A Meaty Topic: Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Eating Animals'

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WHEN THE NOVELIST Jonathan Safran Foer learned he was going to become a father, he made a lot of changes in his life, some typical and others not.

"I began tidying up the house, replacing long-dead lightbulbs, wiping windows, and filing papers," he writes in his new book, in which fatherhood is one subject among many. Foer also thought a lot about food, particularly meat — where it comes from, how it is consumed and what all that means. That thought process became "Eating Animals," Foer's first work of nonfiction, which is both a disquieting trip through the meat industry in America and a philosophical inquiry into human's carnivore nature.

Just as his own son inspired the book, Foer's grandmother inspired much of his thinking on the subject. Born into an Eastern European Jewish family — similar to the one Foer described in his debut novel, "Everything Is Illuminated" — she survived the Holocaust by scavenging what others had thrown away. When a Russian farmer took pity on her and offers her scraps of ham, she declined the meal. Foer writes that he was shocked by her decision to keep kosher in the face of death, but notes the moral of her story: "If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."

Those harsh experiences gave Foer's grandmother a generous, gregarious and often desperate relationship with food, and although she cooked only one dish (a simple recipe of chicken and carrots), he and his brothers considered her the best chef in the world. "Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love," he writes.

An off-and-on vegetarian throughout most of his life, Foer spent three years researching "Eating Animals," and what he discovered disturbed him. Ninety-nine percent of all meat, he says, is produced at factory farms, where animals are genetically modified into meat-heavy mutations, kept in cages smaller than your computer screen, and slaughtered inhumanely, all to produce an inexpensive yet inferior and often unhealthy product.

Furthermore, he writes, factory farms are the leading contributors to pollution and global warming (much more so than transportation, widely identified as the primary culprit), and thanks to the rampant use of antibiotics, they are the breeding grounds for new and dangerous virus strains like SARS and H1N1 (known, tellingly, as "swine flu").

"Eating Animals" is, of course, a controversial book, but Foer insists it isn't simply an argument in favor of veganism or even vegetarianism. Instead, he intends it as the start of a larger dialogue about an issue that affects everyone, regardless of their eating habits or moral systems. In advance of his appearance at Sixth & I Synagogue, "Express" talked to him about these issues, as well as what it means for a novelist to join this dialogue.

» EXPRESS: What was it like for you as a fiction writer to work on nonfiction?
» FOER: It made me want to write fiction again. There's something great about it, in that you always know what questions you're asking and what you're referring to and all those things that make novel writing so difficult and self-conscious and frustrating. On the other hand, all the things that make novel writing so wonderful and liberating and exciting have to do with the freedom of not being constrained — not only not being constrained to fact, but not being constrained to story. You think you're writing about an 80-year-old woman and it turns out you're writing about a 9-year-old boy, and you think you're writing a New York book and it turns out you're writing a story that takes place in Australia. Here, I set out to do something and I really wanted to follow through with it. And of course, there's the problem of the world. The world is a certain way, and I wanted to represent it as accurately as I could. With this subject matter, it just matters so much to get it right, so I ended up having so many pages of footnotes and hiring two outside fact-checkers to corroborate them all. It's very nonfictional nonfiction, in that sense.

» EXPRESS: Did you always envision it as a work of nonfiction? Is there any possibility that you might address these themes fictionally?
» FOER: Not really, because it's so important to know what these conditions are actually like, and not to gesture at what they're like. For example, 99 percent of animals raised for meat come from factory farms. That's really important, that's powerful — the 99 percent — and in a novel, you could give an example and someone might not think it's representative, but just the one that serves a novel best. It's really important here to know we're talking plainly, straightly and factually.

» EXPRESS: What does it mean for a non-expert, and a novelist in particular, to take up this cause?
» FOER: I don't know that I feel like I'm taking up a cause, so much as sharing my own thought process. It probably feels like a cause [laughs], but that says more about the industry than it does about me. It's hard to learn about this industry without feeling like you're suddenly being presented with a big argument, because it's so comprehensively bad. So I didn't think of myself as taking up a cause. I thought of myself actually as a writer sharing something that I learned.

» EXPRESS: There have been so many books and documentaries about the food movement, and it's good to have a slightly different voice in the conversation.
» FOER: For me, what's important is not the different voice but the different subject. Michael Pollan is a wonderful writer, Eric Schlosser is a wonderful writer, but they don't really get into meat. And to me, meat is the bulls-eye of the target. It's the thing that demands the most attention.

» EXPRESS: I was struck by the different formats in the book — the glossary of terms, for instance, and the people telling their own stories. Can you tell me about structuring the book to incorporate these elements?
» FOER: Part of it came from my own thought process — well, not so much my thought process, but my experience with meat. I found the linguistics really confusing for a long time, because the words are so manipulative and so flexible. I started a glossary just for myself, in the interest of keeping things straight. I thought it would not only be helpful to a reader, but also very telling. In terms of the voices that I included, it's really because I found them so compelling, and because I came to realize there's not an objective story of meat. There are stories that we choose for ourselves, despite there being so many objective facts, and I just wanted to reflect that in the format.

» EXPRESS: You've gone on "Ellen" and "Martha Stewart" to discuss this book, and other places where you don't often see literary authors. It seems like this book might be reaching a different audience than normally reads yourfiction. What's the reception been like?
» FOER: I've been very surprised by the reaction. I wondered if the book would be divisive, and it really has not been at all. The book has been reviewed a hundred times, let's say, and there's been exactly one review — that came out today! — from Michiko Kakutani at the [New York] Times. Plenty of people think I'm an asshole, and plenty of people think the style of the book is annoying, but until today, nobody had questioned whether this matters — not my book, but the thing that I'm writing about.

Frankly, some of the reviews that have liked my book least have liked my argument most, and I've been really happy and surprised to see that. It confirms what I suspected, which is that this is a consensus issue. It's not marginal. It's not liberal. It's not East Coast. It's not urban. It's very mainstream American to care about these things. People who care about one thing tend to care about more than that one thing. And the interesting thing is, we don't need to raise billions of dollars to fix this. We don't need to elect a new government; we don't need to go to war. It's just eating differently. It's just trying to make different choices. I think this conversation is done a real disservice by being framed in absolutes. Even the word "vegetarian" — it actually injures the conversation because it implies that you do everything or you do nothing, when in fact almost everyone falls into the spectrum in between. You want to make better choices, and maybe you can't envision doing it all the time, but that's not a reason not to try to do it some of the time.

» EXPRESS: And those words are so caught up in issues of identity and lifestyle. If you're a vegetarian, it means you a certain type of person...
» FOER: But caring about it makes you every sort of person. I'm not saying that as an exaggeration. Ninety-six percent of Americans think animals deserve legal protection, which is a radical statistic if you think about it. That means if you don't care, you are way on the margins of society. It's not Berkeley, it's Middle America. It's very Christian, very Judeo-Christian, and Muslim to worry about dominion, to worry about stewardship. Just mainstream values. If at my readings I could have had a mini factory farm up there with me, people would call the cops. People would leave. Nobody is okay with it in my experience, and I wish the conversation could reflect that instead of asking if you think it's right or wrong to eat meat, which is actually a totally unimportant question. The answer to that question doesn't really matter, given the world we live in. I don't even know my answer to that question.

» EXPRESS: "Eating Animals" makes it sound like these problems are rooted in industry and government.
» FOER: There are huge economic incentives to abuse animals and to wreak havoc on the environment. It's a system that's set up in a way that's very likely to be abused. Can it be fixed? Clearly there are farmers who can do it well, and I spend a whole lot of the book celebrating them. The question is, could such people ever be part of the dominant system, or are they always going to be exceptional people? And can you legislate in such a way that we require farmers to be such people? And I guess I find that hard to imagine, but in the meantime, because the system is not going to be uprooted or replaced anytime too immediately, there's the question of how to reform what we have.

There have been referendums around the country — out in California, Prop 2 is the most famous one — to phase out certain factory farming practices. Despite the fact that agribusiness spends about $150 million a year on lobbying and has 1,600 full time lobbyists, and that the Humane Society and PETA together have a budget of about $200,000, these things pass by the widest margin of anything on the ballot that year. And it's because everyone agrees. No one needs to be persuaded. They need to know what's going on, but they don't need to be persuaded of new values or anything like that.

» EXPRESS: What has been your family's response to this book, especially your grandmother's?
» FOER: I don't know that she's read it. She's not great with English, actually, so it would take her quite a while to get through it. I think she's proud, but then again she'd be proud if I wrote anything. She's my grandmother. She's not a vegetarian, and she's never going to become a vegetarian. No one in my family is a vegetarian. My little brother is an on-and-off vegetarian. I've never asked them to be. I've never asked any of them to change, just as they've never asked me to change. My parents, the way they raised me and the way I'm trying to raise my own kid, is not that I should share their values, but that I should act on the ones that I have. I think even if we have different sets of values, they're proud of me trying to act on mine.

» EXPRESS: So she doesn't take it as criticism of her?
» FOER: Oh no, not at all. In fact, I think she's totally thrilled to be in the book. I think it makes her feel really good. She's the hero of the book, or at least the most sympathetic person in it.

» EXPRESS: How has writing this book changed the way you and your own family eat?
» FOER: First of all, we're raising our kid as a vegetarian, but another thing is — an effect that wouldn't have anything to do with the book, at least not too explicitly — is that I just try not to buy food in supermarkets that much anymore, unless I really have to. I don't order food on the Internet. Actually, I don't order any products on the Internet, whereas I used to quite frequently. Now I try to support my local neighborhood stores, and it's funny because that wouldn't seem to have anything to do with animal agriculture, but it's an important point. Once you start to care about one thing, you just begin to care about other things. Concern is like a muscle that gets stronger with use. It may be that caring about factory farms makes one more likely to care about other things. We don't have a finite amount of concern.

» Sixth & I Synagogue, 600 I St. NW; Tue., Dec. 1, 7 p.m., $10 (or two tickets free with purchase of book, $25.99); 202.408.3100. (Gallery Place-Chinatown)

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Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy Scuolalibrai/Giuseppe