I can't coerce you into this one

I just started reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, and since I’m only 50 pages in I can’t exactly say anything qualitative about the book itself. Still, I’m already feeling a bit enraged. I realized that this is now at least the seventh time in my life that I’m receiving information about the horrors of our factory farm system.

Including this book, I have read Food Matters by Mark Bittman (who I saw on the Colbert Report, more exposure there) and Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. I have seen the fictional narrative based on Fast Food Nation and the documentaries Supersize Me and Food, Inc. A number of my friends have read the Omnivores Dilemma by Michael Pollan. But STILL, I am not entirely a vegetarian.

In reading all of these things, I can only get more upset that things are still the way they are. And yet, none of this exposure has made me change my habits. I still eat meat and fast food on occasion, and enjoy it, too, despite having some vegetarian and vegan friends.

Of course, it’s difficult to change something so institutionalized as our food manufacturers are. I just learned from Eating Animals that they have their own system of laws in which, if something is considered a reasonable practice within the industry, it is exempt from being considered illegal. So if everyone within the farming industry decides it’s ok to tie animals down in unsanitary conditions, it’s allowed. These things are written in print, the unjust nature of the system is being spelled out for everyone to see, and STILL- things haven’t changed.

Except that isn’t entirely true. I often forget how skewed my perspective is by living in New York, as a person with my interests. I live in a place where vegans and vegetarians are catered to and make up a fairly large population, especially amongst the college students and East Village/Brooklynites I hang around with. Here we have co-ops and farmers markets, here we have completely organic restaurants and grocery stores (the closest grocery store to my house is organic). Plus, it was my particular environment which exposed me to these things: I like Richard Linklater so I saw Fast Food Nation, then I wanted to read the book before I saw it, and I enjoyed Bittman on Colbert so I bought and read the book, etc. etc.

So how is exposed is the rest of the country, really?
And why has none of this mattered? I say that I’m sort of vegetarian, that I try to eat less meat. And I guess that’s better than nothing. But that’s after learning so much about the system- why would anyone else, with little to no exposure at all to the in-depth accounts that I’ve been reading, even think about becoming vegetarian?

I have also heard this statement several times over:
“Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change”
-Eating Animals, pg. 43.

But I don’t think I’ve ever heard that fact outside of the context of food industry criticism. If this is the case, if we know that there is something making that large of an impact, that is so fundamentally unjust, why does it stay the same? (Side note: I do understand this is a bunch of idealistic bullshit. There is a lot of money and power and politics and systems that I don’t understand getting in the way of the solution- there is apparently a demand that these farmers aka corporations are fulfilling, etc, but god damnit, you know?)

I think most people are afraid of the kind of people who take these things seriously. I know that I at one point was, and still I’m unable to commit to vegetarianism despite the fact that the system enrages me. (Although there is that one, undeniable fact: meat is fucking delicious). Still, it scares me how easily such matters can be ignored.


Although to really really roughly paraphrase David Cross from ATP: It doesn’t matter how many recycled brown paper bags you use. We’re fucked.


UPDATE

Something to consider: We obviously have much more people on this earth than we've ever had before. In many countries, overpopulation is becoming a serious concern. When you think of it this way, is there a viable alternative to our current system of mass-production, food wise?