Eating Animals

Foer presents differing perspectives in this chapter, allowing readers access to both C’s voice and the voice of a factory farmer, as well as Frank Reese’s. This tactic plays into the ethos argument as Foer allows other, presumably respected perspectives to influence his readers. A critical element of the early portion of this chapter, in which C recounts how she became an activist through the realization of consumer indifference, plays into the symbolic “locked doors” that Foer and C encounter. C notes that she films factory farms because most consumers “aren’t able to see these farms with their own eyes” (92), highlighting the representation of locked doors. Foer, too, is unable to get responses from larger companies to secure a tour of their facilities, which leads to Foer and C breaking into a farm. At the farm, the physical locked doors are meant to keep people like C out, but they serve as a symbol for the closed off nature of the meat industry. C’s friends and parents are not aware of the violence and cruelty involved in factory farming, and factory farming is organized to prevent dissent. The indifference of consumers is not cruel or inhumane, but deceived, as factory farms prevent the common person from seeing or understanding the methods of their operations. What fuels C’s efforts is the idea that most people would reject factory farming if they knew how factory farms operate, but both physical and social locked doors prevent most people from finding out more information.

Though Foer does not directly comment on the factory farmer’s statements, readers can draw a variety of points from the work thus far to influence the farmer’s presentation. The farmer’s claims that there is a need for more food to feed a burgeoning population are countered by Foer’s acknowledgement of food waste and terms like bycatch, which both imply that a lot of food is thrown out or wasted. Acknowledging food waste makes it more difficult to accept the argument that more food is needed, rather than less waste. The factory farmer criticizes the idea of global vegetarianism as idealistic, but Foer has carefully framed the book as a matter of individual decision making. Ironically, the factory farmer’s advice to Foer is that he should research farming thoroughly before passing judgment on the system, but Foer has already established that he has done his research. Likewise, C’s perspective shows how difficult it is to research factory farming in person and provides the results of C’s years of research and investigation. The result is that the factory farmer’s testimony is largely representative of the forgetting process that Foer notes throughout the book, where modern consumers willfully divorce themselves from the process of consumption.

Foer’s depiction of early chickens and humans highlights two elements of arguments in favor of eating meat, and he seems to refute those elements successfully. One is that humans have always eaten meat, which Foer concedes with a caveat. He notes how different human cultures have always had ritual and ethical factors in eating meat, such as sacrificing to the gods or keeping kosher, which implies an unease with meat consumption even among early humans. Likewise, the portrayal of animals and humans operating similarly to predators and prey in nature changes the view of agriculture by framing the massive amounts of animals confined and killed in the modern day against individual people killing only as many animals as were needed to survive. In short, though humans have always eaten meat, they used to eat meat with the intention of remaining ethical, they did so on a much smaller scale, and, though early humans likely needed meat to survive, it is now no longer needed in the modern day. The second factor is Foer’s comparison of farming to slavery, in which he refutes the argument that animals essentially consent to being confined and slaughtered in exchange for safety from nature. Though Foer is dubious about early human relations with animals relying on consent, the bulk of his argument is that current atrocities committed against animals outweigh the idea of safety and security. Animals in the farming industry are genetically modified and bred to live shorter, less functional lives, and this eliminates the possibility of a full life in nature. Like enslaved people, these animals are destined to be abused before they are born, eliminating the possibility of an argument of consent. Unlike enslaved people, animals are genetically engineered in such a way as to live painful lives even if physical abuse did not occur. These arguments are followed by Frank Reese’s testimony, which underpins what humane treatment looks like and serves as a counterpoint in which animals can be confined ethically to some extent.