Imagine a tool. A weapon, really, but a “good” weapon. It does no violence; quite the contrary. In fact, you might describe it as a love bomb. It seeks to persuade; it’s the tool of the better angels of our nature. It can be deployed against an enemy; but the enemy is not a person or a particular group of people; but all of us, collectively, our beliefs, habits, and presumptions. Some don’t need to be “bombed,” but many of us still need to have some (figurative) sense knocked into us. Imagine that there is a writer who has the (rhetorical) knowledge and skill to deploy a weapon with a huge “payload.” (What a euphemism!) The question will arise, what is the appropriate target? Perhaps a command and control center or the key weapons factory. Or perhaps the stables where the ceremonial parade horses are kept.
Really, take aim at the stables?
In reading this book I developed a Jekyll and Hyde attitude towards it. Swooning in places with admiration for Foer’s skills as a writer and his ability to bring into sharp focus important issues by appealing to a mix of thoughts and emotions that any rhetorician would admire. And there were places where I wanted to fling the book against the nearest wall while shouting “Damned fool!” When I noted my completion of the book in Goodreads and was asked to rate the book (on a five-star scale) I couldn’t decide between either a “five” and a “zero,” so I left it unranked, a rare decision on my part.
Before going on with the review, perhaps I should share a sense of where I’m coming from, my beliefs, prejudices, habits, and suspicions. I believe that the issues of global climate change and environmental degradation in general (the air, the soil, the sea, and all the biospheres that they support) are the critical issues of our time. To borrow a term that I don’t like but that has carried the day, global climate change and environmental degradation present “existential risks” to humanity. I’m confident that Foer and I agree on this assessment. And as to diet (the other topic of Foer’s book along with the challenge of global climate change), I’m a curious layman. I enjoy food (a matter of aesthetics, or perhaps more bluntly, hedonism), but I also keep an eye on health. I was born lucky and have remained lucky about my health, and the older I get, the keener I am to keep my run of good luck going by not pressing it. I seek to exert—to the extent that I can—control over my well-being by paying attention to diet, exercise, sleep, relationships, and by not taking foolish risks. I’ve eaten meat all of my life except for a very brief stint eating vegetarian. I’ve changed my opinions about diet, and when considering a diet, I hold my judgments lightly given the state of our knowledge in the field of nutrition, which is poor, limited, and conflicted. Perhaps my most confidant opinion is that the SAD diet—the Standard American Diet—is the worst diet for anyone. How do I describe the SAD diet? The easiest way is to say it consists of what you mostly find in a bodega, convenience store, or fast food joint. I’m an omnivore, aspiring toward “nutrivore” status. Diet is personal to each of us for reasons of religion, philosophy, personal health, taste, and convenience. I eat meat and other animal products along with a variety of plant foods. Given our individuality, biological and cultural, choice is essential when it comes to diet.
N.B. I will make many assertions in the course of this review, including some statistics. After I complete this post, I will post a bibliographical essay to share my sources. You will find it here when it’s posted. (Posted 5.16.21)
The other starting point I should share is that I had a sense of Foer’s agenda before starting the book. I’d not read any of his books before, but I recognized his name. I knew that he’s published a book Eating Animals (2009), and in a conversation about We Are the Weather, my conversation partner reported that she’d gone vegetarian for about a year after reading that book. I knew that Foer was quite critical of practices in the animal livestock industry, a critique with which I’m sympathetic.
During the course of reading this book initially, I also discovered that Foer had written an article in the New York Times a year ago (May 2020) entitled “The End of Meat Is Here.” I read this article and I have to report that it influenced my thinking; the article had none of the virtues of this book and all the faults—in spades. At least I had the good sense not to ever consider hurling an online article against the wall.
As I indicated earlier, I believe that Foer and I agree about the dire threat that global climate change presents to all humans; not just our descendants, but those of us, young and old, now living. And as to practical measures, we agree about a lot of the actions that can be taken by individuals, families, and businesses to help alleviate the problem. In the initial pages of the book, especially the first 64 pages (and some beyond), Foer deploys a wide variety of vignettes, analogies, and metaphors in support of creating in his readers an appreciation of the magnitude of the problem and its challenges. He seeks to create a mindset in his readers by deploying his rhetorical arsenal that I alluded to in the opening paragraph of this review. But then on page 64, we get the Big Reveal and the Big Ask. (Did Foer really believe that any reader would get to this point in the book, not to mention having started it, without knowing what was coming? This delayed revelation created some suspense, but after a while, he should get to the point after beating around the bush for so long.)
And the Big Reveal? Warning! Spoiler alert ahead: “[W]e cannot save the planet unless we significantly reduce our consumption of animal products” (p.64). The Big Ask: “no animal products before dinner.” Id. On the following page, he discusses the fact that he researched and wrote a book “rejecting factory farming” entitled Eating Animals and spent two years giving “hundreds of readings, lectures, and interviews . . . making the case that “factory-farmed meat should not be eaten” (p.65). Fair enough. But in getting to this point (and well-beyond) I got the sense that Foer has an answer (“don’t eat meat”) in search of a question. His rejection of “factory-farming” (which, by the way, seems to be limited in his mind to animal agriculture) didn’t get the response that he wanted, and now he arrives at a new justification, expanding his recommendation from “factory-farmed meat” to “animal products.” Is this justified? Is this the appropriate target of his impressive rhetorical weapon?
Foer seems to believe it is justified, drawing on statistics (the first cousin of lies and damned lies) that purport to show that livestock contributes between 14.5% and 51% of total greenhouse gases worldwide. (Such a huge spread in estimates makes one skeptical, doesn’t it?) Foer doesn’t emphasize that these are worldwide figures. For those of us in the U.S., for instance, the figures are quite different. According to the EPA, livestock in the U.S. contributes 3.9% to the total amount of U.S. GHG emissions, and of that only 2% comes from those evil cows. Of course, some nations do better than us. Japan’s livestock contributes only 1% of its GHG emissions. Less developed countries, which often consist of large tracts of land that are too poor (“marginal”) for crops; therefore, grazing by ruminant animals (cows, sheep, goats, etc.) is the only ecologically sound alternative. But livestock from these poorer countries creates 80% of the worldwide contribution of livestock to GHG emissions (that 14.5% to 51% figure that Foer likes to cite.). As an example, India’s huge cow herd is one-tenth as efficient as the U.S. dairy herd. The U.S. creates 18% of the world’s beef with only 6% of the world’s cattle. (N.B. Efficiency isn’t necessarily the most important value—economists notwithstanding, but it certainly belongs in the mix.)
Perhaps like me, you might have thought that tailpipes and smokestacks were the big problems, spewing forth GHG (CO2) and the like. And you’d be correct, I contend. Indeed, taking it a step back, isn’t the real source of the problem simply fossil fuels? Foer ignores the fact that the GHG emissions from ruminants, including methane, have been ongoing for millions of years and that these emissions are a part of a natural cycle that caused no global warming despite the fact that an estimated 100 million ruminants lived in pre-Columbian America, a number close to the number found today. One estimate suggests that current livestock GHG contributions in North America are about 14% higher than the emissions created in pre-Columbian America by wild ruminants.
So, for me, as a contemporary American, the most important step I can take to reduce my contribution to GHG emissions is to avoid animal products until supper time? Really? I need to worry much less about using our car, taking flights, wasting food (40% of food in the U.S. goes to waste after arrival at the retail level), composting, clothes drying, etc., all of which involve fossil fuels. Are all these undertakings significantly less consequential in inflating our carbon footprint than our animal product consumption? I’m skeptical. And how do we, daily, compare one carbon-generating activity to another? (More about this later.) Also, in reviewing EPA statistics, I find that plant-based agriculture in the U.S. contributes more to GHG than the livestock sector. Reading Foer, you’d think that crops are grown with tractors, combines, and synthetic fertilizers that rely on pixie-dust and not fossil fuels.
After the Big Reveal and the Big Ask, the going gets tougher—or in my case at least—more irritating. Some things become more and more clear. One such irritant is Foer’s struggle with his self-imposed guilt about his continued consumption of animal products, such as eating hamburgers while on a book tour for Eating Animals and his intention to forego all eggs and dairy—when he’s done with this book. His suggestion that he has trouble staying the (vegan) course arises from the claim that we’re all simply used to eating meat, and we just don’t want to give up the habit, familiarity, and comfort of eating meat and using dairy and eggs. In short, he’s into guilt-tripping his readers. But there’s a glaring absence in his argument. It’s his failure to address why humans have been meat-eaters for as long as there have been humans (other than his suggestion of laziness and habit). Over the millennia some few individuals have foregone meat and even all animal products for religious or philosophical reasons. But the reason for eating meat, in addition to the built-in flavor prejudice that I imagine has been provided by evolution, arises from its nutritional value. We eat beef (to pick one prominent example) because of its high nutritional density and relatively low calories. Compare the caloric load of getting 20g of protein from beef against the same amount of protein from a combination of rice and beans. The latter provides many more calories in the form of carbohydrates and less of most other nutrients. And does anyone in the U.S. need more calories from carbohydrates? Not me. But Foer’s few references to nutrition and health only repeat some of the claims that red meat is bad for you, “findings” that more and more seem destined for the junk heap of science.
Foer’s conclusions and recommendations about the effects of animal agriculture and his statements that suggest that plant and animal sources of nutrition were nearly interchangeable started to gnaw on me. And something earlier in the book had also caught raised my hackles, and it dawned on me how these two irritants come together. The early alarm came when Foer commented on Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Foer praised the film, but he argues that recommendations at the end of the film are too “vague” (p. 54) and anodyne. Seem familiar? But most of all, he made this telling statement:
There is a glaring absence in Gore’s list [of steps individuals can take to reduce their carbon footprint], and its invisibility recurs in 2017’s An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, with one minuscule exception. It is impossible to explain this omission as accidental without also accusing Gore of a kind of radical ignorance or malpractice. In terms of the scale of the error, it would be equivalent to a doctor prescribing physical exercise to a patient recovering from a heart attack without telling him he needs to quit smoking, reduce his stress, and stop eating burgers and fries twice a day” (p. 55-56).
Note that Foer doesn’t state what that “it” is—remember the Big Reveal that this is all about animal products doesn’t occur until page 64—and he leaves implicit the suggestion that Gore was merely caving to political pressure in omitting any suggestion of reducing the consumption of animal products (even after he’d been out of politics for 17 years). But while this irritated me when I first read it, upon re-reading the book (yes, I did), I realized that Foer had perfectly framed the indictment that I wanted to bring against him. Foer’s choice of a target (animal agriculture) and claims about its significance as a driver of greenhouse gas emissions amounts to either “radical ignorance or malpractice.” My irritation arises not only from his questionable claim that animal products are the most important component of any individual’s contribution to reducing GHG emissions. Nor is my disappointment (leading to ire) solely from his failure to provide an honest and well-considered discussion of the value of an all-plant diet versus the use of animal products. Troublesome as these contentions and omissions are, it’s his targeting (reference my opening paragraph) that I find most appalling. For a reader in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand, the suggestion that a reduction in animal product consumption is the single most important step an individual, family, or group can take to reduce their GHG emissions is appalling. Left off the target list: fossil fuels, the fossil fuel industry, tailpipes, smokestacks, and human population. (N.B. I don’t want to throw anyone out of the lifeboat, but at some point, humans will have to make a conscious decision about the maximum human population that Mother Earth can sustain at an acceptable level.)
Foer also skates over the really tough but absolutely crucial and unavoidable issue: we have to make political choices and take collective action. Resolving the problem of climate change and other forms of environmental degradation requires political action. We will have to change our political economy. Daunting? Absolutely! But skipping eating animal products until dinner time (or even all the time) ain’t gonna cut it.
Foer also reduces the effectiveness of his whole project and fails his readers, especially those like me—and you, I trust—who already appreciate the stakes in addressing GHG emissions and environmental degradation by completely ignoring another crucial issue. That is, at present, we have no effective way of comparing apples and oranges. And we have to compare them. We have to be able to compare the true GHG and environmental costs of each purchase that we make (or don’t make). Lots of figures and equivalences are thrown around (for instance, it takes two years of the (supposed) GHG reduction attributed to eating as a vegan to offset a flight to Europe (return trip not included). I’m convinced that the best way to do this is to set a price on carbon. By doing this, we'd be able to weigh the cost (impact) of each activity and product upon GHG emissions. Of course, the process would have to be accurate and unencumbered by any partisans, such as Big Food attempting to gain an edge in the process over livestock producers or vice versa. And any process must ward off attempts at regulatory capture. If such a system can be established, we could accurately weigh the carbon footprint of a hamburger against an “Impossible Burger” or a trip to see grandma or the thousands of other choices we as individuals and families have to make in the course of our daily affairs. This is why I actively support the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act (EICDA) promoted by the Citizens Climate Lobby. Any market has its flaws and limitations, but it's the way to proceed for decentralized decision-making across time and space.
I’ll end on a positive note. I can’t agree more with Foer about taking strong, affirmative steps to address climate change and reduce GHG, including taking reasonable steps in the agricultural sector. From my point of view, to echo his numerous World War II analogies and stories that Foer deploys, we’re truly involved in a world war that must be fought on all fronts. We all need to be armed with the ability to weigh the consequences of our innumerable decisions as consumers and as citizens. If someone is happy and healthy on a vegan diet, more power to them. (“Healthy” is crucial. Although it’s not often discussed, the GHG footprint of our (U.S.) health care system is significant, in no small part because of the load created by food-related diseases such as diabetes (T2), cardiovascular diseases, and cancer.) I, for one, will stick to my current regiment of plants, meat, eggs, and dairy, including some before supper. I’ll also see Foer his vegan path and raise him by expanding my fasting regimen and avoiding junk food. I’ll also continue to lobby on the federal, state, and local levels for meaningful initiatives, such as carbon pricing. I’ll continue to compost, drive less, keep the thermostat down, recycle, waste less food, and promote conservation and sustainable agriculture (which, alas, received only a passing mention from Foer). I’ll act individually and collectively. I’ll keep investigating and refining and adapting my actions and positions as information and perceptions change.
And you, dear reader? Consider how can best join in the cause. Foer is certainly correct in this assertion: we are the problem and we are the solution.
