Foer on the Future of Farms and Food

By Travis Pillow

I’m excited that one of my favorite novelists – Jonathan Safran Foer – has a new book out in which his own struggle to break free of the factory farm takes the form of a personal narrative carries echoes many of the themes of his earlier work while addressing perhaps the most important issue of our time.

Three quotes from a recent interview Foer did at Salon draw an important distinction between folks like us, who worry about the effects of industrial agriculture, and what I’m going to call the PETA crowd, who tend to dominate our side of the debate with emotional nonsense:

It’s a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people’s exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they’re the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it’s still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned. These things are not as shocking and don’t work as well in a video, but they’re something to be concerned with much more because they’re happening to billions and billions of animals every year.

I’m with Foer. I really don’t give a shit if someone injures a cow they’re about to kill anyway, or whether it’s a “clean kill” or not. But I do care about the underlying mentality, which, as I’ve written in the past, can wind up affecting the quality of the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breath.

“Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?” That’s how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn’t even matter. The truth is I actually don’t know what I think about that question. What I know is that it’s wrong to do it the way that we’re doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that’s right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis.

I’m not willing to follow Foer’s logic all the way to strict vegetarianism, for a simple reason: I like meat. Plus some types of meet, like beef from cows that eat grass, or venison shot by hunters, allow humans to consume calories in grass or forest foliage that we couldn’t otherwise convert to usable energy. But I realize that I – and everyone else – am going to need to get used to eating a lot less of it. The price paid by the planet is just too high. I’ve seen that elusive near-perfect farm Foer talks about, and he’s right: it can’t possibly be reproduced on a large enough scale to allow us to maintain our current levels of consumption.

The last one speaks for itself:

Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That’s it. It doesn’t taste good, it’s not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it’s cheap. But the thing is that it’s not cheap. It’s cheap at the cash register, and it’s sold as cheap — that’s the defense for factory farming, “Look, we’re making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist.” But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it’s the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying. And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness — companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that’s so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.