Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. 

3/5 rating. 267 pages.

Book #39 of 2020. Read June 19, 2020.

This book is about Jonathan’s in-depth search into the animal agriculture system once he became a father. I will say that he has a very weird way of writing, so be prepared for all of this important info in a different type of book.

This is a very impactful book because of not only the information that Jonathan puts forth, but also, because of the different trips to farms (both a few of the remaining conventional farms, and factory farms). After doing all of this research, it is again apparent how horrendous of a system our current factory farms are. The awful stories that come about, the drains on resources of water and food, the environmental damage, and the sheer cruelty doled out are a direct response to factory farms.

“We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming.”

If you have ever questioned whether you should eat meat (especially factory-farmed meat), give this book a read. I think it gives as objective of an account is as possible with the facts around these farms. 

“Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something.”

Quotes:

“Americans choose to eat less than .25% of the known edible food on the planet.”

“My vegetarianism, so bombastic and unyielding in the beginning, lasted a few years, sputtered, and quietly died. I never thought of a response to our babysitter’s code, but found ways to smudge, diminish, and forget it. Generally speaking, I didn’t cause hurt. Generally speaking, I strove to do the right thing. Generally speaking, my conscience was clear enough. Pass the chicken, I’m starving.”

“But only every now and then. Only whenever we felt like it.”

“I came to learn that food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember.”

“It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.”

“As my experience with the world of animal agriculture deepened, I saw that the radical transformations fishing has undergone in the past fifty years are representative of something much larger.” 

“Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.”

“Now at last I can look at you in peace, I don’t eat you anymore.” -Franz Kafka

“The typical cage for egg-laying hens allows each sixty-seven square inches of floor space – somewhere between the size of this page and a sheet of printer paper.”

“We call them both chickens, but they have starkly different bodies and metabolisms, engineered for different ‘functions.’ Layers make eggs. (Their egg output has more than doubled since the 1930’s). Broilers make flesh. (In the same period, they have been engineered to grow more than twice as large in less than half the time.)”

“What happens to all of the male offspring of layers? If man hasn’t designed them for meat, and nature clearly hasn’t designed them to lay eggs, what function do they serve? They serve no function. Which is why all male layers – half of all the layer chickens born in the United States, more than 250 million chicks a year – are destroyed. Destroyed? That seems like a word worth knowing more about. Most male layers are destroyed by being sucked through a series of pipes onto an electrified plate. Other layer chicks are destroyed in other ways, and it’s impossible to call those animals more or less fortunate. Some are tossed into large plastic containers. The weak are trampled at the bottom, where they suffocate slowly. The strong suffocate slowly at the top. Others are sent fully conscious through macerators (picture a wood chipper filled with chicks).”

“The average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch.”

“Most simply put, someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.”

“(‘Cage-free’ is regulated but means no more or less than what it says – they are literally not in cages.) One can reliably assume that most ‘free-range’ (or ‘cage-free’) laying hens are debeaked, drugged, and cruelly slaughtered once ‘spent.’ I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range.”

“Pathogen-infested, feces-splattered chicken can technically be fresh, cage-free, and sold in the supermarket legally (the shit does not need to be rinsed off first).”

“When surveyed, 96 percent of Americans say that animals deserve legal protection, 76 percent say that animal welfare is more important to them than low meat prices, and nearly two-thirds advocate passing not only laws but ‘strict laws’ concerning the treatment of farmed animals.”

“Virtually all of us agree that it matters how we treat animals and the environment, and yet few of us give much thought to our most important relationship to animals and the environment. Odder still, those who do choose to act in accordance with these uncontroversial values by refusing to eat animals (which everyone agrees can reduce both the number of abused animals and one’s ecological footprint) are often considered marginal or even radical.”

“That really changed me, when I realized that an excruciating life is worse than an excruciating death.”

“From 1935 to 1995, the average weight of ‘broilers’ increased by 65 percent, while their time-to-market dropped 60 percent and their feed requirements dropped 57 percent. To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be three hundred pounds in ten years, while eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.”

“In the past fifty years, as factory farming spread from poultry to beef, dairy, and pork producers, the average cost of a new house increased nearly 1,500 percent; new cars climbed more than 1,400 percent; but the price of milk is up only 350 percent, and eggs and chicken meat haven’t even doubled. Taking inflation into account, animal protein costs less today than at any time in history. (That is, unless one also takes into account the externalized costs – farm subsidies, environmental impact, human disease, and so on – which make the price historically high).”

“And I’ll tell you another thing: if consumers don’t want to pay the farmer to do it right, they shouldn’t eat meat.”

“People only see the killing. They say, ‘What’s the big deal if the animal can’t walk or move, ’cause it’s just gonna get killed anyways?’ If it was your child, do you want your child to suffer three years, three months, three weeks, three hours, three minutes? A turkey chick isn’t a human baby, but it suffers. I’ve never met anyone in the industry – manager, vet, worker, anyone – who doubts that they feel pain. So how much suffering is acceptable? That’s what’s at the bottom of all of this, and what each person has to ask himself. How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?”

“Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chicken in retail stores are still infected.”

“By the standards of the international human rights community, the typical working conditions in America’s slaughterhouses constitute human rights violations; for you, they constitute a crucial way to produce cheap meat and feed the world.”

“Americans eat 150 times as many chickens as we did only eighty years ago.”

“According to a study published in Consumer Reports, 83 percent of all chicken meat (including organic and antibiotic-free brands) is infected with either campylobacter or salmonella at the time of purchase.”

“In the National School Lunch Program, for example, more than half a billion of our tax dollars are given to the dairy, beef, egg, and poultry industries to provide animal products to children despite the fact that nutritional data would suggest we should reduce these foods in our diets. Meanwhile, a modest $161 million is offered to buy fruits and vegetables that even the USDA admits we should eat more of.”

“Nearly one-third of the land surface of the planet is dedicated to livestock.”

“Factory farming is the last system you’d create if you cared about sustainably feeding people over the long term.”

“The UN special envoy called it a ‘crime against humanity’ to funnel 100 million tons of grain and corn to ethanol while almost a billion people are starving. So what kind of crime is animal agriculture, which uses 756 million tons of grain and corn per year, much more than enough to adequately feed the 1.4 billion humans who are living in dire poverty? And that 756 million tons doesn’t even include the fact that 98 percent of the 225-million-ton global soy crop is also fed to farmed animals.”

“We know, at least, that [ending factory farming] will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history.”

“It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it’s hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world.”

“Today, animal products still account for only 16 percent of the Chinese diet, but farmed animals account for more than 50 percent of China’s water consumption – and at a time when Chinese water shortages are already cause for global concern.”

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