Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Penguin Books pp340
ISBN: 978-0-241-95083-8

To put it in Facebook lingo, our relationship with animals – it’s complicated. We love them, keep them and buy them presents – Americans alone spend some $40 billion a year on their pets. We abhor cruelty towards animals.

And yet we are indifferent towards the animals we eat; towards the pain they go through before they appear on our plate. And anyway, who decides why some animals are fine to eat and others are not? Why do we cringe at the thought of eating a dog and yet find pork delicious, even if pigs are as intelligent as dogs. Why do we think fish are dumb, when it is scientifically proven that they pass on their knowledge to younger generations? Why do we find cats a loving home but condemn chickens to a brief lifetime of suffering in factory farms?

It is these questions that Jonathan Safran Foer tries to answer in Eating Animals, now out in paperback.

Eating Animals, Mr Safran Foer’s first non-fiction book, was inspired by the author’s prospect of fatherhood and his need to justify eating animals to his son. Compared to Mr Safran Foer’s previous fictional offerings – Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Eating Animals is, excuse the pun, a very different animal – it is detailed journalism inspired by ethics and driven by three years of gruelling research. Yet despite being non-fiction, Eating Animals has the same shift in formats and genres and the same powerful voice as Mr Safran Foer’s award-winning novels.

In Eating Animals, the author’s primary target is the food industry and how it has figured out that, “You don’t need healthy animals to make a profit. Sick animals are more profitable. The animals have paid the price for our desire to have everything available at all times for very little money.”

But it is not just the industry’s greed that is guilty – the pain and suffering that factory-farmed animals go through is fuelled by our hunger for more food and our greed to spend less money on food. The statistics are staggering, according to Mr Safran Foer: “On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime.”

Yet what is most shocking is not death but the extent of it and how it is inbuilt in factory farming. Here, chickens are kept in horrible conditions, abused, and pumped with drugs. They cannot support their own weight and the ammonia fumes thrown off by their rotting excrement leads to respiratory diseases. Those which survive end up eating their dead companions. After the horrors of living in just eight- tenths of a square foot (the industry standard), they are then slaughtered in conditions so inhumane that frequently, they are still alive when they are being skinned, thrown in scalding water or having their intestines ripped out. Nine billion chickens in America, six billion chickens in the EU, seven billion chickens in China and two billion chickens in India are farmed this way.

Other animals go through similar ordeals. Before being slaughtered, pigs are incapacitated with a stunner which induces such powerful contractions that a lot of them end up with a broken back. Cows have bolts shot through their heads yet frequently remain conscious as they are butchered.

It is not just the animals that are suffering but also those who eat them. Modern farming methods are threatening to our health – the use of drugs in animal farming spawns antibiotic resistant diseases and pandemics. Mr Safran Foer also quotes a study published in Consumer Reports which claims that 83 per cent of all chicken meat, including organic and antibiotic-free brands, is infested with either campylobacter or salmonella at the time of purchase.

Eating Animals is a painful book to read – you probably won’t look at the chicken on your plate in the same way again (although you can never underestimate the human capacity for dismissal). And every page is so tormented with pain that you might seek consolation in the fact that the book takes America as its feeding ground.

Well, don’t seek any consolation because, as Mr Safran Foer writes, “A British reader who cares about the issues raised in this book should not find any peace in being British.” In the UK, approximately 95 per cent of poultry is raised on factory farms. Statistics for other European countries are pretty similar. These numbers compare well to the 99 per cent of poultry raised on American poultry farms.

The suffering investigated and condemned in Eating Animals is global. As Mr Safran Foer concludes, “Our sustenance now comes from misery.”

• For Mr Borg, a book is everyone’s best friend.

The review copy of this title is the reviewer’s own.

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