Ignorance vs. Indifference

So, I recently read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer.

No, wait, hold up. This isn't going to be your average privileged middle class rant about how everyone should be vegetarian, I promise.

It was an interesting read, and spent ample time discussing the horrors of factory farming. Foer is seemingly a snapshot of the guilty meat-eater who goes back and forth between being a vegetarian, and, well, not. He's vegetarian as of the writing of the book.

He makes a Swiftian case for eating dogs using the same logic most people use to justify eating other animals, which is revealing. He loves his dog. What he doesn't discuss is what he feeds his dog - vegetarian diet there, too? It's pretty hard to find a dog food without animal byproducts like chicken fat and other terrible stuff. I suppose you could always make your own dog food.

Foer emphasizes the notion that free-range, as a term, is bullshit, because all it requires is access to the outdoors. A huge chicken coop of the regular type of cruelty is allowed as long as there's a door that's open sometimes. So, yeah, bullshit, generally speaking. He does being up an existing true free-range, minimum cruelty, happy pigs and cows and chickens type of farm as a shining example of what farming should be like. He neglects to mention that (on my own research) a package of four eight ounce pork chops from said farm runs about $60. Not exactly within reach of the average person. So, the thinking person says, either I have to pay through the nose to avoid cruelly-rasied animal products, or just get out.

A key point late in the book is pleading ignorance vs. just being indifferent. I've read more than a couple of books on food and the industrial food system. Knowing what I do, I can't plead ignorance as a reason for eating meat, I can only claim indifference to the cruelty built into the system. Yet, here I am, still eating meat. It's a source of cognitive dissonance for sure. I still eat meat knowing the chicken I am enjoying probably had its beak sliced off by a laser while it was still alive, conscious, and feeling. It probably spent its life in a cage with the square footage of a piece of printer paper. But I'm not going to rail on this stuff, because if you have a pulse and have heard of the name PETA, you probably know at least some of this stuff. I am emphasizing eating less meat, chosing vegetarian options when available (most of the time, eating out in the twin cities), and phasing shrimp out of my diet, shrimp trawling being one of the more awful and destructive processes out there for gathering animal products (shrimp trawling yields about 2% shrimp and 98% other marine life - which is then killed and thrown back overboard). But I don't cry myself to sleep over having bacon with Sunday brunch or enjoying the occasional burger. So what am I supposed to do with that?

I do disagree with some of Foer's points - I think that eating less meat is better than emphasizing meat in the diet, but he makes no such distinction, indicating it's an all or nothing thing - and, as these types of books tend to do, weasel words and phrases do sneak in there (he emphasizes the point that the CEO of a large factory farming operation's surname, Luter, is pronounced "Looter"). I find it interesting that Foer is vegetarian and not vegan, because the logical conclusion of most of his arguments would lead to being vegan (where does one think eggs and milk come from, some kind of magical cruelty free realm, just because it's not animal flesh?). Generally, though, it's a good read that, generally speaking, avoid the pitfalls of such literature, e.g. michael pollan's class blindness (the solution to factory farming is to just spend more on food, silly!). It's a worthy read if it's a topic that interests you, but as always, maintaining a skeptical point of view will yield richer rewards.