Photograph by David Shankbone
Jonathan Safran Foer, who will give a free lecture and book-signing at Washington University in St. Louis tonight, is a literary wunderkind. While still in his 20s, he published his first two novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, both to considerable acclaim. For his third book, Eating Animals, out in hardcover last year, he produced a moving and innovative, nonfiction account of the meat industry and what it costs us.
Foer, 33, is giving a series of readings and book-signings across the country on the occasion of the paperback publication of Eating Animals. He spoke with St. Louis Magazine this morning from his hotel in Toronto.
SLM: Let’s get right to the meat of it. And I’m sorry for that—
Jonathan Safran Foer: It’s alright. It’s unavoidable.
SLM: So, your previous books were novels with somewhat lyrical titles—Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This one is nonfiction and it’s called Eating Animals. Did you consider other titles?
JSF: You know, I don’t think anyone’s ever asked me that. I did, in fact. I found titling this book enormously difficult. A title serves two functions. One is to advertise the book: you can choose to have it advertise the content, or not. It’s the first thing the reader will see, and many more people will see the title than will read the book. So on the one hand I wanted to have a title that would be intriguing. I could have called it Food for Thought, or Thought for Food. For example, in Italy they called it If Nothing Matters. But the other thing a title does is it can bring a certain kind of language into the public consciousness, whether people read the book or not. And I thought there would be some good in getting that title circulating.
SLM: People have asked me about your book, knowing I was reading it, and I find myself saying, “A lot of it is stuff you probably already know on some level”—that is, about factory farming and the cruel way animals are treated before they become our food. In a way that’s your point, isn’t it, that we know this and choose to ignore it?
JSF: I think to some extent that’s true. I think most people know the gist of it but most people don’t know the details. One thing I felt when I was writing the book was—it was interesting: I felt, “I don’t really have to persuade anyone to have different values.” I was trying to frame the conversation in such a way that this broad agreement we already have—like, that 96 percent of Americans think that animals deserve legal protection—would be visible. Because, who wants to have a farm system that’s the number-one cause of global warming, or makes our antibiotics less effective? Nobody does. But that’s the farm system we have. I wanted to make that clear, make the details clear. I, for one, did not know that 99 percent of everything available comes from these places. I also didn’t know what the alternatives are. Like most people, I thought you’re either a vegetarian or a carnivore… I think to a lot of people that’s the real surprise of the book, that there are alternatives. And that it’s not a hectoring manifesto.
SLM: I found a few passages of Eating Animals unexpectedly moving—and I say “unexpectedly” because they seem like they were almost casual statements. For example, you write, “In ancient Greece the myth of consent was enacted at the oracle of Delphi by sprinkling water on the heads of animals before slaughter. When the animals shook off the water by nodding their heads, the oracle would interpret this as consent to be slaughtered.” You connect this to the Russian Yakuts’ hunting rites, where they say the bear offers itself to the worthy hunter. It seems to me there are more connections: Many American Indians and Eskimos have had similar rites, where they thank their prey for offering itself. And I’ve heard many non-aboriginal Americans point to this as proof of superior environmental stewardship, and not incidentally, as a justification for some kinds of hunting. But you seem to be saying it’s all of a piece with a species-wide bad conscience.
JSF: People seem unable to help but care. There really has never been a laissez-faire attitude in all of human history to killing animals. In a way, one of the best examples now is when someone gets very upset by this conversation, when people say, “Look at you, you have a leather belt,” and so on; and I can say, “Clearly this conversation matters.” Meat does inspire a lot of very strong emotions. The conversation wants to move the same way a bowling ball wants to go to the gutters: This conversation wants to go to extremes. It’s amazing that within five sentences, you’re suddenly talking about whether or not it’s OK to swat flies. And it’s at the expense of thinking honestly and humbly about what’s in front of us—50 billion farm animals destroyed every year. That’s bad by anyone’s standards. I’ve yet to meet the person who wants to stand up and make a cogent defense of that system.
SLM: I seem to know a lot of folks who have taken up hunting out of what they say is a concern for factory farming, and by implication, animal suffering. You write that some have tried to dismiss the gap between the meat on their plates and the hidden world of factory farming “by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn’t be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn’t do it.” And I imagine these hunters would respond, “Easy for you to say, living in Brooklyn and shopping at Whole Foods…”
JSF: The people I speak with are not people who are hunting their breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. There are very, very few people in our country who do that. I’m thinking about our dominant system and the choices that most people make every day. The one thing that’s improved in farming in the last fifty years is slaughter. There’s a very good chance that a farm animal today will be killed quickly and relatively painlessly… Hunting—recreation hunting, sport hunting—is only about killing. The thrill is in ending something’s life. I think it’s actually a very fundamentally human thrill, that connects us to our ancestry. But that’s not a good reason to do it now.
SLM: Eating Animals was published in hardcover eleven months ago. Tell me about the reaction to the book—what’s pleased you and what hasn’t?
JSF: I’ve really been only pleased. It’s been much, much better than I thought it’d be. I’ve met so many people who have been changed, and I don’t mean just becoming vegetarians. I’ve met many, many more people who say, “We only eat meat at dinner,” or “We only eat meat on weekends.” That’s the solution to this problem… it’s like what happened with smoking… The way it’s perceived is very different now, and I think that’s what’s going to happen with meat-eating.
SLM: You write a bit about PETA (People for The Ethical Treatment of Animals) in Eating Animals. They’re thought of as extreme now, yet it’s almost because of that reaction that I wonder if there won’t be statues of [PETA founder] Ingrid Newkirk in our parks and cities one day.
JSF: That’s really interesting to consider. They have a lot of bluster. They clearly have no interest in being universally liked. But what’s amazing about them is the things they campaign for are things people actually agree about… I admire [Ingrid Newkirk] enormously, even though I disagree with her about many, many things. Try to imagine a world in which she didn’t exist… PETA has made choices. I think they know that sometimes it pays to alienate half the audience if you can engage the other half. And look at what’s happened: More people know PETA the animal rights group than pita the bread.
SLM: You’ve said you wrote Eating Animals hoping to present “a very clear and very conversational picture of how profoundly strange animal agriculture is… These are things that everyone agrees on and yet very few people act on, and I think it’s because it hasn’t been cast well enough in the form of a story.” Are you satisfied now that you’ve done that?
JSF: There isn’t one solution. I think the challenge is to find the right chorus of voices. PETA is one indispensable voice. It’s not my voice. I hope that I have been one helpful voice. We each of us have different points of access… Some people are concerned about the environment and they learn about the harm [the meat industry] does to it. There are a lot of new parents who learn about the food-safety [aspects of factory-farming], which are terrifying. Some people find very strident arguments compelling… I think writers write the book they want to read. That was pretty straightforward in this case: I’ve been reading about this stuff for years and years and I hadn’t found the book I wanted to read.
SLM: In the book, you say, “In the three years I will spend immersed in animal agriculture, nothing will unsettle me more than the locked doors [of a turkey farm shed]. Nothing will better capture the whole sad business of factory farming. And nothing will more strongly convince me to write this book.” So that’s what convinced you. What if anything dissuaded you?
JSF: My desire to write fiction, which I did feel; the desire to be free imaginatively, not to have to triple-check sources. What I value most about writing is being unconstrained.
SLM: When you began this book you were an exceptionally talented writer of fiction, unusually successful and not yet out of your twenties. During all those three years you were working on it, did people suggest in a well-meaning way that you stick with fiction?
JSF: Nobody tried to talk me about out of it, but I do think there were those who thought it wasn’t the greatest idea. It wasn’t the most obvious career choice. And I will write another novel. I’m working on another novel now. Life is long enough. Also, I wanted to try something different. You know, it’s not like this was some selfless act. It was fun. I was motivated by curiosity and by a certain kind of anger. I was met by so much silence and so many dead ends, it sort of pissed me off.
Jonathan Safran Foer will give a free lecture about Eating Animals, followed by a book-signing, at 7 p.m. Thursday, September 30 in Graham Chapel at Washington University in St. Louis. For more information, call 314-935-4620 or go to news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/21205.aspx.
