Jonathan Safran Foer / Features / Untitled Books

“I do think that most people agree we can’t have a farm system that is the most environmentally destructive thing we do, that as a rule is violent to animals, that is making our antibiotics less effective, propagating swine and avian flu, those kinds of things. No one wants any of that.”

Photograph: ©Peter Rigaud

Jonathan Safran Foer

Not content with expanding the boundaries of fiction and bookmaking, Jonathan Safran Foer takes on the meat industry with the deeply personal exploration of the excesses of modern agriculture 'Eating Animals'. Mark Reynolds catches up with him.

UB: Before we get to Eating Animals, could we turn to your fiction for a moment? Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Tree of Codes seem designed to stretch the limits of fiction further and further. Are you trying to push readers' expectations into new territory with each work? And was it a conscious decision from the start to explore new boundaries?

JSF: Not at all. I don't actually get all that excited about experimentation for experimentation's sake. And it's extremely rare that I would have a particular reader in mind when I'm writing. In fact I would say that's only the case with Eating Animals. But I do have a strong interest in making the things that I want to make, but I can't anticipate what those will be until I'm involved in the process.

UB: The Tree of Codes actually breaks some physical boundaries too. It's a sculptural object as much as it's a piece of fiction, featuring a story carved out from a pre-existing collection, with a unique die-cut on each page leaving only a few words to navigate. How did you go about making it? Did you deliver a single dummy with the words already cut out?

JSF: Die-cutting is an old industrial process which I thought would create an interesting interface between visual arts and literature. I delivered a manuscript of Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles, in which I'd highlighted the words which I wanted to keep or discard. The idea was to carve away words to create a new story. The experience of reading the book changes as you move through it. A lot of people when they open it are surprised. It's certainly not like most books you'd see in a store. I wanted to start a conversation about what's possible with literature and what's possible with print.

UB: Are the publishers trying to figure out how they might turn it into an ebook?

JSF: I think that would be a lost cause.

UB: I suspect you're right. Though it struck me that you could have some kind of fun with it, do something inspired by it that could randomise a different story from the words of the original.

JSF: Yeah, you could do that. But in a way the whole point of the book is the physical experience.

UB: OK, I get that. So let's talk about Eating Animals. Why this book now?

JSF: Well I guess there are two answers to that: why for me, and why for the world. I wanted to make some pretty big decisions about how to raise my child, and what kind of family we would have. My initial research was a response to that, and the book was a response to just how surprising the results of the research were. In terms of the world, it's an issue that's been gaining incredible momentum. I mean, 18 per cent of American college students are now vegetarians, compared with around 4 or 5 per cent in the general public. About once a week there's an article in the New York Times that has something to do with industrial farming, and that certainly wasn't true four or five years ago.

UB: Right. And that's not something you can read about every week without it having an effect. It's a bit like climate change, I guess, which was talked about almost invisibly for decades among scientists and environmentalists before Al Gore and the rest forced it into the mainstream.

JSF: It's not only like climate change, it is climate change. Animal agriculture produces more greenhouse gases than everything else put together, and is the number one cause of global warming.

UB: Good point. And a big part of that is the cutting down of forests to grow soya to feed the animals, which is hard to rationalise... While reading the book I was put in mind of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, which was looking at gruesome practices in the meat industry over a century ago. Did Sinclair's book have any lasting effects on America's eating habits?

JSF: Well, it certainly changed legislation at the time, regarding acceptable methods of slaughter and welfare. But in terms of the public consciousness, that would be a hard thing to measure.

UB: In many ways things have become even more horrific since then. The sheer scale of industrial agriculture has grown unimaginably.

JSF: In terms of diet, we're eating so much more meat than we did a century ago. Americans eat, per person, 180 times as much chicken as then.

UB: Because it's become so cheap: it's self-perpetuating... Thinking of the Sinclair also led me to wonder if you felt you could have dealt with the same issues in the form of a novel.

JSF: I could have, but I don't think it would have had the effect I desired. It would have been seen as science fiction, a work of dark imagination. I think it's essential that readers know that the dark imagination is not mine, but that of the meat industry.

UB: Although Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a remarkable piece of future horror that certainly gets people thinking about our present values.

JSF: Eating Animals describes a present horror, or at least you can say it's the very near future. For example fishery scientists say that if we continue to consume fish the way we are doing, there will be no wild fish left in the ocean by 2048. That's a specific date, by the way; they're not just saying "by the middle of the century", it's based on a very precise calculation. And that's in our lifetimes. They're predicting an apocalyptic future that's pretty close.

UB: Have you seen a sea change in people's attitudes to meat in the year since the book was first published? Do you think you've had a direct effect on the US public's eating habits?

JSF: It's hard to say. Of course I encounter people all the time who tell me they'll change because of the book, but that doesn't necessarily imply anything more than a few individual responses. I'm not naïve. I don't think "my book is going to change the world", but I do hope that my book will contribute to the expansion of the conversation, and help people find new ways of talking about this thing I believe that fundamentally we can all agree on. It's not that everyone now thinks eating meat is bad: I'm not even trying to say that eating meat is bad. But I do think that most people agree that we can't have a farm system that is the most environmentally destructive thing we do, that as a rule is violent to animals, that is making our antibiotics less effective, propagating swine and avian flu, those kinds of things. No one wants any of that. The challenge is not to have to change anyone's values, but to create a new way of talking about this and a new way of acting on these shared values.

UB: Do you get a sense that lobbyists within the meat industry have cranked up a gear, to counter some of the arguments in your book?

JSF: I don't really know. Someone forwarded me an email the other day that they got from some sort of meat council or something, saying it was time to fight back against the "well-funded and powerful" vegetarian lobby, which is like the most ridiculous thing in the world. Not only is the vegetarian lobby not powerful, it doesn't exist.

UB: Although I suppose there are organisations like Peta that are somewhat funded, if nothing like on the level of the food industry.

JSF: Well, they're funded, but mostly what they do is not lobbying. I looked up the numbers, and the Humane Society, Peta and all the animal welfare groups together have a combined lobbying budget of about $600,000, while the meat industry spends tens of millions encouraging us to choose convenience over everything else we should care about.

UB: If we do give up meat, what about the commercial production of vegetables, grains and pulses? Obviously there's no animal cruelty involved, but what about the inbuilt lack of variety and taste, and the widespread use of pesticides?

JSF: It's not perfect. It's not even good most of the time. But the way that it's bad, and the scale of the badness, are radically different from meat production. It's something that would need its own reform, but in every way, from every perspective, it's infinitely better than the meat industry.

UB: In the UK, as I'm sure you're aware, GM crops probably get a worse press than the meat industry. What's your own view on GM?

JSF: I'm not an expert on it, it's not what I spent my time researching, but I'm aware that we should be afraid of these monocultures where we have an incredibly vulnerable food supply, and I agree that it's something to be worried about.

UB: Where do you shop for food? Do you have any problems finding what you want to buy?

JSF: Not at all. We have a really great farmers' market in our neighbourhood where I'm able to buy just about everything.

UB: What about pets: what should we be feeding our domestic carnivores? I know there are some veggie pet foods out there, but I'm not certain they're either palatable or balanced.

JSF: Some people's cats and dogs are perfectly happy with them, but my own dog didn't do very well on it. My local supermarket sells a non-factory-farmed dog food, so it's meat, but sourced from small family farms. And strangely enough it doesn't cost any more than regular dog food.

UB: And while we are still eating meat, what is the livestock meant to eat? Is there a replacement feed that isn't full of antiobiotics and hormone supplements that more carefully-reared cattle are fed?

JSF: Well I think the kinds of things that are fed to industrially produced cows, pigs and chickens are really, really disgusting. I mean objectively disgusting: there's cannibalism, all kinds of industrial by-products. The feed on family farms is much more wholesome.

UB: UK supermarkets have made a big play about switching to free-range - especially eggs. Is this label any more trustworthy in the UK than in the US, where you say it has no value, or are we being duped just as badly?

JSF: The labels are more reliable, England's food supply is better, but factory farming still dominates: 90 per cent of chickens are still produced industrially. On top of which, this is clearly a global problem. If you're concerned about animal welfare, it matters wherever it's happening, and no one is exempt from worrying about global warming, even if you're not one of the worst abusers. The UK also needs to switch back to small farms on a much bigger scale.

UB: I find some of the language on the way towards free range pretty interesting. I was in a supermarket the other day, looking at a bag of chicken that claimed to have been raised by "farmers who believe in our values". It's utterly meaningless, yet presumably people must be buying these products believing they have to be better than the really cheap stuff.

JSF: Of course it's meaningless, but it's increasing because - it echoes what I was saying before - we do share some basic values. The idea that animals should be treated well is a nearly universally-held value. It's not to say that everyone thinks animals should be treated like humans - I certainly don't. Or that animals that are invited into our homes should be given names. But there are these baseline human values about what is a decent way to treat an animal, and when you see that on a package of meat, it does in fact acknowledge a set of somewhat improved values that have been agreed on.

UB: One of the most startling facts in Eating Animals relates to the vast numbers of dead fish thrown back into the sea as unwanted "bycatch". British TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is currently making a big noise about bringing more of this edible fish to market. Is such a scheme workable, against a backdrop of species-specific quotas that causes this waste to happen?

JSF: He's an amazing advocate. I've been lucky enough to have had a couple of conversations with him. I don't really know the answer, but my inclination is that if he's getting excited about something, then it's something worth getting excited about.

UB: How does the future look for tuna?

JSF: When the New York Times, which is not exactly the Humane Society, wrote an editorial saying that bluefin tuna should be reclassified as an endangered species, a lot of people were taken aback. We should definitely be eating less of it, and also clean up the bycatch. As I point out in the book, if tuna sushi were accompanied by all the animals that were killed for each serving, the plate would have to be five feet across.

UB: You make the point that the vast majority of pigs and poultry in the food chain are so genetically altered that they are incapable of a natural existence. Should we let these unnatural species die off and reinvent the food chain? Is there even scope to do that and keep people from going hungry?

JSF: I certainly think we should do that. But it's not really a question of being hungry or not; it's a question of causing harm or not. When agriculturalists talk of feeding the world, they don't take into account the disproportionate amount of calories it takes to make meat. It's an incredibly inefficient way to grow food.

UB: So on balance, do you think our personal choices can change the ethos of the food industry fast enough?

JSF: I do. I think it can happen. The last decade has seen some real changes in perception and action.

UB: I hope you're right, and I'm sure your book will persuade more and more people to at least become more selective in their eating habits. Finally, can you say a word or two about what you are writing next?

JSF: I'm working on a novel. I don't really like to talk about fiction until it's done, because talking about it solidifies it in a way that's not productive. There's no fixed timescale or delivery schedule, so I'll just work on it till it's done.

......................................................................................................................................................................................

Eating Animals is published in paperback by Penguin on 27 January. The Tree of Codes is published by Visual Editions.

Mark Reynolds is Literary Editor of The Drawbridge and Project Manager of the Hard Rain environmental exhibition and accompanying publications

.......................................................................................................................................................................................

Thursday, 20 January, 2011