'Eating Animals' by Jonathan Safran Foer: Are you brave enough to read this?

November 10, 1:32 AMPhiladelphia Literary Scene ExaminerKathye Petrie

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This book could change your life — and the world.

Warning: Do not read this posting or Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals, unless you are prepared to be horrified, confused, brought to the point of nausea and/or tears and — most importantly, made to do some serious thinking and possibly moved to make some major lifestyle changes. This is a spoiler alert in the truest sense: Eating Animals can "ruin" your present eating lifestyle and supposed reality.  But it can also change your life — and the world — for the better.

In many ways,  I wish I had never read this book: Yet I am grateful I did.

Having said all that, I will  leave some space between this sentence and the next paragraph, so you can close this page now if you choose not to read on.
 

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For those of you willing to continue:

With Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer has written the book almost all authors want to write: a book that could change lives and change the world.  In my opinion, it is on par with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It is that important.

It is also, like Carson's book, extremely disturbing. But it is necessary reading.

Many people, when I tell them I am reading, Eating Animals, say to me "Don't tell me, I don't want to know."  I want to ask them this: If there were feces in the water you and your family were drinking, would you want to know about it? Or would you prefer not to know so you could continue to enjoy drinking it, and using it to hydrate yourself and your children?

The analogy is mine, but I think it is an apt one if you exchange the words "water" for "chicken," "drinking" for "eating," and "feed and supposedly nourish" for "hydrate." Because, one of the facts I learned on pages 130-31 of Eating Animals is that if you are eating chicken processed at a plant using refrigerated tanks of water to cool just-slaughtered chickens  (as opposed to air chilling), those chickens are bobbing in a communal bath of "filth and bacteria" nicknamed "fecal soup," and that contaminated liquid is absorbed into the chicken carcasses you will eventually be buying at most supermarkets (emphasis mine). In fact, up to 11% of that fouled liquid is allowed in each chicken by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) laws.

Speaking of the USDA , Foer tells us that USDA inspectors inspect about 25,000 chickens per day, and have only two seconds to check each bird inside and out for abnormalties and disease.  Eating Animals quotes an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter's article which said "every week millions of chickens leaking yellow pus, stained by green feces, contaminated by harmful bacteria. or marred by lung and heart infections, cancerous tumors, or skin conditions are shipped for sale to consumers."

But no worries: the processing plants commonly use chlorine baths "to remove slime, odor and bacteria" on the poultry. This is not to be confused with the electric baths live chickens, upside down and shackled by their ankles, are dragged through prior to slaughter in order to immobilize them before their throats are slit, so they can't scream or flap their wings, though they remain conscious.

"After it has traveled through the bath, a paralyzed bird's eyes might still move," writes Foer on page 129. "Sometimes the birds will have enough control of their bodies to slowly open their beaks as if attempting to scream."

These and many, many more equally and even more horrifying facts are recounted in Eating Animals. In this book, you will learn that the words "free range" can legally be applied to an uncaged chicken jam-packed in a building with no windows and a closed door with thousands of other chickens, alive and dead, so that he or she has only has 67 square inches of space in which to live before he or she is killed. You will learn about a not uncommon practice called "thumping" in which a the runt of a pig litter is killed by picking him or her up the hind legs and smashing his or her head on concrete.

This and more. The cruelties inflicted by humans on chickens, pigs, cows, even fish, who are surprisingly sentient and social beings, as outlined in this book, are astounding.  The antibiotics, anti-diarrheals hormones, salty broths and flavorings stuffed into what is sold to us as food is frightening.

And then there is this: Factory farming, the means for 99% of meat production in the United States, is ruining our health and the environment. It is the number one cause of global warming, the number one cause of air and water pollution, it's making our disease-fighting drugs less effective, it's responsible for the emergence of swine flu, and may be responsible for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).
 
Who knew? And what to do?

Start with informing yourself. Actually, you have already started. You were brave enough to read this post.  Now be brave enough to read Eating Animals in its entirety. Also: Jonathan Safran Foer will speaking at the Free Library of Philadelphia tonight, 11/10/09,  at 7:30 PM. Go and hear him . Ask him questions.  Look things up on the internet. Read other books on the subject. Think.  Talk to your family and friends.

You may, like Jonathan Safran Foer, decide to never eat meat again, that it is just not right, on so many levels. for you or your family to do so.  You may take it one step at a time, and find a local farm that raises organic, lived-a-full-life-in-a-pasture animals that are slaughtered quickly and humanely and not in a mass-processing plant where animal cruelty and human health hazards are rampant.

Eating Animals is not a diatribe or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) polemic. It's one man's well-researched (including his own eye-witness night forays into factory farm sheds), footnoted, journalistic personal search for the answers to whether or not he should eat meat or feed it to his child. He doesn't tell you what to do or not do. The message of the book is that you have to gather the facts and decide for yourself, measure the realities of eating meat against your values.  But first you have to know what values are being violated, by not hiding from facts surrounding obtaining the meat you are eating.  So get the facts. Don't put your head in the sand, don't let the wool be pulled over your eyes.  Because what you don't know or don't want to know can — and is — harming you.

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