some other. And I told a forgiving story about myself to myself.

Then I was set upwardly on a blind appointment with the woman who would become my wife. And only a few weeks after we plant ourselves talking nigh 2 surprising topics: union and vegetarianism.

Her history with meat was remarkably like to mine: there were things she believed while lying in bed at night, and there were choices made at the breakfast tabular array the next morning. There was a gnawing (if only occasional and short-lived) dread that she was participating in something securely incorrect, and in that location was the credence of both the confounding complexity of the issue and the forgivable fallibility of being human being. Like me, she had intuitions that were very strong, just apparently not strong enough.

People get married for many different reasons, but i that animated our determination to accept that stride was the prospect of explicitly marker a new first. Jewish ritual and symbolism strongly encourage this notion of demarcating a precipitous sectionalization with what came before — the most well-known example existence the corking of the drinking glass at the stop of the union ceremony. Things were as they were earlier, but they will exist different now. Things will exist better. Nosotros will be improve.

Sounds and feels great, but meliorate how? I could think of countless means to make myself better (I could larn foreign languages, be more patient, piece of work harder), simply I'd already made too many such vows to trust them anymore. I could as well think of endless means to make "us" better, only the meaningful things we tin can agree on and change in a relationship are few. In actuality, even in those moments when and then much feels possible, very little is.

Eating animals, a concern we'd both had and had both forgotten, seemed like a place to start. And then much intersects in that location, and so much could flow from it. In the same week, we became engaged and vegetarian.

Of course our wedding wasn't vegetarian, because we persuaded ourselves that it was just off-white to offer animal protein to our guests, some of whom had traveled groovy distances to share our joy. (Find that logic difficult to follow?) And nosotros ate fish on our honeymoon, but nosotros were in Japan, and when in Japan . . . And dorsum in our new home, nosotros did occasionally eat burgers and craven soup and smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only every at present and then. Only whenever we felt like it.

And that, I thought, was that. And I idea that was just fine. I causeless nosotros'd maintain a diet of conscientious inconsistency. Why should eating be different from any of the other upstanding realms of our lives? Nosotros were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians who from time to fourth dimension ate meat.

And I couldn't even feel confident that my intuitions were annihilation more than sentimental vestiges of my childhood — that if I were to probe securely, I wouldn't find indifference. I didn't know what animals were, or even approximately how they were farmed or killed. The whole affair made me uncomfortable, merely that didn't imply that anyone else should exist, or even that I should be. And I felt no blitz or demand to sort any of this out.

Simply then nosotros decided to take a child, and that was a different story that would necessitate a unlike story.

Almost half an hour after my son was built-in, I went into the waiting room to tell the gathered family unit the good news.

"Y'all said he! So it's a male child?"

"What'southward his proper name?"

"Who does he await like?"

"Tell united states everything!"

I answered their questions equally chop-chop as I could, and then went to a corner and turned on my cell phone.

"Grandma," I said. "Nosotros take a baby."

Her only phone is in the kitchen. She picked up after the start band, which meant she had been sitting at the table, waiting for the phone call. It was but later midnight. Had she been clipping coupons? Preparing craven and carrots to freeze for someone else to eat at some future meal? I'd never once seen or heard her cry, but tears pushed through her vocalization as she asked, "How much does it weigh?"

A few days after we came dwelling from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some get-go impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, "Everything is possible again." It was the perfect affair to write, because that was exactly how information technology felt. Nosotros could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had some other gamble.

Eating Animals

PERHAPS THE FIRST DESIRE MY son had, wordlessly and earlier reason, was the desire to eat. Seconds after being born, he was breastfeeding. I watched him with an awe that had no precedent in my life. Without explanation or experience, he knew what to do. Millions of years of development had wound the knowledge into him, every bit it had encoded beating into his tiny centre, and expansion and contraction into his newly dry lungs.

The awe had no precedent in my life, but it leap me, across generations, to others. I saw the rings of my tree: my parents watching me eat, my grandmother watching my mother swallow, my groovy-grandparents watching my grandmother . . . He was eating every bit had the chi

ldren of cave painters.

Every bit my son began life and I began this book, it seemed that virtually everything he did revolved around eating. He was nursing, or sleeping after nursing, or getting cranky before nursing, or getting rid of the milk he had nursed. As I terminate this book, he is able to carry on quite sophisticated conversations, and increasingly the nutrient he eats is digested together with stories we tell. Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: information technology matters more. It matters considering food matters (his concrete health matters, the pleasance of eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter. These stories bind our family together, and bind our family to others. Stories virtually food are stories virtually us — our history and our values. Within my family unit'due south Jewish tradition, I came to larn that food serves 2 parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable — the saltwater is also tears; the honey non only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the staff of life of our disease.

There are thousands of foods on the planet, and explaining why nosotros consume the relatively minor selection we do requires some words. We demand to explicate that the parsley on the plate is for decoration, that pasta is non a "breakfast nutrient," why we eat wings just non eyes, cows but not dogs. Stories establish narratives, and stories establish rules.

At many times in my life, I have forgotten that I have stories to tell almost food. I merely ate what was bachelor or tasty, what seemed natural, sensible, or healthy — what was there to explicate? Merely the kind of parenthood I always imagined practicing abhors such forgetfulness.

This story didn't begin as a book. I simply wanted to know — for myself and my family — what meat is. I wanted to know equally concretely equally possible. Where does it come from? How is it produced? How are animals treated, and to what extent does that matter? What are the economical, social, and environmental effects of eating animals? My personal quest didn't stay that way for long. Through my efforts as a parent, I came face-to-face with realities that as a citizen I couldn't ignore, and as a author I couldn't keep to myself. But facing those realities and writing responsibly about them are not the same.

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