Eid at Joe's

[footnotefetish]

I finished reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer this afternoon. It was worthwhile reading, but given my niece's remarks about it and the publicity it received, I expected it to be better than it was. Maybe I've put in enough years of being interested in food politics that Foer had almost nothing new to present to me. The only bit of

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[alsoname]

There was an article on antibiotics use in the New York Times today, complete with some very cute (and sad) pig photos.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/us/15farm.html?hpw

[footnotefetish]

That's good news that there will be some long overdue restriction on antibiotic use put in place. My guess, though, is that the restrictions will have little or no enforcement. Oversight of the food industry has declined in a lot of ways, so I don't expect any restrictions to have much teeth to them.

The pictured pigs were indeed cute. It does make me cringe to see them packed that tightly together, though. Pigs in that much confinement are often the ones that have teeth removed so that they won't bite each other as much when they (inevitably) get aggressive as a result of their confinement.

[alsoname]

Yeah, the treatment of factory-farm animals is what made me transition from vegetarian to vegan. It was a bit difficult, in that I had to learn new ways to cook and bake, but once I learned all the tricks and found good restaurants it was easy. Sometimes socially awkward, but I always feel socially awkward anyway! There are probably certain kinds of animal products I wouldn't have ethical problems with, but aside from a nice flaky croissant there aren't any non-vegan foods I miss anymore, anyway. Maybe someday the vegan food scientists will create a perfect croissant ...

Very true about the inevitably lax enforcement! I mean, that's how so much pathogenic E. coli gets into meat, right? Barely any oversight. Overuse/misuse of antibiotics is causing serious problems -- most people probably know what problems it causes for humans, with MRSA and other infections that you could pick up at a hospital. But not too many people think about the invisible livestock animals.

[lilituc]

I admit to being slightly biased against him - a coworker told me he was his idol until he found out how he wrote Everything Is Illuminated. The coworker thought he'd chosen each word carefully, but apparently he said he just ran it through a thesaurus program.

Sad face.

[footnotefetish]

It's interesting that you'd mention that (I hadn't heard it before). I was more concerned with content than style, but I did notice at times that his writing style seemed somewhat banal and uninspired--at least for a published novelist.

[ally_h]

It's always interesting for me to hear how vegetarians decided to stop eating meat and what kind of relationship they currently have with it. A friend of mine once decided how meat became something she didn't even think of as edible anymore: "You know how you feel when you walk by a ream of paper in the store? That's how I feel about meat now." I've cut way back on my meat consumption, but haven't followed through on becoming a vegetarian. I guess it would get easier over time because I'd develop new habits and coping mechanisms (it sucks so bad when there's a meal at work with no veggie options so you have to just sit and watch everyone else eat) and maybe I would eventually stop craving it too.

[footnotefetish]

The book Beyond Beef also had a lot of influence on me, but I don't know how much of it is outdated now.

One thing I did like about Foer's book was that he commented on the absurdity of people who sneer at people who call themselves vegetarians (or even vegans) but occasionally eat animal products. As he put it, we usually never expect that kind of black-or-white absolutism in a lot of other moral/ethical realms. No one expects an honest person to always tell the truth--or, conversely, for a dishonest person to always lie.

One of my sisters has been known to call herself vegetarian but still eat meat occasionally. I don't question it. For me, though, it didn't take me long to completely lose my taste for meat, and I think that happened even before I had the cooking skills or the food experiences to healthfully remove meat from my diet. I wouldn't say that I had a poor diet at the time--just not a very varied one that could be sustained for a lot of years.