Foer is the award-winning author of two novels, "Everything Is Illuminated", and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"; this is his first non-fiction book.

I didn’t want to write about this until I’d actually spent a few days eating vegetarian food….but now it’s been eight days, and I’m still alive. Eight days? Without any meat at all? What happened? I read a book, and it changed my life.  A week ago I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, and after the first chapter I stopped eating meat. A day later I felt the same way, and a few days later, when I finished the book, I felt even more sure….until suddenly here I am sitting at my laptop, a week-old vegetarian.

I didn’t write about those first few days because I wasn’t positive I’d feel so sure of my convictions after a day or so of not eating my usual chicken or turkey. I imagined myself caving after 48 hours, driving (a little too fast) to Jack in the Box and shouting “CHICKEN SANDWICH” into the drive-thru intercom, with the desperation of someone who’d just spent a week in the Sahara without water and had suddenly found an oasis. I imagined writing to you all, “OH HI YEAH I’M A VEGETARIAN AGAIN,” and then a few days later announcing, “Oh hi yeah, uh, scratch that, I’m going back to moderation; hand me that burger.”

But the thing is, every time I’m hungry and I don’t know what to eat, and I’m freaking out because I have no idea how to get myself some good protein, the idea of going out and getting some chicken just makes me sick. The idea that I might need some factory-farmed chicken, the cooked carcass of a creature that spent it’s short life in abject pain and misery, cruelly slaughtered after a life of suffering and confusion, just because I like the taste of chicken and I’m not sure what else to eat right now, seems like the stupidest thing in the world. Hand me the beans.

I want you to read Foer’s book, I want everyone in the world to read Foer’s book, but what cinched it for me wasn’t even something he wrote; it was a letter he published in the chapter Hiding/Seeking, written by the woman who snuck him into a turkey operation in the middle of the night. She wrote what is probably the most eloquent case for animal rights I’ve ever read. A couple excerpts:

….This [factory farms] isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry person does to killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

…Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. Society didn’t ban child labor because it’s impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it’s corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than an animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting. I’m not speculating. This is our reality. Look at what factory farming is. Look at what we as a society have done to the animals as soon as we had the technological power. Look at what we actually do in the name of “animal welfare” and “humaneness”, then decide if you still believe in eating meat.

(Emphasis mine.)

What Foer’s book makes you do is look. He makes you look, because he looks, and he doesn’t just stop after he discovers the gruesome reality of a slaughterhouse kill floor (where cows are frequently stunned instead of killed, and eviscerated while hanging from one leg, still alive).

He delves into the history of factory farming, he asks why we don’t eat our pets (making a case for why eating Fido makes a lot of good sense), he interviews people who own and run ranches, he asks if it’s possible to raise animals for eating humanely, he searches out sources of “humane” meat, he traces the history of the factory farm, and he asks what this entire industry is doing to us; as consumers, as people who live on the earth that factory farms are destroying (you can’t eat factory farmed meat and call yourself an environmentalist anymore than you can financially support the exploits of a rapist and call yourself a feminist), and as human beings – it’s impossible to make the case that delivering regular violence to animals doesn’t negatively affect a person.

We don’t want to look at what we’re eating, at least not too closely, and I refuse to excuse myself from this anymore. I’m not willing to support an industry that condones cruelty and suffering on this incredible scale, for what? Because I like chicken? Because it’s hard to find vegetarian options I like? Because I don’t like the taste of vegetables that much? I’LL GET OVER IT. Do you know what “thumping” is? It’s the common practice of picking up a runt piglet, one that won’t grow fast enough to make a buck, by it’s hind legs, and beating it to death on the concrete floor. Would you take a runt puppy and beat it to death on your floor? What if you walked in and saw your child doing that to a kitten? How is a piglet’s suffering any different than a cat or dog’s?

Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to climate change than all transportation in the world combined; do you know how stupid I feel driving my Prius to go pick up a cheeseburger? How can I go pick up my daughter’s asthma medicine, and then go buy  a pork sandwich, when I know that children raised near factory farms are twice as likely to develop asthma? I’m condemning a child to illness with my lunch.

Communities living near factory farms have problems with persistent nosebleeds, earaches, chronic diarrhea, and burning lungs – how can I possibly eat factory farmed meat knowing that my dollars are going to make communities of families sick, torment animals for nothing but a taste preference, support probably the worst labor practices in the United States, destroy the earth I love, and likely make it so that any future antibiotics I might need to take to make me healthy won’t work so well?

I’m done pretending none of this exists. It does. We all know it does. Make fun of PETA and the crazy hippies all you want, pretend that you “need” to eat factory farmed meat; but just try for a minute to think about where it comes from. I have, and Foer’s book put it into a perspective that just brought it all home, I can’t live with myself if I continue eating this way. I just can’t. I’m not the person I want to be if I pretend this isn’t happening, if I pretend that I’m not a part of it.

I’m terrified to say this – not because I’m afraid I’ll change my mind about the cost of human, animal, and environmental suffering – but because I have this probably ridiculous fear that my body won’t work as a vegetarian, that I’ll somehow get sick and shrivel up, and then what? Would I support the industry to stay alive? Would it really come to that? Am I maybe experiencing the tiniest bit of irrational fear here?  I guess we’ll see, won’t we?

Moderation is a great thing, and I’m happy that I’ve been working on accomplishing goals slowly instead overnight. I didn’t mean for this book to fall into my lap, and I didn’t mean to feel this strongly about it. It just did, and I just do. I’m still eating some dairy products sometimes. Mostly stuff like the occasional slice of cheese pizza when everyone else has ordered meat, or when I can’t avoid meat in a restaurant without eating something with dairy – my preference is to avoid the meat first, and slowly work on the transition to veganism over time. If I try to switch over too quickly, I probably will get sick. So I guess in that, there is some moderation – as well as my willingness to eat eggs from my friend’s humanely raised backyard chickens. Factory farmed meat, though, in any form, is pretty repellent to me.

I have no doubt this will make life harder. I can’t think of a single friend or family member that I eat with regularly that’s vegetarian. Foer says, “It’s a classic dilemma. How much do I value creating a socially comfortable situation, and how much do I value acting socially responsible?” I’m not sure yet how I’ll manage this, although friends are already used to be being a picky eater so certainly that will be nothing new.

But picky about vegetables AND unwilling to eat meat? What am I going to subsist on? Brown rice and Clif bars? I guess that remains to be seen!

For further reading about the book:

• Jonathan Safron Foer’s New Book Asks Why We Don’t Eat Pets? by Rabbi David Wolpe
• ‘Eating Animals’ by Jonathan Safran Foer. A plea against cruelty to animals draws on the author’s family history and personal circumstances as a young father. By Susan Salter Reynolds (LA Times).
• Flesh of Your Flesh - Should you eat meat? by Elizabeth Kolbert (New Yorker).
• Eating animals is making us sick. By Jonathan Safran Foer, Special to CNN
• Eating Animals: Jonathan Safran Foer Talks To Ellen About His New Book (VIDEO)
• Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals Turned Me Vegan. By Natalie Portman

Bob Torres at Vegan Freak has made an interesting post about animal welfare versus animal rights. This is an issue I think about on a near-daily basis, as I wind my way through the many food choices I have available to me, trying to decide what’s best to eat: local, vegan, vegetarian, humanely-raised….if the choices seem simple to you, I’m guessing you just don’t think about them too much.

Torres argues that:

When it comes down to it, the case for animal rights is really a case for adopting a thorough moral and ethical stance in favor of treating like cases alike.

Basically, that because we and animals are both alike in our suffering and our sentience, that we should be giving animals the same kind of moral consideration that we give each other:

Most importantly, this would mean extending to animals inherent value, or really bringing them into the moral community by recognizing that certain aspects of their personhood cannot be “sold away” or sacrificed for the benefit of another.

Rights and humane treatment – those are really two different things, aren’t they? Does an animal have rights of its own? How do we decide what those rights are? Torres offers up the absurdity of how pets and livestock are treated wildly differently – an observation I’ve made myself, one that has wedged itself into my psyche, much to the consternation of my craving for Sesame Beef. I’d drop a few thousand dollars on my dogs (and have – try having a Labrador allergic to North American shrubs and grasses – did you know there are actual dermatologists for dogs? Yeah, be glad you aren’t footing that bill), yet I have eaten a thousand hamburgers without considering (or consciously ignoring) that the cow ground up into the meat on my plate likely suffered horribly for most of its existence. Odds are excellent it led a life of misery, fear, anxiety, confusion, and hurt, and its death probably wasn’t humane or painless.

I haven’t made final decisions yet how I feel about cow’s rights. I’m not sure if people shouldn’t eat meat. What I am sure about is that the way animals are treated in our food and garment industry is both disgusting and unnecessary, and it isn’t something I want to support anymore. As a user in the PPK forums said very simply, “When an animal becomes a resource it is not generally handled in a humane manner.” I’m not sure if animals should be a resource, but I feel that it’s integral to our claim to humanity that we acknowledge their abilities to feel and think and be affected by our actions.

I agree with Torres on this, even while I flinch at the idea of taking animals out of medical research:

The tired objections that animals do not deserve rights because they lack rationality, or language, or human levels of intelligence, or whatever arbitrary characteristics anthropocentric philosophers decide are important are so self-serving as to be almost comical. The obvious problem with using qualities like these to exclude animals from moral consideration is that we can almost always find humans who also lack those qualities. A great many humans lack what we’d consider to be “normal” rational faculties, yet no one seriously suggests that the mentally disabled be enslaved, or that they should be used for food or medical experiments.

I’m sitting here, sick in bed while I write this, while Greg sits next to me on his laptop. I read him the entire essay. I didn’t feel like I agreed with all of it, but with much of it, and I was curious to get his reaction as a meat-eater (and my frequently eloquent husband). While he is against the current treatment of animals raised for food, he says he disagrees with the philosophical underpinnings of many in the animal rights movement, particularly that animals belong inside our shared “moral community”.

“Being part of a moral community has responsibilities as well as rights, and someone who isn’t capable of upholding the rights of others, isn’t a part of the moral community.”

“But wait,” I said, “What about people who are severely mentally disabled? We don’t treat them like livestock, yet they don’t have the same ability to comprehend morality that we do. They can be violent without understanding the results of their actions.”

“Exactly,” Greg replied. “And we commit those people to the mental health system, not the justice system, because we realize that they don’t comprehend and can’t be held morally accountable for their actions. Animals are the same way. So that’s why we treat them both in terms of their welfare (or should, anyway), and not in terms of their ‘rights’.”

“Okay, but isn’t saying we care about the welfare of something also saying that that thing has rights? I care about not eating the cow because I believe that cow has the right not to be terrified and miserable its whole life just so I can eat it.”

“Yes, but that’s two different things. Your wish not to have the cow treated cruelly is your morals – you believe it’s immoral to treat an animal like that, and that’s what fuels your action. It’s different then the cow having rights.”

“Ahhhh,” I said. “I think I see what you’re saying. Welfare is keeping the animal from unneccessary harm. Whereas if I believed in ‘cow rights’, like ‘the right for cows to be happy’, then I’d be saying that it’s my job to make sure that all the cows of the world have the right to a cozy meadow and all the clover they can eat. It would be my obligation as a fellow being in the ‘moral community’ to work for that, and yet the cow can’t do the same for me. Welfare is different from rights.”

“Exactly.”

Which brings to mind an article in the Utne Reader I was perusing the other day (originally published here, in Meatpaper), in which a woman talks about eating the animals on her farm, raising them humanely and caring for them, but still, in the end, eating them. She says that it’s ridiculous not to, that if we didn’t, they wouldn’t exist; where would cows and pigs and sheep live without us? They need us for their survival just as we need them. I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe farm animals don’t need to exist, maybe they’d exist just fine wild. I certainly want to emphasize here that me even examining this question is because of the privilege I have of living in a country with abundant non-animal food choices. I apply all this to myself and to other Westerners, not to anyone living in an area where meat is their only primary source of protein.

Still, how would the world change if we cared about animal welfare? Even if humans still ate animals, even if we still used them in medicine; what would it be like for us to view a violent act against a person, or a pet dog, the same way we viewed workers beating a pig or hanging a still-conscious cow upside down by its ankles and letting it bleed to death?

What would it be like to have us, as a society, view the way we treat animals as a reflection on our own humanity?

I ask myself this a lot. And I’ve yet to be disappointed by any of the answers.