Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals, is the talk of the internet these days. This is Foer’s first nonfiction work (you may remember Foer from such novels as Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and it was prompted by two events: the birth of his first child, and the approach of Thanksgiving. Eating Animals explores the question of how we can sustain the food traditions we grew up with, which often involve eating meat, while passing on the values we have adopted as adults, which may contradict those traditional menus.
Foer’s questions lead him to investigate the food system, and leave him shocked and saddened by the factory farms he witnesses. In the end, though, Foer does not end up writing a book about hard-line vegetarianism. He celebrates the few (tragically few) farmers who resist the factory farm system by raising and slaughtering animals as humanely as possible, and he asks us to see the question of meat-eating as a spectrum. We cannot ignore factory farms, the sheer speed of production (400 cows an hour, a pig every three or four seconds, all at one slaughterhouse) and the sheer horror of seeing these places (this is a family blog, you’ll have to read the book yourself) is literally unimaginable. But that’s one end of the spectrum, and cutting animal products out of your life entirely is just the other end. As Foer points out, much of the reason that the factory farm system still thrives is that people feel that if they can’t bring themselves to move to the other end of the spectrum and give up meat completely, they shouldn’t make any changes at all: if they can’t do everything, they feel they must do nothing. When we make decisions about food, we must do so from the point on that spectrum where we are most comfortable. Being responsible about food doesn’t necessarily mean giving up meat, or giving up food traditions, Foer argues. It simply means being aware of the consequences of our choices, and choosing foods and food sources carefully.
Which brings me to something else that’s been floating around the internet lately: these guys. They’re butchers, in Brooklyn, NY. Their policy of never wasting a part of an animal has led them in some strange directions, like a “sandwich” with pork tongues instead of bread. Yeah, it sounds gross, but people seem to love it, and the “no waste” policy and locally sourced meat are a great antidote to factory farms and megachain grocery stores. They just opened their new shop, The Meat Hook, yesterday, in the same building as The Brooklyn Kitchen (home of some great cooking classes). It can be tough living in the age of factory farms, simultaneously being appalled at the way meat gets to our plates, and cherishing the traditions in our lives that involve meat (and just liking the taste), but it’s good to know that there are butchers out there who try to take a better approach to meat than fast, cheap, and unethical.
P.S. If you’re after more blogs about Thanksgiving in these modern times, but with less moral questions, and more talk about quick and energy-efficient ways of cooking a turkey, check this out.
