Thought-provoking interview

A friend/colleague sent me this interview with Jonathan Safran Foer. Both he and the interviewer bring up a lot of very interesting points:

JF: ...endorsing the exception is to endorse the rule. People would see me as another person eating meat. You know, it's like what happened with farmed fish. Salmon farming was originally created to take pressure off of wild salmon populations, because it's been clear for a long time that they're going to run out. But what happened was, when more supply was created, there was more demand for wild salmon, because our eating habits are contagious. There was more salmon on the menu suddenly, and you see your friends eating salmon, and so you eat salmon - that has more power than does conscientious eating.

There's also the fact that the kind of farming you're talking about can't be scaled. There's enough humane chicken now raised in America to feed Staten Island, at the rate we're eating chicken. You can use child labor as an analogy. It's easily conceivable that there are many situations in which giving a six-year-old a job would improve that six-year-old's life and, on a case-by-case basis, would be a good thing. But we don't create systems for the exceptions, we create them for the rule.

This next one just pisses me off:

JG: Isn't it terribly boring to be a vegetarian? Go to this question of whether we are naturally omnivores, or is that just a cop-out?

JF: Well that's like asking, are women naturally subservient to men? If we look at history, one might have reason to think so. I mean, we certainly treated women as second-class citizens, almost always until quite recently. That doesn't mean it's right, that doesn't mean life is boring if we suddenly treat them as equals. Is a diet less rich without meat? Yes, it is. Is a diet less rich with chimpanzee? Yes, it is. I don't find it boring.

Does anyone (besides me) ask people who subsist on fast or frozen, pre-prepared food whether it's boring? You can make your vegetarian food so interesting. I just don't understand why anyone would think that way.

Great point about food behavior in general:

There are an awful lot of people who care about this stuff and for reasons good or bad, just can't envision becoming vegetarian. So what do we do with that? Do we throw our hands up in air and say that since I'm not going to be perfect about this I'm completely off the hook. They will say, `I was a vegetarian for six years and I found myself at an airport and I was shaking from hunger so I ate some McNuggets and that was the end of my vegetarianism. It's just such a bizarre way of thinking about it.

I care about the environment, I try to buy good appliances, I certainly turn the lights off when I leave rooms, and so on and so forth, and yet I also fly. So should my getting off the plane say 'Okay, I know that was bad, so I'm now bad, I'm going to leave lights on, I'm going to let my car idle.' It's nuts. I wish people would talk about food in a way that was more similar to how we talk about the environment. The question of 'Are you an environmentalist or not?' is nonsense. It just doesn't make any sense.

I love eggs, but trying to navigate the 'certified humane' maelstrom makes my head hurt. Is there really no such thing as a happy egg?

JF: You wouldn't want to be a turkey. Actually, analogous to the milk question, a free-range hen is the worst. If there's any farm animal you wouldn't want to be, that's what it is.

JG: What about cage-free, cruelty-free eggs?

JF: Well, cruelty-free means nothing. Free-range, when applied to hens, means zero. It is literally not defined and it is up to supplier testimonials whether or not to use it, so you should take as much comfort from 'free-range' as you should from 'starry and magical.' Cage-free does mean something: it means exactly what it sounds like it means, literally not in cages, which is not to say that much for the welfare of animals.

JG: That could mean a small building that has 3,000 of them crammed in.

JF: More like 30,000. You won't get buildings with 3,000 - it's 30,000, 50,000 or 60,000. That being said, there are people who actually quantify how much space cage-free hens have and I think it's something like 110 square inches as opposed to 67 for those in a cage, so that's a lot more space, but draw yourself a rectangle of 110 square inches - it's not what people have in mind when they spend more of their money to buy this product. Cage-free and free-range eggs are the fastest growing sector of the food industry right now, which says something so amazing about Americans.

JG: People want to feel good about the product they're buying.

JF: Yeah, they don't taste better, they're not better for us. People all across the country are spending more of this finite resource of money on something just because they think it's the right thing to do, and they are being taken advantage of, and that should make everybody very angry.

I agree that this is a completely inane argument:

JG: Let's talk about Michiko Kakutani's review of your book, which showed, I think, that she's ideologically opposed to raising this issue as a serious issue. How do you respond to someone who would say, 'Jonathan, you say that KFC has caused more pain in the world than any other company, but try telling that to the people, not the animals, but the people of Bhopal.' 'Jonathan, you live in New York City where you have HIV and homelessness and schools that don't work. How could you devote your life to worrying about a chicken over a child?' It's an argument that I'm sure you've heard in other places.

JF: I actually haven't heard it anywhere else, which is a strange thing.

JG: This is the first time that you've seen that argument?

JF: I couldn't believe it got through the editors. I mean it's such a profoundly flamboyantly silly thing. Obviously I care more about kids than I care about chickens but that's not to say that I have to choose. It's not a zero-sum game. People who care about animals tend to care about people. They don't care about animals to the exclusion of people. Caring is not a finite resource and, even more than that, it's like a muscle: the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. This is what Tolstoy meant when he said famously that if there were no more slaughterhouses, there'd be no more battlefields. It's a silly statement in its own right, but it gestures at something that's true.

The Times review was sloppy high school thought, and it comes in lots of different forms. It comes in the form of, 'If we care about this, we're not caring about something else.' Another form it sometimes takes is, 'If we care about this, we're going to have to care about that. If we care about that, next thing you know we're going to be walking on grass barefoot because of the ants that you're going to be torturing.' It's ridiculous.

JG: What do you think motivates her dismissal? That everybody is going to become a Jain or something?

JF: The question is, if we don't say no to this, what do we say no to? If we don't say no to something that systematically abuses 50 billion animals, if we don't say no to the number-one cause of global warming, and not by a little bit, but by a lot, if we don't say no to what the UN has said is one of the top two or three causes of every significant environmental problem in the world, locally and globally, if we don't say no to something that is clearly - not clear to me, but clear to the World Health Organization - a prime factor in the generation of Avian and Swine flus, if we don't say no to something that's making our antibiotics less effective and ineffective, if we don't say no to something that causes 76 million of food-borne illness every year, just what do we say no to? This is not a case where we need to go to war with another country or spend a trillion dollars or elect a new government. We just need to say no to it.