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08/19/2010

It was a magical moment when Jonathan Safran Foer decided to find out the truth about meat.

The author had just become a father a few minutes earlier, and now he was watching his son suckling at his wife's breast. The newborn's instinct to immediately recognize the correct food source filled him with an unfamiliar sense of reverence. Jonathan Safran Foer was a man with a new responsibility, and he was determined to do everything within his power to make sure that this child would eat the right kind of food in the future.

Foer spent three years researching the subject. He knew that he would discover a different reality than the one portrayed by the animals in the picture books he would look at with his son on the sofa. But the scope of the horror that reality had in store for him was unexpected. He decided that he would raise his child without meat.

Here are five examples, five of the hundreds Foer unearthed during his research:

• Industrial-scale poultry farmers inject birds with "broths" and salty solutions, so that they look plump in the store and their meat is more flavorful.
• Hog farmers cut off the teeth of piglets and rip out their testicles -- without anesthesia.
• In tuna fishing, 145 other species -- fish, birds and mammals -- are also caught in the nets, where they die and are subsequently tossed back into the ocean.
• Factory farming accounts for between 18 and 51 percent -- depending on the study -- of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest offenders are cows, which release methane during digestion. Methane is 23 times as harmful to the climate as CO2.
• Some factory farms are so big that they produce more excrement every day than some major cities.

The Search for a Better Life

"As a father, I was confronted with realities that, as a writer, I couldn't keep to myself," says Foer today. The 33-year-old author wrote a book about the horrors of factory farming, which triggered passionate debates about food and nutrition in the United States. His son is now four years old and has a brother, and the rights to "Eating Animals" have been sold in 16 countries. The German-language version, "Tiere Essen," appears in bookstores in Germany on August 19.

Foer shocked hundreds of thousands of people with his book, and for a time the author received angry emails on a daily basis, from people calling him a jerk and complaining that they couldn't eat meat anymore after having read his book.

It's the author's first non-fiction book. Foer, who has published two novels, one about Jewish identity ("Everything Is Illuminated") and one about the 9/11 attacks ("Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"), is considered an exceptionally talented young writer in the United States. In "Eating Animals," he brings together anecdotes, facts, news coverage and correspondence. He describes breaking into a chicken farm, offers accounts of organic farmers and writes about how his inquiries to major meat producers went unanswered. It is an unsettling and moving document -- the account of a man's search for a better life.

Before long, Foer was thinking about more than just his son. He was thinking about the entire world.

'We Have to Give It Up'

Foer doesn't come across as a man on a mission. He has a slim build and is dressed casually in a T-shirt. He is unshaven, and the frames of his glasses match the tone of his dark hair. With his calm voice and unassuming presence, he looks more like a thoughtful, polite graduate student. He is currently living in Tel Aviv. Foer and his family spend every summer exploring a new place and have also spent time in Berlin, but their home is in Brooklyn, New York, a borough known for its large population of writers, artists and intellectuals. Foer owns a house there, close to a store that sells ethically produced food.

"Nothing is as destructive to people, animals and the entire planet as factory farming," he says, as he rattles off one number after the next. He is even familiar with German figures: "Twenty-one thousand animals die to feed an average American. Ninety-nine percent of those animals are mass-produced. In Germany, the number is 98." Then he shrugs his shoulders and says, quietly, almost matter-of-factly: "There's no good way to feed 6 billion people with 50 billion animals. So we have to give it up."

Vegetarian organizations would love to have him speak at their events, but he shudders at the thought, and not just because he isn't a zealot. He believes that his place is behind the computer, not in front of the public. But people recognize him on the street, even in Israel, where he spends his days sitting in a café with his laptop, writing and revising, sometimes drinking a cappuccino -- with milk, of course.

But didn't he write that dairy cows and laying hens are sucked dry until they die? He nods. "Sure. And actually, I do try to avoid eggs, milk and cheese if I don't know where they came from. I do what I can, but I can't do more than that."

He's periodically tried living without meat in the past, sometimes because he felt like it and sometimes because it happened to be in. But now he has finally made up his mind. Foer is a vegetarian, out of shame and out of a sense of global responsibility. He cooks lentils and pasta for his sons, and his wife, author Nicole Krauss, is also a vegetarian.

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• Part 1: Giving Up Meat for a Better World
• Part 2: A Long List of Culinary Sins
• Part 3: 'How Can You Do This, You Gruesome People?'