DANIELLE WEBB
CUP National Bureau Chief

TORONTO (CUP) — Jonathan Safran Foer’s life changed when he became a father, responsible for feeding someone else.

Food is sacred in many ways. It is life, it is comfort and it is ingrained in every culture on Earth. His grandmother refused to accept pork when she was starving near the end of the Second World War because she was Jewish. She told him that if nothing mattered, there was nothing to save.

Safran Foer is out to save his son and what matters is the food that he puts on their table. As he began to learn more about that food, he came to loathe one thing: The world of factory farming.

“I thought, ”˜Could I eat meat and continue to be myself?’ That question is really exaggerated when you’re sent into a fun-house mirror when you have a kid, because being yourself involves telling stories to your kids,” Safran Foer, the best-selling author of Eating Animals, said during a presentation at the University of Toronto on Sept. 29.

“I’m really glad that when it comes to food and addressing that sensitive subject, I don’t have to lie or gloss it over.”

After finding out his wife was pregnant, Safran Foer embarked on a cross-country mission to find out where meat comes from and what happens to it before it arrives on our plates.

Factory farms are the mechanized food production system from which most meat products emerge. Processing thousands of animals a day, the system has been accused of butchering animals while they are still alive and allowing manure and other by-products to enter into the food chain. The enormous amounts of antibiotics used in the industry have also led to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which is more difficult to control when people become sick with those infections.

“More than 99 per cent of the animals we eat come from factory farms,” he said.

And the impacts that system has on public health, the environment and animal welfare are staggering.

“We now have a farm system that is the number one cause of global warming. It is, according to the United Nations, one of the top two or three causes of every environmental problem on the planet,” said Safran Foer.

“We know it’s making our antibiotics less effective. We know we’re treating animals in ways that would be illegal if they were dogs or cats. And we know it’s terrible for our health. If we can’t agree that those things are bad, it’s very hard to have any kind of worthwhile civilization.”

But food is complicated, he says.

“It’s comforting; it’s about breaking bread; it is a religion. These things are not easy to get over. They’re important. The question is: Are they infinitely important?”

Today’s meat industry is built around producing cheap meat that can be quickly prepared. And that industry is broken, he says.

“Americans eat 180 times more chicken today than they did a century ago. It’s hard to call that consumer choice. It’s hard to imagine people saying, ”˜I don’t want to eat just a little more chicken… but a ridiculous shitload more chicken.’

“Our notions of what food is and what meals are have been completely perverted. What has been taken from us is not only our environment or our humanity or our animals or health, but our [cultural] value of food,” he said.

Part of repairing the system will be achieving a proper subsidy structure, moving towards small family-run farms, re-introducing a culture of food where kids are taught how to prepare meals and, of course, decreasing our consumption of meat.

“Change can happen quickly. There are more vegetarians than Catholics at American universities. Just think, in five years when these [students] become journalists, writers, politicians, doctors, ignoring it’s going to become very, very difficult.

“We’re just getting to that point where there’s just too much information to ignore.”

But Safran Foer is not asking everyone to give up meat entirely, starting tomorrow. Choosing between being a vegetarian or a meat-eater ignores a huge middle ground where we can all come together, he says.

A radio host once told him that vegetarians make terrible tourists. But Safran Foer counters that context is everything. Few people spend their entire lives as tourists and living for the exception is never an excuse to do anything.

“How often are we tourists? How often do we find ourselves in Papua New Guinea being offered pig’s testicles?” he asked. “Maybe some of us are a week, two weeks a year. So eat that stuff when you’re in Papua New Guinea for those two weeks a year but don’t use that as an excuse for eating McDonald’s when you’re in Toronto.”

Instead, he says, it’s all about baby steps. “Each meal is an opportunity,” he said, to make a choice to eat according to personal taste, larger goals and according to health.

He says that if every American ate one less serving of meat a week, it would be the environmental equivalent of taking five million cars off the road.

“If someone says to me, ”˜I can’t become a vegetarian,’ okay. But if someone says to me, ”˜I can’t remove one serving of meat a week,’ it’s kind of pathological. It sounds like you are addicted to meat.

“That’s where we should be starting.”

– –
Photo: William Wolfe-Wylie/CUP