Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer

EVA Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, the American bestseller-author

‘There will come a time in the not too distant future when we think about meat like we think about cigarettes’

Jonathan Safran Foer, the American bestseller-author of ‘Everything is Illuminated’ and ‘Extremely loud and incredibly close’, was  in Europe for a tour around his new book, ‘Eating Animals’. We were able to interview him in Antwerp. Foer is a short, quiet and relaxed guy, and oozes intelligence. He walks around in jeans and sneakers and there’s no way you would guess that you’re facing one of today’s young literary gods. Of course it is exactly because his fame as a fiction author that ‘Eating Animals’, a nonfiction work about a less accessible and rather unpleasant subject, became such a success.

EVA: You wrote this book to tell people about what’s going on with the meat they eat. Like many vegetarians, you believe that if people would know more about how their steak and chicken breast are produced, they would eat less of those. A strange thing, however: the meat industry in the US seems to think the exact opposite. A spokesperson recently said that when consumers see the people behind their product, they’ll feel a lot more confident in buying it. 

Jonathan Safran Foer: That’s just dishonest. First of all she’s saying ‘if you meet the farmers’. She’s not saying ‘if you have exposure to the practices’. That’s a very different thing. They don’t allow people to see what they do. If that was something they genuinely believed, they would give tours of their factory farms, or at the very least they wouldn’t make it a terrorist act to enter one.

I understand that you’ve asked farmers and producers if you could visit their places but they didn’t let you in?

Let’s say I sent about a 150 letters. I got maybe 10 responses. They talked about security regulations or said things like: ‘as a practice we don’t do it. I’m sorry.’ So yes, actually nobody invited me in.

You write early on in your book that eating animals is a place where people don’t really want to go. There seem to be many progressive, well intentioned people doing all the right things and making good choices, but they totally ignore the issue of eating animals. Why do you think that is?

Yes, I come across these people all the time. As for an explanation, well, it’s not a popular thing to care about. People tend to care about things that are popular to care about. Secondly, I think people are aware of the stakes. The more resistant somebody is to talk about it, the better an indication it is that they know that they have to change, or they have to recognize their own hypocrisy. Most of the time they don’t want to do either. So they try to ignore the issue and hope that it will go away.

Or they try to rationalize the issue away. Michiko Kakutani, one of the most respected literary critics, wrote a rather negative review of your book in the New York Times. She uses the same old argument, wondering how you ‘can expend so much energy and caring on the fate of pigs and chickens, when, say, malaria kills nearly a million people a year (most of them children)’.

That is literally the only bad review in the US of this book. It’s a shame that it was in the New York Times. If I had turned that article in high school, I would have gotten a bad grade. I’m sure one can find intelligent arguments to go after the book, but that wasn’t one.

Can you give an example of an intelligent argument against your story?

You could get into a conversation about poverty and talk about the way the food system is structured and how so many people don’t have access to alternative food, for instance. For many people in the US, junk food is the only thing they can afford. Not that it’s a good argument, or a defense, but there are stumbling points. It’s at least something to talk about.

You have said repeatedly that your book is not per se an argument for vegetarianism. You are mainly writing and talking about the way we treat animals for food, without giving any opinion about the actual fact of killing them.

Animal welfare is something that can be objectively discussed. I’m comfortable saying that what I’m saying is something we all need to agree on. However, when you start talking about killing animals or not, we get into less rational territory, where we end up investigating our own deep senses into what is right and what is wrong. I have my own feelings about it. They are reflected in the fact that I wouldn’t eat meat, not even from the best farm in the world, but I’m not comfortable discussing that as something objective.

One cannot say that killing is objectively wrong? 

Killing animals is not something to be a part of. But in the case of the very best farm, the right that you are talking about is the right of an animal to continue its existence, which in a way is a strange notion. During the course of my research, I went to farms where I had a hard time putting into words what was actually wrong and on what grounds I could say to someone else that was wrong. I don’t think that the question about the morality of killing animals is the important question to ask. It is divisive and not effective. We should rather be appealing to the things that everyone agrees on. Almost all people agree that we can kill animals for food. But if you ask them if it is right to have a system where animals can barely move around, or that breeds animals that can’t reproduced sexually, it turns out that a large majority of the people will disagree with what 99% of the meat industry does.

When we talk about killing people though, it’s pretty clear that that is wrong.

Not all living things are the same, or are to be treated the same. Would you ever swipe out a cockroach or a bee that’s in your face? If you can imagine yourself squatting a mosquito, you have drawn a line. Not always for good reason. A mosquito undoubtedly has a will to live. It doesn’t want to be killed, but if you kill it, you say it’s not like other things. I think a lot of people say that humans are qualitatively different. I don’t know if I would say that, but I could swat a mosquito. It’s a blurry, complicated issue.

We do seem to have a big taboo around killing though. People are not comfortable with killing. Does that mean anything?

Certainly the great majority of people in slaughterhouses don’t have a problem with killing. And we have to face the fact that the great majority of people don’t have a problem with animals being killed, even if they don’t want to be present when it’s happening, much like they don’t want to be present at a surgery. There’s very few people who’d want to watch a surgery on a human, but that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. Blood, organs, anatomy… it all makes us very uncomfortable.

You write about Frank Reese, a farmer who seems to run the farm that comes closest to your ideal of a farm. The guy clearly cares a lot for his animals. Do you think that after treating his animals so well during their lives, he has no problem killing them?

He does! He cries when he talks about it!

Isn’t that strange?

Yes it is. Well… he’s a strange guy.  There’s not many farmers like him.

What is your vision for the future? Where do you think we are headed?

I think it’s quite possible that in ten years the majority of meals will be vegetarian. I don’t mean the majority of people, but the majority of meals. You would see that on restaurant menus the ratio of meat versus vegetarian dishes is reversed. There will come a time in the not too distant future when we think about meat like we think about cigarettes. People will feel a little bit ashamed eating meat, and will feel a bit grossed out perhaps. They won’t do it as openly and not as brazenly as today.

Do you think we could end up with a situation in which we have only farms like Frank Reese’s?

No, there’s no way they will ever produce meat for more than a few people, relatively speaking. The important thing is working on the reduction of meat consumption, like what has happened here with the vegetarian days. How did you guys do that, by the way?

You mention that food habits have deep cultural roots. Less meat means a cultural change. What do you think has to be done to create this cultural change without losing part of our cultural identity?

You lose something but you replace it. We always had turkey at Thanksgiving, and now we don’t. But the kind of conversations we have had explaining why we don’t have the turkey are a much more valuable and interesting cultural fact than the turkey ever was.

What do you think needs to happen to make the fastest progress possible?

I would say we need to move away from an absolutist conversation. The word vegetarian shouldn’t be an identity. After talks, people come to me and they say they’ve been vegetarian for four days, since reading my book. I’m almost inclined to say: have one meal with meat a week. You know these people who were vegetarian for fifteen years. You ask them what happened and they say ‘well, I was at the airport, and there was nothing to eat, so I eat chicken, and I’ve eaten meat since then.’ What’s that about? That’s when people put the entirety of their commitment on a vegetarian identity.

 Any celebrity reactions to your book?

Nathalie Portman read the book and became vegan. And Judd Apatow, director of movies like Knocked up and Funny people wrote me an email saying ‘fuck you – you ruined my life, I used to love meat and I now I won’t eat it anymore.’

What is the most interesting reaction you got from the meat industry? 

Well, their reaction is interesting only in the way that there hasn’t been any. They haven’t responded at all. Both because they have nothing to say – I got the facts right – and because they know that expanding the conversation is the worst thing they could do. Their business model depends on people not thinking about it.

You wrote this book because you noticed you had to explain to your son why you choose to eat what you eat. Your children are vegetarian. What do you say to people who tell you that you are forcing a diet on your kids?

Everybody is doing that. Everybody makes a choice, even if their choice is no choice.

Source: EVA (Ethical Vegetarian Alternative)        vegi.info
Author: Tobias Leenaert

See more interview with Jonathan:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyvWKdYJQN8&feature=related

Why Do Vegetarians Live Longer?

by Kathy Freston  Health and Wellness Activist, Author    www.huffingtonpost.com

 

 

Nearly a decade of extra life — that’s what you get when you move away from eating animal foods and toward a plant-based diet. This is really exciting science for anyone seeking healthy longevity (and who isn’t?)!

According to a recent report on the largest study of vegetarians and vegans to date, those eating plant-based diets appear to have a significantly longer life expectancy. Vegetarians live on average almost eight years longer than the general population, which is similar to the gap between smokers and nonsmokers. This is not surprising, given the reasons most of us are dying. In an online video, “Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death,” Michael Greger, M.D. explores the role a healthy diet can play in preventing, treating, and even reversing the top 15 killers in the United States. Let’s take a closer look at what the good doctor has pulled together…

Heart disease is our leading cause of death. The 35-year follow-up of the Harvard Nurses Health Study was recently published, now the most definitive long-term study on older women’s health. Dietary cholesterol intake — only found in animal foods — was associated with living a significantly shorter life and fiber intake — only found in plant foods — was associated with living a significantly longer life. Consuming the amount of cholesterol found in just a single egg a day may cut a woman’s life short as much as smoking five cigarettes daily for 15 years, whereas eating a daily cup of oatmeal’s worth of fiber appears to extend a woman’s life as much as four hours of jogging a week. (But there’s no reason we can’t do both!)

What if your cholesterol’s normal, though? I hear that a lot. But here’s the thing: having a “normal” cholesterol in a society where it’s “normal” to drop dead of a heart attack is not necessarily a good thing. According to the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Cardiology, “For the build-up of plaque in our arteries to cease, it appears that the serum total cholesterol needs to be lowered to the 150 area. In other words the serum total cholesterol must be lowered to that of the average pure vegetarian.”

More than 20 years ago, Dr. Dean Ornish showed that heart disease could not just be stopped but actually reversed with a vegan diet, arteries opened up without drugs or surgery. Since this lifestyle cure was discovered, hundreds of thousands have died unnecessary deaths. What more does one have to know about a diet that reverses our deadliest disease?

Cancer is killer number two. Ah, the dreaded “C” word — but look at this hopeful science. According to the largest forward-looking study on diet and cancer so far performed, “the incidence of all cancers combined is lower among vegetarians.” The link between meat and cancer is such that even a paper published in the journal Meat Science recently asked, “Should we become vegetarians, or can we make meat safer?” There are a bunch of additives under investigation to suppress the toxic effects the blood-based “heme” iron, for example, which could provide what they called an “acceptable” way to prevent cancer. Why not just reduce meat consumption? The meat science researchers noted that if such public health guidance were adhered to, “Cancer incidence may be reduced, but farmers and [the] meat industry would suffer important economical problems…” Hmmm, so Big Ag chooses profit over health; what a surprise.

After Dr. Ornish’s team showed that the bloodstreams of men eating vegan for a year had nearly eight times the cancer-stopping power, a series of elegant experiments showed that women could boost their defenses against breast cancer after just two weeks on a plant-based diet. See the before and after here (nutritionfacts.org/video). If you or anyone you know has ever had a cancer scare, this research will make your heart soar. Because there is real, true hope — something you can do to stave off “the big C.”

So, the top three leading causes of death used to be heart disease, cancer, then stroke, but the latest CDC stats place COPD third — lung diseases such as emphysema. Surprisingly, COPD can be prevented with the help of a plant-based diet, and can even be treated with plants. Of course, the tobacco industry viewed these landmark findings a little differently. Instead of adding plants to one’s diet to prevent emphysema, wouldn’t it be simpler to just add them to the cigarettes? Hence the study “Addition of Açaí [Berries] to Cigarettes Has a Protective Effect Against Emphysema in [Smoking] Mice.” Seriously.

The meat industry tried the same tack. Putting fruit extracts in burgers was not without its glitches, though. The blackberries “literally dyed burger patties with a distinct purplish color,” and though it was possible to improve the nutritional profile of frankfurters with powdered grape seeds, there were complaints that the grape seed “particles became visible” in the final product. And if there’s one thing we know about hot dog eaters, it’s that they’re picky about what goes in their food!

Onward to strokes: The key to preventing strokes may be to eat potassium-rich foods. Though Chiquita may have had a good PR firm, bananas don’t even make the top 50 sources. The leading whole food sources include dark green leafy vegetables, beans, and dates. We eat so few plants that 98 percent of Americans don’t even reach the recommended minimum daily intake of potassium. And if you look at killer number five — accidents — bananas (and their peels) could be downright dangerous!

Alzheimer’s disease is now our sixth leading killer. We’ve known for nearly 20 years now that those who eat meat — including chicken and fish — appear three times more likely to become demented compared to long-term vegetarians. Exciting new research suggests one can treat Alzheimer’s using natural plant products such as the spice saffron, which beat out placebo and worked as well as a leading Alzheimer’s drug.

Diabetes is next on the kick-the-bucket list. Plant-based diets help prevent, treat, and even reverse Type 2 diabetes. Since vegans are, on average, about 30 pounds skinnier than meat-eaters, this comes as no surprise; but researchers found that vegans appear to have just a fraction of the diabetes risk, even after controlling for their slimmer figures.

Kidney failure, our eighth leading cause of death, may also be prevented and treated with a plant-based diet. The three dietary risk factors Harvard researchers found for declining kidney function were animal protein, animal fat, and cholesterol, all of which are only found in animal products.

Leading killer number nine is respiratory infections. With flu shot season upon us, it’s good to know that fruit and vegetable consumption can significantly boost one’s protective immune response to vaccination. Check out the short video “Kale and the Immune System,” and you’ll see there’s not much kale can’t do.

Suicide is number 10. Oh yes, vegan food even has something good to offer on this one! Cross-sectional studies have shown that the moods of those on plant-based diets tend to be superior, but taken in just a snapshot in time one can’t tease out cause-and-effect. Maybe happier people end up eating healthier and not the other way around. But this year an interventional trial was published in which all meat, poultry, fish, and eggs were removed from people’s diets and a significant improvement in mood scores was found after just two weeks. It can take drugs like Prozac a month or more to take effect. So you may be able to get happier faster by cutting out animal foods than by using drugs.

Drugs can help with the other conditions as well, but instead of taking one drug for cholesterol every day for the rest of your life, maybe a few for high blood pressure or diabetes, the same diet appears to work across the board without the risk of drug side-effects. One study found that prescription medications kill an estimated 106,000 Americans every year. That’s not from errors or overdose, but from adverse drug reactions, arguably making doctors the sixth leading cause of death.

Based on a study of 15,000 American vegetarians, those that eat meat have about twice the odds of being on antacids, aspirin, blood pressure medications, insulin, laxatives, painkillers, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers. So plant-based diets are great for those that don’t like taking drugs, paying for drugs, or risking adverse side effects.

Imagine if, like President Clinton, our nation embraced a plant-based diet. Imagine if we just significantly cut back on animal products. There is one country that tried. After World War II, Finland joined us in packing on the meat, eggs, and dairy. By the 1970s, the mortality rate from heart disease of Finnish men was the highest in the world, and so they initiated a country-wide program to decrease their saturated fat intake. Farmers were encouraged to switch from dairies to berries. Towns were pitted against each other in friendly cholesterol-lowering competitions. Their efforts resulted in an 80 percent drop in cardiac mortality across the entire country.

Conflicts of interest on the U.S. dietary guidelines committee may have prevented similar action from our own government, but with our health-care crisis deepening, our obesity epidemic widening, and the health of our nation’s children in decline, we may need to take it upon ourselves, families, and communities to embrace Food Day ideals of healthy, affordable, sustainable foods by moving towards a more plant-centered diet. If we do, we may be afforded added years to enjoy the harvest.