Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the novels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Everything is Illuminated, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award.
Eating Animals, his first extended work of non-fiction, is a powerful and disturbing look at the moral and environmental effects of factory farming and the devastating impact our dietary choices have, on both our health and the world around us. A combination of philosophy, science, memoir and reportage, the book examines the stories we tell ourselves to justify our eating habits and how such fictions can lull us into a brutal forgetting. The novelist JM Coetzee has said of Eating Animals: “Anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume factory farm products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.”
Foer currently lives in New York with his wife, the writer Nicole Krauss, and their two sons.
Elizabeth Kirkwood: Even if you know about the methods of factory farming, this is still a deeply disturbing book to read. Was the writing process equally disturbing, and how did you cope with that?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Yes, it was really disturbing. I coped, probably like you did when reading it. Sometimes I didn’t want to look at it. You have to put it away for a while and come back to it—that was how I wrote it. Also, you do get used to it. If I went to a slaughterhouse now I wouldn’t recoil or find it disgusting. Frankly, I can’t say that I found it disgusting the first time round, so much as sad.
The experience I had, more often than disgust or even sadness, was surprise. So often when I was researching I would discover something and I would call my wife or a friend and say, “You’re never going to believe this...” I really feel like that is the stage our farming system is at now: this “You’re never going to believe this” place. It stretches the limits of what we can comprehend. Someone asked why I didn’t write it as novel, but I think if I had written it as a novel, people might have thought that it was fictional.
EK: Did you ever consider writing it as novel?
JSF: Not really. Firstly, I love novels and I love the way novels don’t have to do anything. There’s no function to a novel. And especially now, in this world where everything has to have a function—what with multi-tasking, getting efficiency maximised—a novel is the only place where you only do it for its own sake. The idea of writing a novel not for its own sake, but for some other end, was not something I was interested in.
Also, I wanted people to believe me. It’s not a coincidence that a quarter of the book is footnotes. I think that when reflecting on food it’s really important to know that we’re all talking about the same thing. We’re not talking about the exceptions. We’re not talking about someone’s impression of something, but just the real facts of the matter.
EK: You’ve said in the past that you wouldn’t touch journalism.
JSF: I touched it! (laughs)
EK: And in a pretty profound way. What happened?
JSF: I didn’t feel like writing a novel at the time. And I don’t see any reason to write a novel if you don’t feel like it—assuming you can survive [financially]. But more importantly, it’s a very unusual subject. Not only because I’ve cared about it for forever—for as long as I can remember having ideas, I remember thinking about it—but also because nobody actually writes about meat, even though it’s the centre of everything. It is the most important kind of food when we’re thinking about our health, or our relationship to the environment; certainly our relationship to animals. And a lot of people have written very well about food, but they don’t write about meat.
EK: Do you think writing this book—essentially a piece of extensive investigative journalism –has changed your writing muscles? Will you feel frustrated returning to fiction after this?
JSF: Well, if I didn’t feel frustrated that would imply a great change. Writing is just frustrating. That’s my experience of it. Every day of fiction writing is frustrating. If you were to ask what was the one word that best describes fiction writing, I would say, “frustrating.”
EK: Why do you think that is?
JSF: Maybe because it’s useless. Zadie Smith wrote a great essay about comedy. She went to a comedy show with a cousin of hers and afterwards they were sitting around having drinks with this group of comedians and they were saying, “Was it funny when I paused before I got to the punch line? Was it funny when I looked at the guy in the eyes? Was it funny? Was it funny? Was it funny?” And it was completely neurotic, but, she said, as a novelist she felt jealous because at least they knew what the question was. That’s the problem with novels: you don’t even know what you’re trying to do, so how can even know if you’re setting about doing it the right way? How could you know if you’re successful? Every book wants to change a reader, but with a novel you don’t know how you want to change the reader.
EK: Going back to the issue of eating meat and factory farming. You’ve said that “converting” or convincing people to stop eating meat is not achieved through polemic, but by example. Do you think vegetarians can offer such an example?
JSF: Yes, but not even vegetarians. This is partly the problem: we’ve created two categories of people—vegetarians and people who don’t care. And in fact most people care, it’s just that we haven’t left room in the conversation for caring without caring ultimately. I have a lot of sympathy for people who have a hard time changing. It took me 25 years to become a vegetarian. And I still eat, occasionally, dairy or eggs that have been produced in factory farms—which is to say I’m a bad hypocrite according to my own standards. I don’t want to and I don’t think I will in the future, but it takes time. And if someone had presented me with this choice—do everything or do nothing?—then I would probably end up like most people: doing nothing.
EK: What about fiction as offering alternative ways of thinking about animals. I’m thinking about the work of Coetzee, novels like Disgrace, or ElizabethCostello.
JSF: Well, yes, it works, but I don’t know how well it works when you’re trying to make it work. I don’t know how many good novels were written with the intention of trying to make a political point. Though I do think almost always novels do make a political point, in that every good novel makes the reader look at the world differently.
Personally, if I set out to do that with a specific idea in mind of how I wanted people to see things differently, it wouldn’t work because the whole process of writing novels for me is to surprise myself. I had a set goal that would require me to fulfil my own expectations. I honestly don’t think I have the ability to make something good on purpose—it requires figuring out... being open to accidents, and stumbling upon things and pursuing tangents. I’ve never finished the book that I’ve started, and I’ve never written the book that I thought I was going to write. That’s what saved me.
EK: And in the case of Eating Animals?
JSF: In this case I did. I’m really happy I wrote this book. I’m proud of it, but it’s not like a novel, it’s a very different kind of book. Nobody is ever going to come up to me and say this is my favourite book. Do you write books for them to be someone’s favourite? No, no exactly. But at the same time you write books to connect with somebody on a very deep level. I hope that this book connects with people on a deep level, but it’s not going to be as deep a level as a novel can potentially connect with somebody. Think about works of art that have moved you most—it’s pre-verbal, it’s pre-intellectual, it’s just very visceral. And there are certainly moments of this book that someone might engage with viscerally, but it’s more like a conversation. It’s not a work of art.
EK: Did you have an ideal reader in mind for Eating Animals?
JSF: No. Not really. I guess I was thinking about younger readers, because younger readers are more responsive to the subject: 18 per cent of college students in the US are vegetarian now. That’s an unbelievable number. There are more vegetarians that Catholics in American universities. Yes, vegetarianism is always skewed younger. But there are more now than there were five years ago. Basically, the younger you are the more able you are to change, which makes sense because your habits are less ingrained in you. I mean, I already find it hard to change and I’m not old.
It’s not that I was thinking about writing for young people, but they’re certainly the most important audience to me. I don’t think I wrote the book any differently because of that. Maybe I promoted the book differently, went to a lot of high schools, but I can’t think of anything I wrote differently.
EK: Were you worried about alienating potential readers?
JSF: Not really. Some things are very simple, and some things are complicated. It’s simple that we shouldn’t eat factory-farmed products—I say that being somebody who does. And we should eat a lot less. But we have to stop thinking about it in terms of “I am a this, or I am a that.” And instead, really think about it in every situation: is this a time when I can say yes, or I can say no?
Even if you don’t care about animals, nobody is indifferent to the quality of air we breathe or the water that we drink, or the health of the oceans, or our ability to use antibiotics, or how workers are treated—there are so many perspectives from which we can look at this. But what is complicated is good farms. And farms where animals are treated very well. And these exist.
EK: How do respond to some of the negative press you’ve had here? Jay Rayner in the Guardian, for example, accusing you of taking a sentimental view of animals.
JSF: Well, I think they’re sentimental. Sentimentality is when our feelings influence us more than our brains and our reason. It is an engagement with the facts, to say, “I don’t want to eat a food that is the worst thing for the environment,” and: “I don’t want to eat a food that abuses animals in ways that I wouldn’t abuse my dog.” That’s not sentimental, that’s just being a decent human being. I have no desire to let a chicken crawl into bed with me, I just don’t want to treat it like a block of wood.
It’s curious, these strange and very sentimental divisions we create. To treat a dog one way and to treat a pig another way is sentimental. And I’ve never heard a good—rational—explanation for why we draw such lines, other than: “we’ve always done it.” Which is not an explanation, as that would justify all kinds of behaviour that we would never do today.
EK: You talk about the need to activate compassion in the book. How do you activate compassion on a practical level?
JSF: Well, I think you activate it in yourself. And I feel odd even using the words because they sound “new-agey.” But in the course of writing this book I noticed that I started behaving differently in ways that had nothing to do with food. I all but stopped buying things on the internet and would just go buy them from local stores. And I knew I was doing it because it felt like the right thing to do. Because I want there to be local stores, I don’t want everything to be Amazon.com.
I like character. I don’t like homogeneity. Life is richer when there are more options, especially when you get to interact with people rather than computers. Life is better when you have somebody say to you, “Oh you should try reading this book,” as opposed to seeing what the sales rankings are for people like you.
EK: And what’s the connection between those impulses?
JSF: All I know is that when I start thinking about food, I start thinking about other things. The goal in life is not to care about as few things as possible. The goal is to think and care about as many things as possible. And my experience of food is that it’s been contained.
Of the two hostile reviews I had in the US, one of them asked why I would care about this subject when there are starving children in the world. First, it’s not a zero-sum game; I don’t take my concern from the kids and give it to the animals. But secondly, I think being awake to the world is a way of recognising that we are perpetuating all different kinds of violence. I don’t think it ever stops with one case. It’s not like you become awakened to the food industry and then say: “this is where I stop.” In the course of writing this I became aware of how workers are treated in different industries. I never got into this to know more about conditions for meat packing workers, but I did. Opening our eyes to one thing can open our eyes to something else.
EK: Do you ever think there can be such a thing as “compassionate farming,” when ultimately what we’re rearing animals for is to be killed? Might we risk simply trying to console ourselves from the reality of the business with such terms as “free-range” and “organic”?
JSF: Yes we do, but those terms are also real too. There are certain labels that really matter, like you would rather be cage-free than in a cage? Maybe it’s put there to manipulate us as consumers and to make us feel good and it’s actually an act of narcissism, but to the chicken it matters.
I think there are examples of humane farming, but I don’t think there can be a humane farming system: there’s just too many people in the world and the planet’s too small, we have too strong a desire for meat and we have become too use to prices that are too low. As a system I just don’t think it would work; people would have to change their habits a lot.
Different technological advancements have made it cheaper to produce food, and society has changed its eating habits around that. People are eating a shit load more meat than ever before, and it’s not good for anybody. Nutritionalists tell us it’s not good for us. And it’s clearly not good for the planet. Americans eat 150 times more chicken than they did 80 years ago. It’s insane. I did try to find a reputable nutritionalist who would say that this is the right amount. But not even the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) says that it’s okay. We’re simply way, way, way above the amount of protein we should be taking in.
Clearly meat can be part of a healthy diet, but it doesn’t need to be part of a healthy diet. And that’s a very important distinction to make. The first research I did for the book wasn’t on farms but was about nutrition, because I thought, well, if my kids need it, I’ll just feed it to them. So, if I found out that there was a consensus that you needed meat to have healthy bones or proper brain growth, I would have done it, because I care more about my kids’ health than I do about farm animals. But, I could not find such a person, and, by the way, I did not talk to a single vegetarian nutritionalist.
EK: Has writing this book changed your perception of humanity?
JSF: No, because I don’t blame consumers. I blame this industry. It’s a very manipulative industry. People have good instincts, and when I wrote this book I didn’t feel like I was having to change peoples’ minds—I felt as though everyone was of the same mind, they just don’t have access to good information. That’s not to say that they’re going to stop eating meat altogether.
I don’t blame people who work in abattoirs either. They work in those places because they need jobs, and they’re just grateful to have a job. Most of them are making minimum wage and most of them are illegal immigrants. You can’t blame them.
The ones you can blame are those who set the protocols for how animals are raised, and how they’re slaughtered and what the environmental effects will be—those decisions are not made on farms, but in cities. I do also blame the USDA and US department for environmental protection for not enforcing laws which are already on the books. Companies are not supposed to be dumping waste from factory farms into rivers. And soon, we are approaching the moment when it will be time to hold consumers to account. To be fair, I don’t know how I’ll feel about this in a couple of years.
It’s interesting: I wrote this whole book and my parents eat meat and I’ve never asked them not to. I’ve never asked anybody not to eat meat actually.
EK: You’ve really never said anything to your parents?
JSF: Well, I think they know what I think (laughs). And they eat meat very rarely, maybe once, twice a week. On top of which, I do things which others would criticise. I buy products that, I’m sure, come from sweatshops halfway around the world. I don’t give nearly as much money as I should to charity. I live in ways which, by any reasonable definition, are extravagant.
EK: What are your extravagancies?
JSF: Well, you know according to those people who say that anyone who lives on more than $35,000 a year is simply like taking food out of the mouths of starving kids. There is a way of looking at the world like that. There’s a book called Living High: Letting Die, and it’s really hard to read, because you finish it and you think “I’m an asshole!”
A certain amount of “assholeness” is not only necessary, but part of a life I want for everyone. But we do have to come to terms with the facts. Especially when these things don’t actually matter that much to us. So much of our problem with the meat industry is food we don’t even like, or don’t even really enjoy. A passing hamburger here or sandwich there—if we just got rid of that, and kept the Christmas ham, and the Thanksgiving turkey, then that’s the answer.
EK: The UN predictions for global meat production in the coming 40 years, particularly with the rapidly expanding Chinese and southeast Asian market, is pretty terrifying. Does that fill you with horror, and if so, how do you remain optimistic in that knowledge?
JSF: Yes, it does. But vegetarianism is becoming such an aspirational identity. Especially on college campuses it’s becoming a desirable identity, and not something that requires explanation or embarrassment. So the fact that 18 per cent of college students are vegetarians, and the fact that those 18 per cent will go on to become journalists, musicians, actors and culture-makers, means the whole thing will feel different. It’s like if you think about how quickly smoking went away after it was banned in public places. Almost entirely: it happened within five years.
EK: It’s still pretty prevalent in Britain.
JSF: Sure, sure, it’s present, but nothing like it used to be. More interestingly, it’s becoming like a social stigma. And I do think that meat eating is going to become like that too. That’s not to say that people won’t do it, but I do think we’re nearing a time when the question is going to be, “Why do you eat it?” and not, “Why don’t you eat it?” And that will be reflected in popular culture. It seems like a huge percentage of actors and singers are already vegetarian anyway. And that, I think, will have a huge effect: the notion that this is the way to be becomes more and more present.
Eating Animals, his first extended work of non-fiction, is a powerful and disturbing look at the moral and environmental effects of factory farming and the devastating impact our dietary choices have, on both our health and the world around us. A combination of philosophy, science, memoir and reportage, the book examines the stories we tell ourselves to justify our eating habits and how such fictions can lull us into a brutal forgetting. The novelist JM Coetzee has said of Eating Animals: “Anyone who, after reading Foer’s book, continues to consume factory farm products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both.”
Foer currently lives in New York with his wife, the writer Nicole Krauss, and their two sons.
Elizabeth Kirkwood: Even if you know about the methods of factory farming, this is still a deeply disturbing book to read. Was the writing process equally disturbing, and how did you cope with that?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Yes, it was really disturbing. I coped, probably like you did when reading it. Sometimes I didn’t want to look at it. You have to put it away for a while and come back to it—that was how I wrote it. Also, you do get used to it. If I went to a slaughterhouse now I wouldn’t recoil or find it disgusting. Frankly, I can’t say that I found it disgusting the first time round, so much as sad.
The experience I had, more often than disgust or even sadness, was surprise. So often when I was researching I would discover something and I would call my wife or a friend and say, “You’re never going to believe this...” I really feel like that is the stage our farming system is at now: this “You’re never going to believe this” place. It stretches the limits of what we can comprehend. Someone asked why I didn’t write it as novel, but I think if I had written it as a novel, people might have thought that it was fictional.
EK: Did you ever consider writing it as novel?
JSF: Not really. Firstly, I love novels and I love the way novels don’t have to do anything. There’s no function to a novel. And especially now, in this world where everything has to have a function—what with multi-tasking, getting efficiency maximised—a novel is the only place where you only do it for its own sake. The idea of writing a novel not for its own sake, but for some other end, was not something I was interested in.
Also, I wanted people to believe me. It’s not a coincidence that a quarter of the book is footnotes. I think that when reflecting on food it’s really important to know that we’re all talking about the same thing. We’re not talking about the exceptions. We’re not talking about someone’s impression of something, but just the real facts of the matter.
EK: You’ve said in the past that you wouldn’t touch journalism.
JSF: I touched it! (laughs)
EK: And in a pretty profound way. What happened?
JSF: I didn’t feel like writing a novel at the time. And I don’t see any reason to write a novel if you don’t feel like it—assuming you can survive [financially]. But more importantly, it’s a very unusual subject. Not only because I’ve cared about it for forever—for as long as I can remember having ideas, I remember thinking about it—but also because nobody actually writes about meat, even though it’s the centre of everything. It is the most important kind of food when we’re thinking about our health, or our relationship to the environment; certainly our relationship to animals. And a lot of people have written very well about food, but they don’t write about meat.
EK: Do you think writing this book—essentially a piece of extensive investigative journalism –has changed your writing muscles? Will you feel frustrated returning to fiction after this?
JSF: Well, if I didn’t feel frustrated that would imply a great change. Writing is just frustrating. That’s my experience of it. Every day of fiction writing is frustrating. If you were to ask what was the one word that best describes fiction writing, I would say, “frustrating.”
EK: Why do you think that is?
JSF: Maybe because it’s useless. Zadie Smith wrote a great essay about comedy. She went to a comedy show with a cousin of hers and afterwards they were sitting around having drinks with this group of comedians and they were saying, “Was it funny when I paused before I got to the punch line? Was it funny when I looked at the guy in the eyes? Was it funny? Was it funny? Was it funny?” And it was completely neurotic, but, she said, as a novelist she felt jealous because at least they knew what the question was. That’s the problem with novels: you don’t even know what you’re trying to do, so how can even know if you’re setting about doing it the right way? How could you know if you’re successful? Every book wants to change a reader, but with a novel you don’t know how you want to change the reader.
EK: Going back to the issue of eating meat and factory farming. You’ve said that “converting” or convincing people to stop eating meat is not achieved through polemic, but by example. Do you think vegetarians can offer such an example?
JSF: Yes, but not even vegetarians. This is partly the problem: we’ve created two categories of people—vegetarians and people who don’t care. And in fact most people care, it’s just that we haven’t left room in the conversation for caring without caring ultimately. I have a lot of sympathy for people who have a hard time changing. It took me 25 years to become a vegetarian. And I still eat, occasionally, dairy or eggs that have been produced in factory farms—which is to say I’m a bad hypocrite according to my own standards. I don’t want to and I don’t think I will in the future, but it takes time. And if someone had presented me with this choice—do everything or do nothing?—then I would probably end up like most people: doing nothing.
EK: What about fiction as offering alternative ways of thinking about animals. I’m thinking about the work of Coetzee, novels like Disgrace, or ElizabethCostello.
JSF: Well, yes, it works, but I don’t know how well it works when you’re trying to make it work. I don’t know how many good novels were written with the intention of trying to make a political point. Though I do think almost always novels do make a political point, in that every good novel makes the reader look at the world differently.
Personally, if I set out to do that with a specific idea in mind of how I wanted people to see things differently, it wouldn’t work because the whole process of writing novels for me is to surprise myself. I had a set goal that would require me to fulfil my own expectations. I honestly don’t think I have the ability to make something good on purpose—it requires figuring out... being open to accidents, and stumbling upon things and pursuing tangents. I’ve never finished the book that I’ve started, and I’ve never written the book that I thought I was going to write. That’s what saved me.
EK: And in the case of Eating Animals?
JSF: In this case I did. I’m really happy I wrote this book. I’m proud of it, but it’s not like a novel, it’s a very different kind of book. Nobody is ever going to come up to me and say this is my favourite book. Do you write books for them to be someone’s favourite? No, no exactly. But at the same time you write books to connect with somebody on a very deep level. I hope that this book connects with people on a deep level, but it’s not going to be as deep a level as a novel can potentially connect with somebody. Think about works of art that have moved you most—it’s pre-verbal, it’s pre-intellectual, it’s just very visceral. And there are certainly moments of this book that someone might engage with viscerally, but it’s more like a conversation. It’s not a work of art.
EK: Did you have an ideal reader in mind for Eating Animals?
JSF: No. Not really. I guess I was thinking about younger readers, because younger readers are more responsive to the subject: 18 per cent of college students in the US are vegetarian now. That’s an unbelievable number. There are more vegetarians that Catholics in American universities. Yes, vegetarianism is always skewed younger. But there are more now than there were five years ago. Basically, the younger you are the more able you are to change, which makes sense because your habits are less ingrained in you. I mean, I already find it hard to change and I’m not old.
It’s not that I was thinking about writing for young people, but they’re certainly the most important audience to me. I don’t think I wrote the book any differently because of that. Maybe I promoted the book differently, went to a lot of high schools, but I can’t think of anything I wrote differently.
EK: Were you worried about alienating potential readers?
JSF: Not really. Some things are very simple, and some things are complicated. It’s simple that we shouldn’t eat factory-farmed products—I say that being somebody who does. And we should eat a lot less. But we have to stop thinking about it in terms of “I am a this, or I am a that.” And instead, really think about it in every situation: is this a time when I can say yes, or I can say no?
Even if you don’t care about animals, nobody is indifferent to the quality of air we breathe or the water that we drink, or the health of the oceans, or our ability to use antibiotics, or how workers are treated—there are so many perspectives from which we can look at this. But what is complicated is good farms. And farms where animals are treated very well. And these exist.
EK: How do respond to some of the negative press you’ve had here? Jay Rayner in the Guardian, for example, accusing you of taking a sentimental view of animals.
JSF: Well, I think they’re sentimental. Sentimentality is when our feelings influence us more than our brains and our reason. It is an engagement with the facts, to say, “I don’t want to eat a food that is the worst thing for the environment,” and: “I don’t want to eat a food that abuses animals in ways that I wouldn’t abuse my dog.” That’s not sentimental, that’s just being a decent human being. I have no desire to let a chicken crawl into bed with me, I just don’t want to treat it like a block of wood.
It’s curious, these strange and very sentimental divisions we create. To treat a dog one way and to treat a pig another way is sentimental. And I’ve never heard a good—rational—explanation for why we draw such lines, other than: “we’ve always done it.” Which is not an explanation, as that would justify all kinds of behaviour that we would never do today.
EK: You talk about the need to activate compassion in the book. How do you activate compassion on a practical level?
JSF: Well, I think you activate it in yourself. And I feel odd even using the words because they sound “new-agey.” But in the course of writing this book I noticed that I started behaving differently in ways that had nothing to do with food. I all but stopped buying things on the internet and would just go buy them from local stores. And I knew I was doing it because it felt like the right thing to do. Because I want there to be local stores, I don’t want everything to be Amazon.com.
I like character. I don’t like homogeneity. Life is richer when there are more options, especially when you get to interact with people rather than computers. Life is better when you have somebody say to you, “Oh you should try reading this book,” as opposed to seeing what the sales rankings are for people like you.
EK: And what’s the connection between those impulses?
JSF: All I know is that when I start thinking about food, I start thinking about other things. The goal in life is not to care about as few things as possible. The goal is to think and care about as many things as possible. And my experience of food is that it’s been contained.
Of the two hostile reviews I had in the US, one of them asked why I would care about this subject when there are starving children in the world. First, it’s not a zero-sum game; I don’t take my concern from the kids and give it to the animals. But secondly, I think being awake to the world is a way of recognising that we are perpetuating all different kinds of violence. I don’t think it ever stops with one case. It’s not like you become awakened to the food industry and then say: “this is where I stop.” In the course of writing this I became aware of how workers are treated in different industries. I never got into this to know more about conditions for meat packing workers, but I did. Opening our eyes to one thing can open our eyes to something else.
EK: Do you ever think there can be such a thing as “compassionate farming,” when ultimately what we’re rearing animals for is to be killed? Might we risk simply trying to console ourselves from the reality of the business with such terms as “free-range” and “organic”?
JSF: Yes we do, but those terms are also real too. There are certain labels that really matter, like you would rather be cage-free than in a cage? Maybe it’s put there to manipulate us as consumers and to make us feel good and it’s actually an act of narcissism, but to the chicken it matters.
I think there are examples of humane farming, but I don’t think there can be a humane farming system: there’s just too many people in the world and the planet’s too small, we have too strong a desire for meat and we have become too use to prices that are too low. As a system I just don’t think it would work; people would have to change their habits a lot.
Different technological advancements have made it cheaper to produce food, and society has changed its eating habits around that. People are eating a shit load more meat than ever before, and it’s not good for anybody. Nutritionalists tell us it’s not good for us. And it’s clearly not good for the planet. Americans eat 150 times more chicken than they did 80 years ago. It’s insane. I did try to find a reputable nutritionalist who would say that this is the right amount. But not even the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) says that it’s okay. We’re simply way, way, way above the amount of protein we should be taking in.
Clearly meat can be part of a healthy diet, but it doesn’t need to be part of a healthy diet. And that’s a very important distinction to make. The first research I did for the book wasn’t on farms but was about nutrition, because I thought, well, if my kids need it, I’ll just feed it to them. So, if I found out that there was a consensus that you needed meat to have healthy bones or proper brain growth, I would have done it, because I care more about my kids’ health than I do about farm animals. But, I could not find such a person, and, by the way, I did not talk to a single vegetarian nutritionalist.
EK: Has writing this book changed your perception of humanity?
JSF: No, because I don’t blame consumers. I blame this industry. It’s a very manipulative industry. People have good instincts, and when I wrote this book I didn’t feel like I was having to change peoples’ minds—I felt as though everyone was of the same mind, they just don’t have access to good information. That’s not to say that they’re going to stop eating meat altogether.
I don’t blame people who work in abattoirs either. They work in those places because they need jobs, and they’re just grateful to have a job. Most of them are making minimum wage and most of them are illegal immigrants. You can’t blame them.
The ones you can blame are those who set the protocols for how animals are raised, and how they’re slaughtered and what the environmental effects will be—those decisions are not made on farms, but in cities. I do also blame the USDA and US department for environmental protection for not enforcing laws which are already on the books. Companies are not supposed to be dumping waste from factory farms into rivers. And soon, we are approaching the moment when it will be time to hold consumers to account. To be fair, I don’t know how I’ll feel about this in a couple of years.
It’s interesting: I wrote this whole book and my parents eat meat and I’ve never asked them not to. I’ve never asked anybody not to eat meat actually.
EK: You’ve really never said anything to your parents?
JSF: Well, I think they know what I think (laughs). And they eat meat very rarely, maybe once, twice a week. On top of which, I do things which others would criticise. I buy products that, I’m sure, come from sweatshops halfway around the world. I don’t give nearly as much money as I should to charity. I live in ways which, by any reasonable definition, are extravagant.
EK: What are your extravagancies?
JSF: Well, you know according to those people who say that anyone who lives on more than $35,000 a year is simply like taking food out of the mouths of starving kids. There is a way of looking at the world like that. There’s a book called Living High: Letting Die, and it’s really hard to read, because you finish it and you think “I’m an asshole!”
A certain amount of “assholeness” is not only necessary, but part of a life I want for everyone. But we do have to come to terms with the facts. Especially when these things don’t actually matter that much to us. So much of our problem with the meat industry is food we don’t even like, or don’t even really enjoy. A passing hamburger here or sandwich there—if we just got rid of that, and kept the Christmas ham, and the Thanksgiving turkey, then that’s the answer.
EK: The UN predictions for global meat production in the coming 40 years, particularly with the rapidly expanding Chinese and southeast Asian market, is pretty terrifying. Does that fill you with horror, and if so, how do you remain optimistic in that knowledge?
JSF: Yes, it does. But vegetarianism is becoming such an aspirational identity. Especially on college campuses it’s becoming a desirable identity, and not something that requires explanation or embarrassment. So the fact that 18 per cent of college students are vegetarians, and the fact that those 18 per cent will go on to become journalists, musicians, actors and culture-makers, means the whole thing will feel different. It’s like if you think about how quickly smoking went away after it was banned in public places. Almost entirely: it happened within five years.
EK: It’s still pretty prevalent in Britain.
JSF: Sure, sure, it’s present, but nothing like it used to be. More interestingly, it’s becoming like a social stigma. And I do think that meat eating is going to become like that too. That’s not to say that people won’t do it, but I do think we’re nearing a time when the question is going to be, “Why do you eat it?” and not, “Why don’t you eat it?” And that will be reflected in popular culture. It seems like a huge percentage of actors and singers are already vegetarian anyway. And that, I think, will have a huge effect: the notion that this is the way to be becomes more and more present.
