Guttersnipe Bookshelf: Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company 
2009

Eating Animals is an important book, written and organized in an tremendously skillful way.  I can even honestly say that I enjoyed it.  Despite the fact that I cried half a dozen times and once actually threw up.  (No pork for me, thanks.)  I am grateful for what I learned.  It was worth it.

Safran Foer’s approach to the subject seems to me the ideal one.  Eating Animals is not a diatribe, a rant or a polemic.  His approach is mild-mannered and matter-of-fact.  Many viewpoints are shared, including that of the factory farmer, in a way that is respectful and does justice to each.  Safran Foer, at the start of the book, is an omnivore expecting his first child, contemplating what is right to eat and feed his child, wondering why we eat some animals and pamper others.  By the end of the book, he’s come to some conclusions, but there’s plenty of space and information available for the reader to make different conclusions and choices.

When it comes to factory farming, a polemic is wholly unnecessary.  You needn’t have a jot of sympathy with animal rights activists like PETA – though he does a particularly good job of explaining why their gross-out tactics can be effective.  The relentless brutality and unmitigated suffering of factory farming is enough to shock and repulse  anyone – which is why it is virtually impossible, nowadays, to see where our meat comes from without breaking and entering.

Even if morality, decency and humanity aren’t interests of yours, Safran Foer makes it unnervingly clear how dangerous our food supply is, consisting as it does of drugged bioengineered animals living hellishly in their own excrement.  Turns out that you can hate animals and still oppose factory farming – all you need to know is the history of influenza.

We are part of a system which creates a vast, vicious, and unnecessary mass of brutality and harm.  Most of us, in the back of our minds, already know that.  For reasons of ecology, morality and epidemiology, it’s time we faced the effects of our own choices and actions.

The Extinction of Stories

The stories died out gradually, then catastrophically, as the tiger and the eagle had -- other creatures that perched atop the food chain seeming durable and self-reliant, but which turned out to rely on absolutely everything.

How can a story survive in this city, which arrives and departs on time, which is comfortable and convenient and hurries in perpetual silence?  Even meticulously kept in a climate-controlled room, fed fruit and lean meat, and given a wheel on which to run -- the stories languish.

Because there must be gossip, doomed love affairs, and idle chatter. Time wasted with pals, and drunken talks, and arguments forgotten by morning.

Mosquitoes were always considered an annoyance, but without them many things we loved began to vanish. Who ever imagined that stories, which appeared to thrive in every environment, which went on forever, were actually so vulnerable, so vastly and intricately interdependent?

Of course there are still things called stories. Like that man who twists goats' horns together and claims to have created unicorns. There are now special preserves where stories are born and raised. Even the government has gotten involved, and speeches have been made.

The stories which result appear oddly domesticated. They are correct and impeccably groomed. Their parts are all there. Yet they are strangely dull. Like sheep raised for their wool and meat.

Just when you're about to give up on stories entirely, one appears in the backyard. Gnawed its way out of the preserve evidently. Must have gotten hit by a car.

Don't get too close to it. Despite its ridiculous appearance, that thing will tear your arm off. The goddamned thing intends to live and never mind it's only got three legs.



(An earlier version of this story appeared in Gargoyle #57)

Bully

(from Quick Fiction 12, October 2007)





We warned him that if he didn’t stop being such a mean, tyrannical, egomaniacal, bullying bastard that everyone would eventually leave him. And we were right.

Still, we were shocked when we left and he showed no remorse. This was the mistake we always made with our father. We kept expecting decency would at some point kick in.

He has not noticed we are gone.

Now we live in the trees and look down on him. We are not hidden but he does not see us. His notice of us has always been intermittent—it is in this space that we live, the gap of his inattention, the time between rages.

We watch him keep busy. He builds things with the help of neighbor children he grabs off the street. So far he is building a sauna, a boat house, a chicken coop, and an observatory. We can see into all of them and we watch the fresh yellow wood turn gray. He never gets as far as the roof. He forgets, begins another project, loses his workers. These neighbor children are resourceful. They chew off their hands and escape. Our

tears fall on them from the trees as they stagger away.

He is building a fence. His lawyers scuttle back and forth, huddling and pecking about like hens. They’ve eaten everything in sight: the chives, the popcorn garlands, even the forsythia. Our father steps into the gutted yard and shouts, “All of this is mine!”  The lawyers bob and cluck.

He sits in the yard and writes letters to the newspaper. White paper covers the ground around him. “Discipline is what’s lacking in America! Responsibility! Respect!” He waits for respect like a package lost in the mail that will one day arrive for him, a tremendous wave building elsewhere in the world that will at last rain down on him. Respect! Crash!

The letters languish in the yard. There is no one to mail them for him.  The rain comes and ink washes away into the ground. Nothing grows.

At the end of the day the yard is entirely silent. This is it, we think. Now he will notice we are gone. He does not. He looks around and declares that what he needs is a new lady friend.

Despite the failings of his previous women, our father continues to be a great believer in romantic love. He continues to oil his hair and wear cologne and every day he walks the perimeter of the yard to meet eligible women who have been caught in the leg traps. We hear him complain that he is unappreciated. Disrespected. Nobody pays attention to him.

We watch him day and night, even when he seems to sleep. Our trees begin in his yard. He loves his ax. So far he has not noticed us, which is the same as safety.

Many nights we watch our father gazing upward, past us, at the stars.  He loves the stars. He calls their names, Orion, Deneb, Antares, as if they were dogs. They do not come. They are far enough away, we hope, that they will not be harmed. 

Twelve Orchards

Now that all are gone, I thought that I should make a list of my family's twelve orchards, and what they contained.

Here, then, are the twelve orchards -- as far as I am able to remember. To other people, they might seem ordinary orchards, but they were special to us, and within them we never failed to find wonders.

Orchard #1 was composed of beavers and beaver dams. The rows were navigated by canoe and this orchard was highly profitable, in floods.

Orchard #2 consisted of bonfires. Isn't that convenient? Lovers always had someplace to go and Old Hank got an eyeful as he made a modest fortune selling cider donuts.

In Orchard #3 we cultivated crackpot theories, fringe political candidates and conspiracies. Doomsday was in oversupply -- but wild ideas from left field remained as popular as ever.

Orchard #4 contained only Blue Hubbard Squash. And Blue Hubbards, it must be admitted, were no longer the bumpy gargantuan darlings of American housewives. Nonetheless, the Blue Hubbards were not budging. They'd grown so enormous and so hard -- there was simply no negotiating with them.

In Orchard #5 we grew rocks. Yes, regular rocks. Even though this was not glamorous or profitable the good news was: the rocks were always incredibly successful. The peaches might get hit by frost every other year but -- there were always more rocks, and big ones!

In Orchard #6 we cultivated packinghouse ladies. Naturally the competition to do so was intense. More often than not the workmen took to smacking each other and the packinghouse ladies had to cultivate themselves. Just the same, our packinghouse ladies were second-to-none: apples and children were sorted accordingly, without ever a bruise or a break in the skin.

Orchard #7 was composed of naked apple pickers. Only naked apple pickers. Naked except for their apple buckets. Standing on aluminum ladders. Nobody was allowed to go to Orchard #7. Nobody ever wanted to go anywhere, except to Orchard #7.

In Orchard #8 we grew cider, in jugs. Our grandfather had been among the first to admit that crushing apples for their juice was barbaric.

Admittedly this had its challenges. Some years the trees produced only empty jugs. Other years, only cider. Unsuspecting passersby might suddenly be doused in sweet and sticky juice.

In Orchard #9 we somehow found space for a few apples. Apples possessed of such sterling self-esteem they shined themselves. People who ate them -- or rather, those by whom the apples consented to be eaten -- came to quietly possess small advantages: they grew a third set of teeth or developed the ability to play unusual musical instruments, such as the gamelan or the harmonium.

In Orchard #10 we grew enormous strawberries, on trellis. The taste, its true, did suffer some among these gargantuan berries -- but it will come as a surprise to no one that, on our farm, even the small fruits tended to suffer from delusions of grandeur.

Orchard #11 consisted of herons. What a hassle, only herons! Herons and doomed lugubrious goldfish. Herons and goldfish and tourists. Tourists mostly in hysterics, because nothing in their lives had prepared them for so many herons. In most of the world herons are seen only one at a time: the herons know that is all we can handle.

In Orchard #12 we once cultivated the sky. The sky which once stretched above us, far as the eye could see, the sky which now must be painstakingly maintained in special preserves, given antibiotics and fed intravenously.

We had one of the very last patches of natural sky and, though you may struggle to believe it, the blue of that sky was 100% real natural blue. No dyes or additives were used. This was where the granddaughters received tutorials, directly from the sky. The granddaughters, to whom the farm rightfully belonged.

Twelve orchards!

It is easy to imagine how the boss of such a place might mistake himself for a king. A minor god. Perhaps delusion is nearly unavoidable -- that the arrival of so many herons, so many first-rate packinghouse ladies, means that something is laudable about you personally.

From there it is one small step to believing -- you deserve even better.

"Development," said the Boss, our father, as though the earth does not reach full flower until a house is built atop it. Let someone else preserve the sky. The granddaughters were sent packing.

The granddaughters, to whom the farm rightfully belonged, hurried away, carrying the sky within themselves.

Looking around for something else to sell, the Boss' eye fell upon the herons. Who needs them really, he decided, it's not as though they lay eggs, like chickens. And the herons departed.

To tell the truth, the money had never been good for small fruits -- at least not compared to a road lined with mansions, named Strawberry Lane.

Are apples still necessary nowadays, the Boss wondered, and the apples were left to fall, unpicked, to the ground, where their grief at not being eaten poisoned the water table, generating debt so vast it necessitated selling off Orchard #8, where cider had once grown in jugs.

As for Orchard #7, well, it was found to be simply immoral. Those naked apples pickers were told to put pants on and go home. Which they did -- though you can find them online now at www.appletripleX.com, along with a number of absolutely scintillating naked packinghouse ladies.

The Blue Hubbards, to their credit, operated a courageous guerilla operation, but finally were overtaken and dynamited, along with the field of rocks.

Crackpot theories never got anyone anywhere, our father the Boss declared, and fringe party candidates were never elected. "I am simply being practical, pragmatic and realistic. Hard-headed, rationalistic, matter of fact" said the Boss. The land was blanketed with signs calling for the re-election of Congress' current members.

The bonfires were doused and Old Hank sent off to the old people's home. On that land four pharmacies were built, each the mirror reflection of the others, so that the townspeople might have unparalleled selection.

The beavers, seeing what was coming, hitchhiked out of town, their dams strapped to their backs.

Using the money, the Boss set up the Twelve Orchards Memorial Foundation, complete with statues and speeches, so that the farm might be preserved in perpetuity and provide a refuge to people wearied by the never-ceasing rush of human progress.

All this was accomplished with so much fanfare and adulation

that it was a little while before anyone recognized or admitted that nothing whatsoever was left.