Jonathan Safran Foer

I’ve been thinking recently about Jonathan Safran Foer, specifically this interview from The  Atlantic Monthly. In it he takes some puzzling logistic leaps and says some things that I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with while simultaneously endorsing a simplistic notion of vegetarianism – and meat eating – that I am adamantly opposed to.

I’ll preface this by saying that I haven’t read Eating Animals – Foer’s pro-vegetarian book – and he may well go into depth about some of these things in that book. I have read several reviews of it and found them hard to learn much from because the reviewers let their own beliefs color their reviews so much.  So it’s hard to glean how much emphasis he put s on sustainability issues, as opposed to the morality of eating meat.

Foer starts out the interview with a hearty endorsement of sustainable farms – he praises them for treating their animals well and, as he puts it, “the goodness of good farmers might have surprised me more than the badness of bad farmers.” So far so good – I think we can all agree that factory farming is terrible.  And that, perhaps, not all meat consumption has to fit the bad models in his book.

Then the interview gets, well, cloudy. Here’s an excerpt:

So are you a vegetarian because, at this point in the history of farming, it’s safer, morally, to be a vegetarian? In other words, if you absolutely knew that all the meat or eggs and milk that were produced by X farm were produced according to your standards, would you go back to eating meat?

JF: You mean assuming that that farm existed in the context of this world?

Now Foer is putting on the interviewer, right? He knows that farm exists, because he just talked about it, one paragraph earlier.  And if he’s been doing his homework, he knows there are hundreds of good farmers out there doing the right things.

I’ll let you finish the interview yourself. I can’t get into all the logic leaps he takes here. What the interview comes down to, at the end, is that vegetarianism is virtuous because factory farming of animals is bad.  Foer winds up by pointing out how many college students are vegetarian and how, simply put, vegetarianism – without any kind of context, mind you (you could be vegetarian and eat pizza and taco bell every meal ) – is the virtuous choice.

It’s a lazy argument, and it’s disingenuous.

I’m not going to argue about the virtue of a dietary choice. It’s a moral or even religious question and one which I find myself ill-equipped to deal with. I will say that we are lucky to be able to live in an affluent culture in which we can make decisions about what we eat; most of the world doesn’t get that choice. They eat what they have or they starve.

The problem with his argument is that it equates all meat production with factory farming, while giving short shrift to the factory farming of vegetables and fruits. In other words, it’s not meat that’s the problem. It’s industrial agriculture, period.  When I have this discussion with vegetarians their argument so often comes down to factory farming. It’s as if the option is vegetarianism vs. factory farming, while if you’ve been paying any attention to sustainable food culture over the last decade you know that choice is bunk.

Kate and I are lucky to live in a place where we can eat locally and sustainably almost year round. We have made a conscious decision to avoid factory-farmed anything, especially meat. We’re lucky to have great farmers around Bloomington who raise cows and chickens and pork and rabbits in ways that we can fully support. I recognize that not all people can do that, and that we’re in the minority, but I think we’ve made a virtuous choice although meat is still part of our diet. The argument that I can’t stand is the lowest common denominator argument – “factory farming of meat is bad, therefore all meat production is bad.” It’s jingoistic and doesn’t take anything else into account.

I’m sure if you’ve paid attention to food politics at all that you know about the Coalition of Immokalee workers. These are migrant, mostly Latino farm workers in Florida that pick tomatoes for a few cents on the pound in fields in Florida, picking mostly for Taco Bell and McDonalds and Burger King. Throughout the 2000s the group has staged boycotts of those and other big-time fast-food outlets because they have tried to increase the wage the companies pay the pickers. By a penny. A single penny per pound. For most workers the amount would be less than 2 dollars a day. And the fast-food giants have fought it tooth and nail. It took years for the workers to claim victory – for these three behemoth corporations to accede to the penny-a-pound wage increase.

Notice what’s not produced or harvested by these farms? Meat. It’s all vegetables. Now, would Foer –or anyone –argue that food produced in this way is a virtuous or moral choice?

If you drive through the arid parts of southern California and Arizona, you’ll find these miraculous fields of iceberg lettuce, grown with the help of millions of gallons a day of water sucked in from thousands of miles away and coated in pesticides and insecticides. The workers, many undocumented and working for slave wages , have cancer rates 2-3 times higher than their population should, even accounting for the statistical noise around cancer clusters and poverty. That is industrial agriculture, my friends. Growing non-native produce that requires enormous amounts of scarce water and energy while giving its workers cancer and polluting what little groundwater there is left with poison. And, again, this is vegetable farming. This is the stuff that allows us to eat flavorless tomatoes in December in Indiana. Is this a virtuous operation?

I’ve gone to the farm where the chicken we eat are raised. I feel completely comfortable with the way they are treated. I know how they’re fed and processed. And yet my choice to eat them is less virtuous, according to Foer, than eating a Taco Bell bean burrito? How can that be? Does the virtue of vegetarianism excuse the terrible conditions of big agriculture? Or, to put it another way, can you condemn all vegetable eating because so many vegetables are raised so horrendously, with so much waste and a complete disrespect of the human beings who grow and harvest our vegetables?

Of course, I don’t buy that argument either – I think using the worst of an institution to impugn that very institution is lazy. It’s what Rush Limbaugh does. It’s something the film Food, Inc. fell perilously close to doing before salvaging the film with the appearance of Joel Salatin and his “beyond organic” approach to farming. But what we should be talking about is sustainability and how much we’ve removed it from our vocabulary around food.

Do we eat too much meat in this country? Of course. A McDonald’s hamburger used to be one ounce of meat. Now it’s four times that. But we also eat too many tomatoes in December, we grow so much corn that most of it is fed to animals or used as fuel, we obliterate our topsoil by planting too much and refusing to leave fields fallow. We eat billions of pounds of Dole bananas every year, simply because they have a monopoly on the product and they treat their workers worse than you or I would treat a dog.  In that context what is virtuous? What choice is moral?

When it comes to food and its production and consumption, it’s not the product; it’s the process. We have to get Industrial Agriculture out of the picture.  Then we can talk a bit more honestly about eating virtuously or morally. At least then we’d have some concept of what those words even mean.

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