Food for thought

By way of some very entertaining writing, Jonathan Safran Foers demands that we make our choices with open eyes on the subject of whether to eat meat. Photo / Supplied

Giving up smoking is one of the easiest things a person can do, according to Mark Twain. He himself used to do it all the time. Jonathan Safran Foer puts converting to vegetarianism in the same category. "In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember. Many dinners of those years began with my father asking, 'any dietary restrictions I need to know about tonight?"'

This is one of the reasons I enjoyed Foer's foray into a fundamentally troubling area: troubling, that is, if one happens to enjoy eating meat. Where many lifestyle activists tacitly or explicitly lay claim to the moral high ground, Foer is canny enough - or perhaps just honest enough - to put his own hypocrisies under the microscope before starting in on anyone else's. He likes meat. It isn't obvious to him that he has the right to kill other creatures. But he likes meat.

The list of excuses he's made for side-stepping his principles over the years is entertainingly diverse; to anyone who's ever slid gently away from a youthful ideal, it will also be wince-inducingly familiar. He structures his book not as a sermon, but as an investigation into the arguments for and against meat-eating, one he undertook for the most cliched of reasons - the birth of his first child - and the sudden realisation that a half-hearted intention to think all this through one day is no longer good enough. "Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: it matters more."

The other reason I enjoyed this book is that Foer can take a cliche like this and give it teeth. At the level of word choice and individual sentence construction, he's a good enough writer rather than a good one, but as a storyteller he's outstanding.

He winds ideas and anecdotes around each other into a great spiral helix of investigative argument. His opening chapter, built around the story of his grandmother's survival of the Holocaust and her refusal to eat pork even when it seemed the only way to stay alive, is a perfect example of how the political requires the personal to give it meaning. It's also a profoundly moving piece of writing.

Foer's core requirement of anyone willing to pick up this book is that we think about what we eat. In particular, he wants us to think about how we treat the animals we eat. To say that the disparity between the life of an American pet dog and an American factory-farmed pig is disquieting is to miss the point, which is that there's no popular disquiet over the matter at all: Americans are experts at quietly ignoring this stuff.

As I read Foer's descriptions of his country's farming practices, I wondered, slightly smugly, how much relevance this portion of his argument had for New Zealand. A few days later, the news of the McKenzie Basin factory farm applications broke. And it's only a few months ago that we were all talking about the use of sow crates in New Zealand farms. Hands up everyone who was outraged by that story and then somehow went back to buying factory-farmed pork, ham and bacon.

Foer does not attempt to stampede us into vegetarianism. He does insist, thoughtfully and by way of some very entertaining writing, that we make our choices on the subject with open eyes. It seems little enough to ask.

Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer (Hamish Hamilton, $37)

Reviewed by David Larsen

David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer.