INTERVIEW:Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book looks at the horrors of factory farming and questions how we can eat meat without really thinking of the animals. He talks to ANNA CAREY
AMERICAN COMEDIAN ELLEN DeGeneres recently devoted a segment of her daytime talk show to the many letters she’d received from viewers who had been profoundly affected by a book that had featured on the show. Eating Animals is the first non-fiction work by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. In it, the author examines his own attitude towards eating meat and investigates the often barbaric way animals are farmed in the US.
On the Ellen DeGeneres Show several viewers said the book had inspired them to become vegetarian or vegan. A nine-year-old girl said she had read the book with her mother and, as a result, they started drinking soya milk and buying free-range eggs from a farm. The girl suggested Safran Foer write a version of the book aimed at children.
Yet Safran Foer doesn’t see himself as an activist. A few days before the show aired, the Brooklyn-based author of the acclaimed novels Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated tells me he’s not a campaigner. “I don’t think of myself that way,” he says. “I really think of myself as a novelist.” And he doesn’t plan to write any more non-fiction.
But the book is clearly having a big impact and the reaction from vegetarians and omnivores has been positive. Safran Foer seems faintly surprised. “I guess I was worrying it would more controversial than it turned out to be,” he says. “One thing that surprised me was that the strongest positive reaction was from [small] farmers and probably the strongest negative reaction was from animal-rights groups. They thought it didn’t go far enough – it leaves room for killing animals.”
In the book, Safran Foer, a vegetarian, suggests that if farming was more humane, he would consider eating meat; he’s remarkably non-judgmental of those who eat the odd burger. The only people he hasn’t heard anything from, he says, are factory farmers – indicating that they know what he’s written is both accurate and indefensible.
The one criticism that seems to bother him is the suggestion that, by writing about animals, he is ignoring the suffering of human beings. He seems keen (or as keen as anyone with such a relaxed demeanour can ever seem) to point out that just because he has written about this subject doesn’t mean he believes it’s more important than issues that affect people. “People ask, ‘why does this matter more than world hunger or malaria?’ – and it doesn’t,” he says. “It’s just one thing that matters an awful lot to me. And it’s a subject that’s really under-served – it’s not spoken or written about as much as it should be. It’s not that there aren’t other issues that captivate me; I always want to know more about genocide or poverty – and positive things as well. But, thank goodness, there are so many people out there writing about them. Meat is different. It’s hard to think of anything else we confront so often that’s given such a silent treatment.”
Although Safran Foer paints a grim picture of industrial farming, he does believe change is possible – after all, he points out, the current system is relatively young. Factory farming has only been around for roughly 70 years – traditional farming has existed for 10,000.
“The newness [of modern farming] also holds the promise of it being dismantled,” he says. There are, he believes, reasons to be depressed about the future of food: the fact that China is taking on Western eating habits, the fact that more people are eating more meat than ever before. But there are also reasons to be cheerful. “There are also more vegetarians than ever before,” he says. “It’s not a weird marginal hippy thing.”
Safran Foer believes the debate is moving in a new direction. In the future, he hopes, the question will be not simply whether you eat meat or not, but whether you care about animal welfare and the environmental consequences of eating meat. “Very few people will become vegetarians but just about everyone cares when they’re presented with the facts,” he says. “I appreciate that many don’t feel they can become vegetarians. But there are a lot of people who feel they can eat one or two less servings of meat a week, and that direction is helpful.”
After dabbling in vegetarianism as a teenager, 32-year-old Safran Foer has been a full-time veggie for three years. And yes, he does miss meat sometimes, especially when he smells a roast chicken. “But there are all kinds of things we crave and don’t act on,” he says. “Most people have sexual urges at some point every week that we don’t act on, and we don’t feel that as a great deprivation – even though the satisfaction of that urge would probably be a lot more significant than any meal. It’s not deprivation; it’s what it means to be a civilised person.”
In the book, Safran Foer tells how his grandmother survived the second World War in eastern Europe by hiding from the Nazis and eating whatever she could find. At the very end of the war, she was close to starvation when a Russian farmer took pity on her and offered her some food. But she refused, because it wasn’t kosher. When Safran Foer asked why she didn’t take the food in order to save her own life, she told him: “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”
Safran Foer says he can’t really understand the depth of feeling that led a starving young woman to refuse that meat. “But I respect it, infinitely – somebody whose values were so important to her that she would risk her life for them. If I was malnourished in a forest and somebody offered me factory-farmed pork, would I eat it? Yes. I feel very strongly about it but not as strongly as she felt about [keeping kosher]. But I did understand the lesson she was trying to convey, which was not that I should keep kosher but that we should act on our values – even when it seems difficult.”
Eating Animalsby Jonathan Safran Foer is published by Penguin, €14.99
