Guest guest Posted March 26, 2010 Report Share Posted March 26, 2010 Courtesy Phil Wollen http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2856551.htm Jonathan Safran Foer joins Lateline Print Email<http://www.abc.net.au/cgi-bin/common/mailto/mailto-nojs_query.pl?http://ww\ w.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2856551.htm> Australian Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast: 26/03/2010 Reporter: Tony Jones Vegetarian US novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who set out to research ethics of what we eat to see if he would ever be able to justify it to his son, joins Lateline. TranscriptTONY JONES, PRESENTER: Three years ago the American novelist Jonathon Safran Foer, a new father, set out to research the ethics of what we eat to see if he would ever be able to justify eating meat to his son. As a result he became a vegetarian and he wrote Eating Animals, a passionate polemic against factory farming. I spoke to him in New York earlier today. Jonathon Safran Foer, thanks for joining us. JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: Thank you. TONY JONES: Now, largely inspired by your book we sent a reporter out to investigate factory farming of chickens in Australia. She made contact with an animal rights activist group and they conducted a raid which they filmed on one of the factory farms and the images will have shocked many of our viewers I'm sure. Forty thousand chickens crammed into a giant barn; the maimed and dying birds unable to get food or water; dead chickens being cannibalised by the living. This, I imagine you would argue, is not untypical. JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: People often ask me what was the most disturbing thing that I saw in the course of my three years of research into animal agriculture and I think they're expecting me to say something I saw in a slaughter house or a half-dead animal crawling across the ground trying to get some water. The scariest thing is that this is the rule - 99 per cent of chickens in America are factory farmed and the numbers are pretty consistent globally. As a rule these animals are treated in the way that you're describing and sometimes worse. As a rule, they are bred to suffer, we know they are going to become ill. We know that they cannot be allowed to live out of their adolescence because their bones will start to break under the weight of their Frankenstein bodies and as a rule there is environmental destruction built into this business model and we have hardly any alternatives to it any more. And that - the breadth of this industry, as much as how terrible it is, is what is so grotesque. TONY JONES: You say that nothing unsettled you more nor better captured the whole sad business of factory farming than the locked doors you encountered when you went on a raid. JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: Well, the first thing I learned about animal agriculture is that it's very difficult to learn anything at all. If you wanted to know where your orange juice comes from, you could probably write a letter to the manufacturer and get a tour of the orchard. If you wanted to know where your bread is made, the baker will almost certainly let you behind the counter and show you the ingredients and the machines. But if you want to know where meat come from you are totally out of luck and I would encourage all viewers of this - go to your refrigerator, open it up, find a brand name and give the company a call. And say, what is a very reasonable thing to say, which is " I'm somebody who gives you my money, puts your product in my mouth and often, for many of us, into the mouths of my children and loved ones, and I'm curious because I know that there are serious effects on my own body and I know there are serious effects on the environment and animal welfare " . And I will be very surprised if any viewers have luck. I should say, this is distinguished - factory farming is distinguished - from small farming, family farms, the kinds of farms that unfortunately occupy less than 1 per cent of the market but are still prevalent in green markets and farmers markets in many neighbourhoods and these kinds of farmers will usually eagerly invite you to see their farms. TONY JONES: Well, you argue that the actual business model of factory farming is to keep the whole business secret from consumers? JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: Well, it is interesting. My book came out on November first in America and it was a New York Times best seller, I was on TV a number of times and I said some very strong things in the book and in interviews about this industry. Now, if I wrote a book about you and said such strongly negative things, you would stand up for yourself. You would say " Well, you've got the facts all wrong, " or " There's another way of looking at it, " or " Yes, there is something unfortunate about me but there's also these great things about me which outweigh the unfortunate things " . What has been amazing to me and I think really revelatory, is the absolute silence of the industry. The silence is due to one or two things. Either everything I said in my book is true or - or and/or - they know that any kind of conversation about the industry is going to move people away from it. And frankly, you know, that is why I wrote my book. It wasn't to try to change anyone's mind, I don't think anyone's mind needs to be changed. It was to mainstream this conversation. I think it would be great if America had a national conversation - if we had a global conversation - that included people from the factory farming industry, and included veterinarians and included environmentalists, included philosophers and included all of us - and we made it very open, very transparent. We open the doors to these farms and we simply said " Does what we get justify the means and what we lose? And I'm convinced that most people, if they had a direct line of access to this information, would say " No, what we are getting does not justify what we are losing " . TONY JONES: Well, you send out the views of one factory farmer in the book. His argument is that people wanted cheaper food and we have grown it and that protein has never been more affordable. JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: It depends on how you measure the cost of something. If you mean simply what we pay at the cash register, then what he said is true. You cannot beat a 49-cent burger at McDonald's, but is the burger really 49 cents? That is the question. What costs have been externalised? An environmental group recently did a study to try to quantify simply the environmental costs of that 49-cent burger - leaving out the human health costs, which are tremendous - and they estimated that each 49-cent burger costs about $200. That is a not a hypothetical, that's not a made up number and it's not a punch line of a joke. This is real, this is the price we are actually paying or more properly stated, it is what our kids are going to pay and our grandkids are going to pay. So the problem is, we have set up this industry that has artificially lowered these prices to such a point that a lot of people simply can't say no to them any more while they have externalised the real costs that we are ultimately paying. TONY JONES: Alright, let's go to the next stage of chicken factory farming, the massive automated slaughter and the processing plants that follow. Describe for us, if you can, briefly, the process as you understand it and the dangers to human health. JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: The dangers to human health are really catastrophic because, as these animals are killed by machines, you know, inevitably... You know, chickens bodies are not identical to one another, so any machine that thinks they can slaughter them as if they were is not going to do a proper job. Often intestines are ripped open, there's faecal contamination and these birds are put into large cooling tanks where they are left to cross-contaminate each other. This liquid is actually termed " faecal soup " - or it was in my book. Someone in the industry referred to it as " faecal soup " . Ninety per cent of chickens at one point are contaminated with salmonella or campylobacter. Perhaps even more frightening to some people is that we are feeding these animals - and this happens on the farm, not in the slaughter house - antibiotics from birth until death and the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and the Union of Concerned Scientists have all been pleading with the industry to stop because there's a very lucid link between the use of antibiotics for farmed animals and their ineffectiveness for humans. Perhaps more scary than that is that we know that our factory farms are now like Petri dishes for disease and we are creating conditions where swine flu and avian flu can be propagated. The recent swine flu H1N1, which has moved across the planet and fortunately been relatively benign, although I think more than 10,000 people have died, originated on a hog farm in North Carolina. It's not to say that all flues come from factory farms or that there weren't flu epidemics before factory farms, but as with almost everything about this industry, we are creating conditions that make cruelty, make violence, make environmental destruction and make human health problems inevitable. TONY JONES: One of the things we know for sure is we are going to have billions more mouths to feed on the planet by 2050 - the population is growing that fast - so what are alternatives, as you see it, for this kind of mass production or factory techniques and have you thought of a way to deal with this fundamental problem? JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: It takes between 6 and 26 calories of food input to get one calorie of meat from an animal. It's very inefficient, it's extremely wasteful and it's a very expensive way to make food. We now feed corn and soy - these are foods that humans are capable of digesting - naturally to cows, which are not capable of digesting corn and soy naturally. We've taken them off of grass, which is a food of course that humans cannot digest naturally. So this is an example of, you know, perverting the natural model. We need to eat less meat. It's what everybody says. It's what every environmentalist now says. Greenpeace doesn't even serve meat at its functions anymore, not for reasons of animal welfare but environment reasons. The climate chief of the United Kingdom said in an interview two months ago, the only way to save the planet is a global movement toward vegetarianism. Al Gore is now talking about it, small farmers, family farmers are talking about it. One of the strange things about factory farming - one of the tragedies - is not only how it changed farming practices but how it changed our diets and our notions of what a meal is. Americans now eat, per capita, 150 times as much chicken as we did 80 years ago, so clearly part of the solution to this problem is going back to our older eating habits - to thinking that perhaps a dining room table is a good place to eat a meal, that maybe the car isn't the best place; that maybe cutlery is nice when eating and we don't have to have all of our meals with the fingers of one hand and that maybe it's nice to eat meals with other people that we prepared ourselves, rather than alone that we picked up through a drive through window. So, you know, people sometimes talk about being vegetarian as being a deprivation, or rather, of eating less meat as being a deprivation. When I think, my experience of eating less meat and ultimately now no meat, is that a great thing has been added. TONY JONES: Well, what about eating fish because a lot of people who refuse to eat meat are eating fish for their protein. Is that the answer? JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: Well, not according to fishery scientists. People who study fish populations globally have estimated that in the year 2048 there will be no more wild fish and if that number sound precise it's because it's based on a very precise calculation. And when I say no wild fish, I don't mean that your tuna roll is going to cost twice as much or that it's going to become a tilapia roll instead. I mean there will be no wild fish. We are really ravaging the ocean. Some of this is simply because of over fishing. A good deal of it is because of by catch, which is when you know, these huge - essentially warships go and bring in tons of ocean life at a time. Inevitably, obviously, of course they are bringing in all kind of things that they're not intending to bring in. So, for shrimp trawling, for example, some of the worst shrimp trawling operations can have 98 per cent by catch, which is to say 98 per cent of everything they bring in they throw back out dead because it's unwanted. In my book I ask the reader to imagine a plate of sushi and to imagine further that all the animals killed in the process of bringing those few pieces of sushi to the plate were also present on the plate. And I say that plate would probably have to be about 5 feet wide. People would eat less fish if this were visible, so again, I think, the problem is not that anyone needs to find new values, it's that we need a clear line of sight to the process that brings us our food. TONY JONES: You say in the book that it shouldn't be the responsibility of consumers to figure out what is cruel and what's kind, that cruel and destructive food products should simply be illegal, but how do you convince legislators that they should legislate the make that the case? JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: Well, the New York Times editorialised about a month ago that bluefin tuna should be reclassified as an endangered species. You might be aware that in the past few weeks there was an international row over this and that ultimately because of Japan's lobbying, there was going to be a rule in place that would make the importation of bluefin tuna illegal, but it didn't happen. This is not, you know, my opinion. You are now hearing this from people who don't have any environmental or animal welfare advocacy slant. We just need to find ways of moving toward more sustainable food that better reflects our values. TONY JONES: Finally, what's going to change human nature here, because you talk about the process of deliberately forgetting and the fact is that most people who consume the produce of factory farms are capable of switching off their minds to the way in which the animals are treated, housed and slaughtered before they reach the table? JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: Well, I'm such a person. Everyone is such a person. We are all hypocrites. We are all forgetful. I think the problem has been that we've imagined only two alternatives: either you are a vegetarian or you are someone who eats meat and doesn't think about it all. The fact is, we live in a world in which most people cannot picture themselves becoming vegetarian but we also live in a world in which most people care about these things. I mean, does anyone not care about air pollution, water pollution, the fact that animal agriculture is the number one cause of global greenhouse gas emissions? In fact, it emits more global greenhouse gas than everything else put together. Does anyone not care about antibiotic resistance or and does anyone not care about torturing animals? I do not think such people exist. If they do, they're on the fringes of society so we need to find a way to allow these people into this conversation. I think we need to move away from this binary " You are a vegetarian or not " to " You are somebody who cares or does not " . And for people to care, there are a lot of different paths on can take. Some will say " I want to completely reject meat " . Some people will say " I want to reject factory farming and the meat that I eat I'm going to get from small farms, family farm " . Some people will say, " I'm going to eat less meat. You know, I don't need it three times a day, I don't need it two times a day " . If every American were to remove one serving of meat a week from his diet, it would be environmentally the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road. That's a very radical statistic and I think a lot of people find that persuasive. I respect, I understand anyone watching this who says " I am not going to be a vegetarian. I mean, it took me 25 years to become one. It is difficult. Someone who says " I can't remove one serving of meat a week " ? I find that very hard to understand. So I think we need to start at the first step and not let the recognition that we won't perfect and we won't be perfectly consistent - not let that let us off the hook from trying at all. TONY JONES: Jonathon Safran Foer, we thank you very much for taking the time the talk to us tonight on Lateline. JONATHON SAFRAN FOER: Thank you very much. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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