Journey of a vegetarian missionary

FOOD: MARY RUSSELLreviews Eating AnimalsBy Jonathan Safran Foer Hamish Hamilton, 341pp. £20

IT'S HARD not to feel sorry for Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, a personal account of his journey towards vegetarianism. Did he never, as a child, get to work the festive turkey's claws, examine the contents of its stomach or push stuffing up both its orifices – the turkey being already dead, of course. It seems not and, as he rightly observes, we are now so distanced from the reality of the food industry that we can tolerate the appalling suffering animals are subjected to in order to get them on our tables.

Eating Animalsis an examination of both compassionate farming and factory farming mainly in the US, and you would be well advised not to read it while biting in to a beefburger or savouring that slice of succulent ham. Not only because it might put you off your dinner but you might even become vegetarian – something which would please Foer who, as a committed vegetarian, is positively missionary in his desire to spread the word about the way in which animals, bred for food, are forced to live and die.

Up until recently – he is now 32 – he had been an occasional vegetarian. “Any dietary restrictions I need to know about tonight?” his lawyer father would ask at the family dinner table.

Then he became a father himself and asked the question: what should he give his own children to eat?

His journey, down a tunnel into hell, brought him to places – physical and spiritual – that clearly left him uncomfortable.

Some things, because of their outright cruelty, were easier than others to handle: those turkey farms which have on-site incinerators to deal with the many birds who die of suffocation because they have to live in a space the size of an A4 sheet of paper, or the electrically charged baths through which the birds are pulled to kill them. There are the heifers who, inconveniently, start to give birth on their way to the “kill floor” so that their calves have to be pulled out the rest of the way out before they can go on to the next stage. One man who did this and sent the live calf back to the stockyards landed in trouble with his boss: “He’d wanted that calf. They use the blood for cancer research”.

This is America though, we can say. Nothing to do with what goes on here. But we should not be too complacent.

The discomfort Foer experiences stems from the fact that some of the farmers he meets are decent people, striving to treat their animals well, letting them roam freely in green pastures and doing as much as they can to lessen the stress of impending death whether it comes via a stun gun, a bolt shot through the brain or a knife drawn across the carotid artery. (The flesh of an animal stressed at the moment of death tastes acid and won’t sell so well.)

He meets Nicolette, who is genuinely dedicated to giving her animals a good life and who, amazingly, is vegetarian. A pragmatist, she advocates a return to more humane farming and lays down the three aims she has for her animals: a good life, an easy death and little waste.

He also meets Frank, owner of a relatively small organic farm, whose future looked grim when the local slaughterhouse closed. He was saved by an entrepreneurial friend who helped fund the building of a slaughterhouse right there on Frank’s farm so that the animals could be killed on the spot, thus cutting down on the stress many animals feel when being transported over long distances. The friend was vegan.

Foer has his critics, not least among the factory farmers who say that people have to be fed and that the returns on compassionate farming are too small. The conveyor-belt method pays better.

A point made by Foer and one not often brought in to the discussion is that the modern farmer no longer farms, not in the US at any rate. They merely operate the conveyor belt.

The argument for and against compassion in farming and indeed vegetarianism will continue till the cows come home, whenever that will be, but what is interesting in this book is the philosophising – though some would call it agonising. Foer graduated in philosophy at Princeton and here examines the ethical aspect of flesh eating which involves, he says, choosing between unavoidable and serious conflict of interests, in this case, "the human's desire for a palate pleasure and an animal's interest in not having her throat slit". He looks at what he calls the hierarchy of empathy: we love baby animals and especially cuddly ones, so that pigs and fish are way down the line – though I bet from this he hasn't read Charlotte's Web.

Like his earlier, much-praised novel, Everything is Illuminated, Eating Animalshas its share of irritating graphics and Foer's dedication to his subject at times borders on the born-again. Nevertheless, his literary narrative easily sustains the huge amount of research that has gone into this book.

Read it after you’ve eaten, but read it.

Mary Russell is a writer and a vegetarian