Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

“Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things.” (7)

• recidivism is real!

“more important than reason in shaping habits are the stories we tell ourselves and one another.” (8)

• “ and I told a forgiving story about myself to myself”
• this is a form of narrative post hoc rationalization—identity homeostasis to reduce cognitive dissonance

“there were things she believed while lying in bed at night, and there were choices made at the breakfast table next morning.” (8)

• belief versus action gap (intention?)
• beliefs don’t always motivate action, especially moral beliefs

“the acceptance of both the confounding and complexity of the issue and the forgivable fallibility of being human” (8)

• appeal to complexity is an interesting rationalization device

“I assumed we’d maintain a diet of conscientious inconsistency” (9)

• this was in reference to him and his wife I identifying as being vegetarian, but sometimes still eating meat
• is this morally bad? or just causing some cognitive dissonance in someone who thinks about it for too long?
  • I don’t think hypocrisy’s bad unless they were receiving material benefit for identifying as vegetarian yet not practicing what they preach?

“Why should eating be different from any of the other ethical realms of our lives? We were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians from time to time ate meat.” (9)

• Why is veganism puritanical? What is the most amount of meat someone could eat and still identify as a vegetarian?

“the stories that are served with food matter” (11)

“There are thousands of foods on the planet, explaining why we eat the relatively small selection we do require some words. we need to explain that parsley on the plate is for decoration, that pasta is not “a breakfast food“, why we eat wings but not eyes, cows, but not dogs.” (12)

• food categorizations and diets are not really natural. They are socially constructed and narrative.
• many of these categorizations are just coincidence and trying to rationalize these distinctions and categorizations is a fool enterprise because they are not logical and so there is no logical explanation

“It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a throw inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from meeting me, but that most people already know that to be the case.” (13)

• How aware is the average person?

“Perhaps there is no “meat.“ Instead there is this animal, raised on this farm, Slaughter at this plant, sold in this way, and eaten by this person— but each distinct in a way that prevents them from being pieced together as a mosaic.” (13)

• some of the answers are dependent on questions like what is animal experience like

a case for eating dogs (24)

• I think the argumentative move to expand the circle of care from companion animals to animals is a good strategy and probably a common one, but I’m not sure why it doesn’t work
• perhaps the strategy involves too much reflection or criticism of held beliefs, which causes defensiveness?

“dogs are practically begging to be eaten. 3 to 4,000,000 dogs and cats are euthanized annually. This amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year.” (27)

• this isn’t full blown a modest proposal because they are being euthanized anyway
• i am unsure if he is leaning into the edginess of this proposal to challenge people’s intuitions or not
• in some ways this line of argumentation does seem counter intuitive to veganism
• “discomfort pumps” like Dennett’s “intuition pumps”
• this passages may be harder to read as someone with higher empathy but it is likely designed to elicit empathetic responses from more subdued individuals and emotional harm is unfortunately just collateral to sensitive readers

“If we were to one day encounter form of life, more powerful, intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would it be our argument against being eaten?” (31)

• Very interesting question/exercise

“The choice, obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat no way that is good for society.” (32)

• very true, it can be annoying and/or difficult to try to accommodate dietary restrictions which often can stigmatize it

“ I can’t count the times that upon telling someone that I’m vegetarian, here she responded by pointing out, inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw I never made. (I have often felt in my vegetarianism matters more to such people that does to me.)” (32)

• Defensiveness and distain is truly a commonknee-jerk reaction
• A guilty person sweating? A far reaching psychic defense ego protection mechanism that is proactive and reactive
• “ 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“ (33)
• there are civilians killed in cross fire like seahorses
• more politically charged metaphor that leans edgy

kafka forgetting fish (37)

• who invented pescatarianism?

“ today, at steak in the question of eating, animals is not only our best ability to respond to sentient life, but our ability to respond to our own (animal) being.” (37)

• we forget that we are animals too

“ language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, where are as often used to misdirected camouflage as they are to communicate.” (45)

• what is an animal?
• veal used as obfuscation term for example

broilers and layers are two different types of chickens that have been bred for different purposes (48)

table fellowship versus acting socially responsible (55)

a seemingly unstated moral assumption by Safran Foer is that euthanasia is good (57)

• “Any individual that close [to health] needs either to be saved or mercifully killed.”
• This is not a dilemma nor are they equal and opposite options.

people who are raised vegetarian likely don’t crave meat because they have no associations with it—only curiosity if any (63)

PETA does good precisely because of how brash they are and you probably don’t know as much about them as you think you do (72)

while most people can accept the fact that animals feel pain (from current scientific research), people will deny subjectivity (a mental-emotional world that can understand and remember pain) to say that animals don’t suffer (76)

• he believes that animals do suffer but is more raising the question to show that the answer of the question is very important to animal rights (he doesn’t argue any reasoning as to what suffering is)

eating animals and our ideas of wanting to protect them is wrought with inconsistencies

factory farming is necessary to meet current demand

• there are a lot of jobs and money in the industry
• not all consumers want to give up meat or pay more for meat

“myth of animal consent” (99)

• animals do not get a fair trade and domestication is cruel and unnatural
• “animals want us to farm them” because that is the reason why they exist and reproduce
• animals do not choose captivity and passivity is not consent

“Killing an animal oneself is more often than not a way to forget the problems while presenting to remember.” (102)

• I would have expounded this point better but as I understand it killing an animal oneself only proves to you that you are capable of such an action, not that it’s actually okay to do it or not from a moral standpoint.

“eat with care” used to be the dominant ethic (102)

• the confluence of various technologies from industrial revolution converged to enable factory farming like artificial incubators and vitamin supplemented feed
• antibiotics and artificial selection via breeding enlarged animals
• these birds are genetically predisposed to horrible suffering who can potentially only survive in these technological circumstances

“illegal aliens” (132)

• this book being written in 2009 makes sense with some of the discourse and also pre COVID

disgust at slaughter (156)

• some people might use the evidence at disgust at slaughter to point at moral wrongness or at least the mind/body somehow perceiving the moral wrongness—if you can’t stomach the slaughter of a pig then you shouldn’t eat meat
• i don’t think that this is a good argument because i don’t think many people would want to work at a landfill or a wastewater treatment facility but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to throw things away or use a toilet (or does it?)
• i think killing animals is bad regardless of whether or not slaughter is nasty (we may biologically not like seeing blood or guts as a survival instinct)

animals not only suffer more during factory farming but have been bred to suffer more (159)

does food and the taste and sustenance it provides as the end justify the means of farming? (164)

“ whether we’re talking about fish, species, pigs, or some other eating animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that’s not the question. Is it more important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That’s the question.” (193)

“ our decisions about food are complicated by the fact that we don’t eat alone. Table fellowship has forged social bonds as far back as the archaeological record allows us to look. Food, family, and memory are primordially linked.” (194)

• “ These occasions, simply aren’t the same without those foods – and that matters.” (194)
• We can make substitutes but some foods are harder to sub than others and it is different.
• However in some ways it’s not about the particular foods, just that there is a particular food associated. Some way of having tradition and delineation.

compared to animal suffering, how much do you like meat? (196)

• there is a limit and individual choice
• it is also responsive to context, factory farming didn’t used to exist, so people would have had different justifications for why they’re vegan if so

“I’ve not insisted that me eating is always wrong for everyone or that the meat industry is irredeemable despite its present state. What positions on eating animals would I insist are basic to moral decency?” (199)

can there be equivalent exchange to husbandry? (206)

• is raising an animal not just beyond suffering but thriving an equal exchange to taking its life for food eventually? we owe them that much yes but is it a fair trade?

there are economic and environmental reasons to return to pasture (grass based) animal raising (210)

even more moral animal raises still inflict pain on their animals so it seems like it is a lesser evil but still an oxymoron (227)

he brings up B.R. Meyer’s review of the Omnivores Dilemma but it feels like this book falls to the same criticism (228)

vegan who builds slaughter houses (240)

• this makes a lot of sense from a utilitarian harm reduction approach kind of way

“Should we serve turkey at Thanksgiving?” (249)

• he says this sums up a lot of the thought in the book about stories about eating, culture and traditional, and if it is ethical to eat meat after all the suffering that animals endure

“ the debacle of the factory form is not, I’ve come to feel, just a problem about ignorance – it’s not, as activist often say, a problem that arose because “people don’t know the facts.“ Clearly that is one cause.” (263)

• arguments elicit strong opinions because of associations with memories, desires and values (264)