“Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.”
I am not a raging anything. I am passionate about my own decisions yet I have never felt the need to inform others on how to live, behave or what to eat. Yet reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals has led me to examine my life as an eater, a food lover and a person with a heavy conscious.
I was raised in a Colombian household. To my family eating was a shared experience of delight, laughter and indulgence. To put it simply, in our home food was love. My mother cooked dishes that often times caused our upstairs tenants to come knocking on our door to linger in the doorway and get a better whiff of the spice filled aroma that ran through their air vent. Welcomed by my parents, they’d end up sitting at our dinner table eating my mother’s carne assada, ground beef stuffed bell peppers, fajitas, yellow salted potatoes, chicken and rice, meatballs, ceviche, breaded lemon pork chops. The Muñoz residence was a home of extreme foodies. This is why I’m sure my family was stunned when I, who loved all things wrapped in bacon, announced that I was going to become a vegetarian.
I have been a vegetarian for over ten years now. And although I’m still often faced with why in hell would you not eat meat expressions, hmm, interesting whimpers of pity, interrogating questions and pointblank confused glares, nowadays I rarely stop to acces, let alone defend my life choices. Reading Eating Animals caused me to examine my relationship with food. My reasoning like Foer’s and that of many vegetarians circled around the fact that I did not want to eat animals. It is the grappling of this truth that lies at the core of Eating Animals. Foer’s book is many things including, a self-study, a memoir, a book about food, an activist environmental book, but above all it’s a book that questions and challenges our habits, our comfort, our future and our humanity. Eating Animals is a call to action for people who may or may not want to know about what eating animals entails. Foer asks readers to put down their forks and ask: What am I eating? How did it get on my plate? Who and what do my eating choices affect? And ultimately, what does it mean to eat animals?
Foer’s clever modernist prose seen that appear in his works of fiction, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, seeps the pages of Eating Animals, his first nonfiction book. Fatherhood was the catalyst for Foer to research the food industry, visit farms and factories across the nation and write a book about eating animals. In 270 pages Eating Animals examines people’s relationship with animals, identifies Foer’s vegetarian conviction and traces both his hopeful and horrific encounters with American farming and food production.
What sets Foer’s poignant and informative book apart from other books and documentaries about this country’s food industry is his ability to sympathize with animal eaters. Foer’s sentimentality towards eating animals lies in the fact that neither he nor his vegetarian raised child will ever eat his grandmother’s famous chicken and carrots. I am often times asked if I miss the taste of meat and my answer is always yes. Eating animals is delicious. Yet my missing meat does not mean I long for it. I miss eating animals because it was once a part of who I was.
When describing his lack of lust for red meat Foer admits, “…the smell of summer barbeque still makes my mouth water.” Similarly, to this day the smell of fried bacon makes my eyelids flutter. I am able to placate myself with a deep blissful inhale. Stuffed turkey, glazed ham, baked chicken, pickled fish, most major holidays have a super star animal at the center of the table ready to be eaten. Herein lies the paradox, eating animals is a significant part of the American lifestyle yet, as Foer states, American factory farming is the key player in the deterioration of our ecosystem.
Eating Animals is not simply another pro-vegan and anti-meat book. What is at stake here is not only the animal welfare, health and environmental issues but our ability to stop think and choose to act upon our moral instinct. “Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.” Food production in this country has gone terribly awry. Yet as a population of people who love to eat animals we are writing our own downfall. “Scientists predict the total collapse of all fished species in less than fifty years.” The destruction of our everyday buying and eating choices are revealed in Eating Animals and although the truths Foer presents are neither pleasing nor easy to act upon they should be seriously considered. Foer teaches his reader that the staggering effects of factory farming impact both the environment and human morals. Reading Eating Animals has caused me to become a more active vegetarian mainly because I don’t want my children or grandchildren to look back on my generation with anger and disappointment. “More than anything, I want people to come away with the idea that meat matters," Foer says. "I am not asking other people to come to these conclusions. I am asking people to see something that they already know, which is that what we choose to eat when ordering at a restaurant, what we choose to buy at a supermarket, is frankly one of the most important decisions we'll make all day.”
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Gloria Munoz wrote this amazing essay. When you see her, ask her to sing that Lorca poem. She will swoon you with her voice.
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