The World Today - New book questions ethics of meat industry 30/10/2009

The World Today - New book questions ethics of meat industry 30/10/2009



New book questions ethics of meat industry

Shane McLeod reported this story on Friday, October 30, 2009 12:34:00
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SHANE MCLEOD: To an ethical question - why for most Australians would eating fish be okay but dining on dog meat would be distasteful?

The relationship between humans and the animals we eat is the subject of a new book by the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who is questioning the way modern society relies on industrial farming to feed us.

He says high intensity farming has alarming environmental and social costs but also raises profound ethical questions about the decisions we make about what we eat.

While he's become a vegetarian he's not advocating it for everyone. Jonathan Safran Foer says instead we should be certain we're comfortable with how our food ends up on our plates.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: I approach these issues not as any kind of activist or journalist or philosopher, clearly not a farmer; but rather as a father.

When my wife became pregnant with our first child and I faced the prospect of having to make food choices on someone else's behalf I took the question as seriously as I could and meat poses the biggest questions when it comes to what we're going to eat.

SHANE MCLEOD: Why don't people talk about where meat comes from?

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: They don't talk about it for a few reasons - some of them good, some of them bad.

The good reasons are because it cuts to something very deep about who we are; you know, what our grandparents fed us, what our parents fed us, what we feed our children, how we think of ourselves as humans in the animal world, how we think of our relationship to the environment - very, very big questions.

And the sense that one might not be operating up to one's own standards can be very intimidating. It can encourage a kind of willed ignorance. Like, I just don't want to know about it. I don't want to go there.

The other, less good reason is because, in American in particular but it's all over, spread all over the world there's a real veil of secrecy around animal agriculture.

In America more than 99 per cent of the animals that are raised for meat are raised on what are called factory farms, which basically means they're raised usually indoors, usually never see the sun, never touch the earth.

And factory farming depends on consumers holding in their minds an image of a different kind of farm. The kind of farms that covered the globe only 50 years ago. A farm where a farmer interacts with animals personally, where animals live outdoors, where they have not been genetically modified, where it isn't necessary to give them antibiotics before they're sick.

So as long as consumers hold that image in their minds they don't get too upset about eating meat.

SHANE MCLEOD: Is it by intention or necessity you think that people have adopted willed ignorance when it comes to the source of meat?

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: Well different people, you know, act in different ways so I don't want to make any generalisations that are too broad. How about speaking for myself? (Laughs) Because I spent much of my life...

SHANE MCLEOD: We'd be prepared to question you personally.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: You know speaking for myself I have been an on-and-off vegetarian for much of my life but I've probably, you know, eaten meat for more time in my life than not.

And during those periods did I suddenly forget everything that I knew that once motivated me to be a vegetarian? No of course not. I just thought, this stuff tastes good. This stuff smells good. This is very convenient. It's a very easy way to get full. Heck, my friends are eating it...

SHANE MCLEOD: And you don't think too much about where it's coming from.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: You push the questions out of your mind. But you know we do this all the time with many, many other things as well. There's homeless people, you know, in every, just about every neighbourhood in the world. There's certainly children who don't have the advantages that we would want them all to have in life, the opportunities.

Their problems surround us and clearly we're not racing to solve all of them. So you know part of being a human is simply to get by in the world requires a certain amount of willed forgetting.

The difference with animal agriculture is first of all the scale. So we're talking about 50 billion animals that are factory farmed every year. We're talking about the number one cause of global warming, and not by a little bit but by a long shot.

This is big. And the interesting sort of counterpoint to that is what it would take to undo it is small. You know we don't have to elect a new government. We don't have to spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. And we don't need to find a new set of values. All we need to do is eat according to the values we already have.

SHANE MCLEOD: Are you saying that the choice we should make is vegetarian?

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: No. I'm saying the choice we should make is to reject factory farmed meat.

In the course of my research I went to many small farms. Here we call them family farms; basically farms where the person who owns it has some involvement in the day-to-day activities, they're not run by corporations, you know, miles away or on the other side of the country; where animals live outdoors, they live according to their own species' instincts; where they're given enough land to graze properly which also happens to be the amount of manure that the ground can feasibly take.

So those kinds of farms, I wouldn't eat the products of those farms but I wouldn't argue, or at least I wouldn't argue strongly against someone else doing it. If all farms were as, looked as farms did 50 years ago I would not have written my book.

SHANE MCLEOD: Because we're dealing with food products that have been consumed for millennia. It's really the modern interpretation of these agricultural production methods that you're particularly concerned about.

JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER: That's exactly right. You know we, in America, we now eat 150 times as much chicken as we did 80 years ago, a really startling statistic.

And do we do this because we suddenly decided it tastes really, really great and we just never realised it before? No, of course not. We do it for two reasons - one because McDonald's invented the kind of chicken you don't need silverware to eat, it's deep fried and you pick it up; and two because these agribusiness corporations found ways of raising tens of thousands of chickens at a time for very, very little money.

So what factory farming succeeded in doing, and they will talk about this a lot, is making cheap food.

The problem is it's only cheap at the cash register. All the real costs are externalised - the environmental toll, the cost to rural communities, the cost to land values, the air and water pollution, the you know human health costs, the swine and avian flu always trace back to factory farms. These are massive costs.

SHANE MCLEOD: Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of the new book Eating Animals. And you'll find an extended version of that interview later today at our website: abc.net.au/worldtoday.