I am reading the new Jonathan Safran Foer book. I didn't read Everything is Illuminated because the whole "There's a character in this book with my name" has worked for exactly 3 authors: Jorge Luis Borges, Philip K. Dick, and Tim O'Brien. Also, really, I've read, heard, and seen enough about the Holocaust in my life and will never willingly read, view, or listen to any Holocaust-involved stories again. Unless maybe there are zombies involved. Because that would be cool.
I own but have not read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I hear it's good and feel like I should read it but am worried that it might be one of those "Manhattan and/or Brooklyn is the center of the universe" books. And, I mean, I like New York. I might even say I heart it, even though it's where the Yankees play. But sometimes New York-based fiction gets annoying in its insistence that the particulars of Manhattan (or, increasingly, Brooklyn) life are just inherently fascinating.
But I bought and am reading Eating Animals. This is largely because I am a vegetarian, and despite the growing numbers of vegetarians, it's still a fringe phenomenon, a diet that most people in this country think is freakish and annoying. Though I know no militant vegetarians (I mean, I know they're out there, but none of the vegetarians I know personally are militant like that) I know plenty of militant omnivores who think nothing of lecturing me about protein intake or looking for hypocrisy in the way I live the rest of my life. And vegetarians, when acknowledged in popular culture at all, are typically presented as either ridiculous hippies or hectoring killjoys.
Writing this book in hopes of affecting how anyone eats is an act of tremendous and admirable optimism that I would never be able to undertake. I'm cynical enough to believe that humans will gleefully kill themselves for a few moments of convenience, so the idea that a large number of people would ever do anything that would be even slightly inconvenient represents a positive outlook I just don't have. Many people won't even read this book because they kind of know that farming (not using factory farming here because that's pretty redundant) is a deeply screwed up process. We (counting myself, as I continue to eat dairy and eggs, which involve horrific amounts of suffering, so I'm not exactly on my high horse here) willfully shut our eyes and minds to the horror behind what's on our plates, because if we really allowed ourselves to know what we're participating in, we would stop. And then what would I have on top of my pizza?
So, since most people won't read this book, I wanted to share a particularly gross tidbit that's got me thinking about chicken. It's about how chickens are killed and processed, but the horror of this is unrelated to animal welfare and suffering. Take it away, Jonathan!:
Contamination often occurs here, as the high-speed machines commonly rip open intestines, releasing feces into the birds' body cavitites...
Next the chickens go to a massive refrigerated tank of water, where thousands of birds are communally cooled. Tom Devine, from the Government Accountability Project, has said that the "water in these tanks has been aptly named 'fecal soup' for all the filth and bacteria floating around. By immersing clean, healthy birds in the same tank with dirty ones, you're practically assuring cross-contamination."
While a significant number of European and Canadian poultry processors employ air chilling systems, 99 percent of US poultry producers have stayed with water-immersion systems... It's not hard to figure out why. Air-chilling reduces the weight of a bird's carcass, but water-chilling causes a dead bird to soak up water (the same water known as "fecal soup"). One study has shown that simply placing the chicken carcasses in plastic bags during the chilling stage would eliminate cross-contamination. But that would also eliminate an opportunity for the industry to turn wastewater into tens of millions of dollars' worth of additional weight in poultry products.
He goes on to reveal that chickens sold in the US can be up to 11% water by weight.
Enjoy your lunch!
