Jonathan Safran Foer is getting plenty of attention with his recent book Eating Animals. It's definitely worth reading, although the well-read veg*n will find few new earth-shattering facts in this non-fiction foray for Foer. He is a writer writing about animal agriculture (AA), which leads to a better-reading product than an AA activist who happens to write. Extensively well-researched and using the most conservative statistics, he makes the strong and obvious indictment against AA, arguing among other things that if animal welfare is one's key concern over AA is animal welfare/suffering/cruelty, the most important AA product to give up is eggs based on the treatment of battery hens (making his "vegan-in-transition" position even more perplexing to his more strident vegan critics).
Critics of Foer's moderation score their points in terms of logical/intellectual consistency. But Foer responds (rightly) that improvement and change come in many ways for many people, and berating people for lack of 100% purity/consistency does little to make a dent in the AA Leviathon if it drives away folks who might otherwise make moderate (but meaningful) changes in their pattern of AA support/consumption.
And this is a point worth emphasizing. As supporters of the Meatless Monday campaign point out, the effect of Americans giving up meat for one day a week would be the equivalent (in terms of greenhouse gases reduced) of every American driving hybrid. I'll say that again. Every American driving a hybrid. That's fantasy-territory for green energy advocates (transitioning the entire US auto fleet to hybrid), but that could be accomplished overnight by simply foregoing meat one day a week. Of course there are other significant savings as well, including water use, gasoline consumption, etc. But the hybrid car correlation is striking. Foer gets that getting the average American to become veg*n is a stretch, but giving up meat one day a week? That's hardly revolutionary or radical.
By the way, here's an engaging reading/Q&A session with Foer in which he addresses topics from hunting to storytelling to why AA facilities are "petri dishes" for tomorrow's deadly diseases. Check it out.
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