carolyn kellogg

I consumed Jonathan Safran Foer’s book EATING ANIMALS very quickly, mostly because I had less than 24 hours between the time I got my hands on it and our scheduled interview. It is, I must warn you, difficult to read while eating, even if what you’re eating is a plate of entirely meatless potato perogies. There is just no way to read about factory farmed chickens and not want to swear off eating anything, at all, ever again.

I don’t eat much chicken, because it’s pretty gross. But I do eat pork chops and bacon (mmmm, bacon); I make and eat delicious hamburgers; I buy spicy sausages and a nice hunk of tri-tip when I can find them. Frozen shrimp, fish, and cans of tuna. I eat sushi with gusto. Salmon skin? Bring it on.

It’s been more than a decade since I gave up being a vegetarian. I was solid veggie for two years, but I was blacking out a lot, and dreaming of cheeseburgers, which I took to be my body telling me that I needed more iron than spinach and tofu were giving me. So I did one year on, one year off — it gave me a resolution, and I stuck to it. In my world, fish were as off limits as cows (the distinction makes no sense to me still), but cheese and eggs were OK, because no animals were killed for them.

Part of my vegetarianism was health-related — we all know too much red meat isn’t good for you — and part of it was my conscience. I turned veggie the first time I drove past a cattle truck on a highway somewhere in the middle of America. You know what those trucks are like? The cows are stacked double-decker in metal cages; driving past, you can see their noses and haunches, the splatters of cowshit smattering the lower cages and those toward the back. Were they going to slaughter? Or just farm to farm? I had no idea. Neither did they, just that they were suddenly whipping down a highway one above the other at 75 mph.

Foer doesn’t write about this in his book — what he writes about is worse. The conditions of factory chickens, turkeys and pigs, who are barely recognizable as the farm animals we picture. How a slaughterhouse works, and how the trauma of killing animals on an assembly line turns normal people into sadists.

But it wasn’t that parade of horror that reminded me that I was once a vegetarian for a reason, and that I do care about that reason.

It was a list. On page 49 and 50, Foer lists the creatures that are swept up in tuna nets. Before I got to the end of the more than 100 fish, mammals and birds that die in tuna nets, I thought, I can’t be responsible for this. I can’t kill all those creatures because I like a good piece of sushi, because a tuna salad sandwich is a comfort food that goes back to childhood. I’m not interested in turtles dying, I’m not interested in killing an albatross that’s in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s possible to fish without enormous nets, it’s possible to raise and kill animals to eat in a way that’s not cruel. And those are going to be the only meats I eat from now on. If I can’t be sure, I’ll skip it.

Don’t get me wrong — I like meat. I REALLY like bacon, steak and New England lobster. I dreamed about cheeseburgers, for god’s sake. But I’ll only get those things when I know they’re humane.

If you’re a foodie and you don’t read this book, you’re not a foodie. And if I tried to tell you about this book and you tell me you don’t want to hear it, well, I think I know what you’re getting for Christmas.