I’m watching this amazing talk on ABC Fora (seriously my favourite site) and I’m pretty gobsmacked. It’s called and discusses Eating Animals, a new book by Johnathan Safran Foer, in which he talks about his reasons for eventually becoming vegetarian after several years of flip flopping between eating meat and not eating meat. I can’t really describe just how brilliant this talk is - it basically is a summary of his personal journey towards vegetarianism and the factors which influenced him, told from a beautifully human perspective (particularly the story of his child and grand mother).
His talk is very much about eating meat in the US and nearly all the statistics he mentions are concerning US meat farming practices. I think in Australia the statistics are a little better but the facts are remain the same regardless of where you live, just some of the numbers might be slightly different. But the talk is not so much about the raw statistics (although apparently the book is - he has 70 pages of foot notes and had two independant fact checkers go over his references) as it is a personal story.
The best part is that the way he speaks is very conversational - it isn’t preachy, he’s not telling you you’re a bad person if you eat meat. This is the achievement of the talk (and probably the book) - he isn’t proselytising, his tone isn’t pompous.
One part of this talk in particular struck a chord with me. Mr Foer said that in the US the free range/cage free eggs are the fastest growing sectors in the whole food industry (~36mins in the video). In Australia free range eggs have also become increasingly popular. Free Range is not a legal definition in the US or Australia so some producers mis-label their eggs as free range when they’re not, to take advantage of the increasing popularity of free range and the higher price they command. Anyway, I bring this up only to share a related anecdote: I used to work at a salad bar near where I live and some of the salads you could buy contain eggs. One day a customer asked the girl serving them if the eggs were free range. The serving girl didn’t know the answer so she asked the manager (and sister of the salad bar’s owner) who replied “they’re not but just say they are… As if it makes a difference. People are so stupid about these things aren’t they?” At the time I wasn’t vegetarian (it would be another ~6 months or so before I stopped eating meat) but I was really shocked and often since then I’ve wished I had said something at the time about it eventhough it would have cost me the job. (Incidentally, the manager and owner are both Jewish and I’ve often wondered how they would feel if they found out they had been lied to about having pig meat in something they ate - I’m pretty sure they would be disgusted.)
Anyway, I highly recommend everyone watch this talk. He covers nearly all the points (albeit very briefly) I care about in vegetarianism but much more eloquently than I ever could. Also be sure to watch all the questions he answers from the audience too, he provides excellent answers to some aspects of eating animals in a bit more detail.