First of all, I’m not the type of person who buys and reads books about eating ethically. I’m the type of person who would mow down a chicken with a machine gun and then laugh loudly. So now that we have that out of the way, why did I buy these two books? Well, Kingsolver seems like a nice lady, so I wanted her to make money off of me, and Foer’s book was all green with squiggly letters on the cover, which I liked.
I chose to read and review their books at the same time since both texts have to do with eating ethically and because they partially disagree with one another. To the death. Seriously, Barbara Kingsolver ended up killing Foer over the dispute a few months ago. (Disclaimer: I’m just fucking with you. She totally didn’t. Like I said, she seems like a really nice lady.)
In her book, Kingsolver makes the case for eating foods grown locally (and yet her initials are BK. Like Burger King. Hmmm. This aside makes no sense. I don’t know why I wrote this, and I also don’t know why I didn’t delete it.) She and her family move from Arizona to freaking southern Appalachia, wherever that is, so that they can grow most of their own food and purchase almost everything else they need from local farms. In her text, she brings up a lot of good points about the social and environmental benefits of eating locally grown foods. First of all, she points out that most of the energy used for food production comes not from agriculture but from the transport and packaging of foods. She also points out that by supporting local growers, you are supporting your local economy and giving small farmers a chance to not become homeless and sad. Preserving local food economies also boosts the variety of tastier fruits and vegetables available (aka not extinct.) Small farms are also often better for workers and for the land.
The biggest apprehension I had going into this book was that the writing style would be very snooty. Kingsolver herself admits that she was on the list of 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, albeit only at number 73. Overall though, the book was not preachy. Anytime the danger of pretentiousness arose, Kingsolver would say something like “I fucking love tomatoes guys! Tomatoes are fucking amazing! Give me more!” and then everything would be okay. (Disclaimer: Kingsolver never said any of those things. Her actual words were “The first tomato of the season brings me to my knees. Its vital stats are recorded in my journal with the care of a birth announcement: It’s an early girl! Four ounces! June 16!”) Basically, the book is not about being holier-than-thou and forcing you to eat local foods, but about the experiences and adventures Kingsolver had with her family while trying to eat almost exclusively locally grown foods (most from their own garden) over the course of a year. And it’s about getting you to eat local foods.
Okay Kingsolver, some of your arguments for eating locally make sense. I can actually get behind you on this thing. But what about the other big topic tied to eating ethically, namely, the deliciousness of animals? Now, Kingsolver doesn’t go into it in detail, but she is okay with eating meat, as long as it comes from local farms and not factory farms, where animals are raped and boiled alive! (Jesus, I’m not even exaggerating there, it’s that gross, people.)
Disclaimer: I love eating animals. So, on to the next book.
Foer makes a lot of points about why eating animals is bad. I won’t go into all of them here (or most of them) because I’m lazy. One of the things he points out is that like 99% of our meat (almost everything, people) comes from factory farms, where animals are treated cruelly and suffer horribly. Which we all already know, but it’s always fun to hear about it again. Now, pigs and cows are pretty cute (well, pigs are… cows are imposing and scare the shit out of me), so I don’t want them to suffer. Chickens though? Eh. Foer says this is called the “species barrier” and says it doesn’t make sense that we care about the suffering of one animal more than another’s. That’s true. Still, I don’t care about chickens. They’re ugly, people. They gross me out. In the end, I can’t bring myself to feel bad for a chicken (or fish… ugh, the creepy dead eye.) So what’s your next point, vegan Foer? How come you’re not okay with eating animals, but Kingsolver does it?
So then Jonathan’s all like, hey, raising animals is really bad for the environment. It’s even more wasteful than transporting foods long distances. Plus it creates a shitload of manure (haha) that poisons our waterways. Don’t you care about the environment, Barbara?
But Barbara’s all like, vegetarians have to buy a lot non-local foods, and that’s really bad for the environment too. And pasture-grazed animals raised on small farms don’t hurt the environment. And when you don’t buy meat from happy farms, you’re not giving those farms the support that they need and deserve.
Then Foer’s like, technically, I do support small, happy animal farms. But taking into consideration the amount of meat that people eat today, those farms don’t produce enough meat to feed us all, and probably never could. Plus, eating is social by nature. When you eat meat, others see you do it and don’t know that you choose only non-factory farm meat, so you are propagating the problem by supporting meat eating. See, by even eating meat (any meat) you are encouraging the growth of factory farms.
Barbara’s like no I’m not.
But Foer’s like, look, even if the animals are raised ethically on happy farms, there are practically no slaughter houses where animals die a humane death.
So which is it guys?? What should I do?? Just tell me!
(Disclaimer: Barbara and Jonathan weren’t ever addressing one another when making these points. I’m not even sure Barbara made all of those points. That part was all just in my head, as are most things. I just needed someone to argue against Jonathan and that was your job, Barbara.)
I actually found Foer’s book to be pretty confusing. The parts where he describes how factory farming is cruel, polluting, and a health nightmare (bird flu comes from birds, people! I did not know this. It comes from sad factory farmed birds. And Swine Flu came from sad pigs!) made sense. But I didn’t understand how Foer supports small farms, as he claims to, since he implies that people should give up meat, preferably even happy farm meat. He spends a good amount of time in his book pointing out ways in which the small, humane farms can be bad, too. I also didn’t understand why he was saying that mostly avoiding factory farmed meat is not enough- one must never eat it- but at the same time he was not really criticizing eating mass produced milk or eggs, which also come from depressing farms. So why not say that cutting out as much factory meat from your diet as you can is a good place to start?
Foer’s book is a mishmash of different things: it includes facts and statistics, his own personal experiences, interviews with and essays from activists, factory farmers, and family farm owners, and some pages where he writes three random words in really big font, like in his other books. I found his writing to be sometimes off-putting, but that’s just me, so you can take that with a grain of salt. (For example, he makes statements like “KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other company,” which equate human and chicken suffering in, to me, weird ways.)
The one thing I took away from all of this is that it is really fucking hard to eat ethically, people. There are organic products that are good for the land but score poorly when it comes to how the companies treat their laborers (especially organic products offered by large companies.) If you stop eating meat to boycott the factory farm, you might be buying more foods transported from far away, like from Brazil or the Moon. So whether you care about the environment, your community, how workers are treated, animals, your soul, or any combination of the aforementioned, it takes a lot of thought and preparation to make wise eating choices. No matter what you try to do, you’ll probably get ethically cock blocked.
Also, in case you don’t feel frustrated enough, I found this New Yorker article (a review of Eating Animals) called “Flesh of your Flesh: Should you eat meat?” by Elizabeth Kolbert and she’s all like “The cost that consumer society imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in them all.” So there you go, assholes. Look at what you did.
Anyway, I would highly recommend both of these books. They made my brain explode, as you can tell. But that’s because I have no background knowledge in these areas- I have no idea how these books compare to the eighty billion other books on ethical eating, like James McWilliams’s Just Food: How Locavores are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly (which argues against Barbara) or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Also, I may have to give up eating meat now. Except for chicken. Because I hate you chicken. You are gross. I am animally racist against you. And I will destroy you.
Fired!!
