I just finished Eating Animals, which is not only an excellent introduction to the issues surrounding meat-eating, from factory farms to family dinners, but also thought-provoking for an already-educated eater like myself. I think it will definitely accomplish the author’s goal of starting conversations — conversations already in progress, I’m sure, since the ethics and impact of veganism has been mentioned recently on Oprah, Martha Stewart, Ellen, The View, and other mainstream media sources. Here are some of the provoked thoughts I had as I was devouring the text…

Factory farming is just plain wrong. Only by ignoring the fact that animals can feel pain and experience suffering can you support it was a clear mind and a clear heart. But family farms are trickier, because everyone has the image of happy cows grazing on green grass. They get the chance to live good, full lives, and are protected from the stress of the wilderness. Often people justify eating meat with this image falsely fixed in their imagination, but even if that image were real, I doubt its moral integrity. Bill Niman, a small-farm rancher, is quoted in Eating Animals:

“I vividly remember lying awake the night after we’d slaughtered our first pig. I agonized over whether I’d done the right thing. But in the weeks that followed, as we, our friends, and family ate the pork from that pig, I realized that the pig had died for an important purpose — to provide us with delicious, wholesome, and highly nutritious food. I decided that as long as I always endeavored to provide our animals good, natural lives, and deaths that were free from fear or pain, raising animals for food was morally acceptable to me.”

“The pig died for an important purpose.” There might be purposes important enough to die for, but food is not it. Bringing people together over the dinner table, through traditions passed on through generations, is commendable. But it is not the highest good. Traditions can and do change. I might choose to die myself if it would end a war or a family feud, if it would save lives or vastly improves the lives of many. Yet even here, does anyone have the right to make that decision for me? Things would have to be really bad to justify murder. Perhaps it is because I couldn’t kill Hitler or the Joker even if I knew, positively, that the world would be so much better for it. Perhaps that is why I choose not to kill (or pay someone else to kill) an animal for the joy and convenience of sharing its flesh and fluids with my loved ones.

And there is something especially disturbing about killing one sentient being with whom you have bonded in order to eat it with some other companions. Mr Niman, may I slaughter some of your friends and family — who, after all, have had a good and happy life — in order to feed my own?

Not so morally acceptable now.

At the end of this chapter, Foer says that the board of directors of Niman Ranch ousted Mr Niman because they wanted to pursue less ethical, more economical practices that he opposed. Niman himself won’t eat Niman Ranch meat anymore. Up to this point, Niman and his wife and their friends had almost almost convinced me that it was actually worthwhile to pursue better conditions for farmed animals than to the complete abolition of animal agriculture — welfare over rights. Until this unexpected and unfortunate fall from grace. Niman Ranch not yet a factory farm, to be sure, but its actions demonstrate that as long as animals are treated as property and producers of valuable commodities, their interests cannot be protected. Not even by the few ranchers who really do care.