Regardless of where you stand on the ethics of eating meat, the fact is, it’s a big part of the climate math. It provokes strong feelings all around, some of which may be contradictory within one’s self. And so much of the climate analysis is dependent upon how the animals were raised, marketed, and so on. It’s hard to speak (at least for some) with crisp lines. In this episode we wade into these details.
Jonathan Safran Foer is the bestselling author of Eating Animals, Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Today, Jonathan joins Ross to describe his relationship with meat, explaining what inspired him to become a vegetarian at the age of nine and why he is willing to admit to moral failure when he grabs a burger at the airport.
Jonathan shares his proposal for reducing our meat consumption as posited in We Are the Weather, weighing in on why it’s dangerous to make our food choices such a big part of our identity. Listen in for Jonathan’s insight on what makes climate change such a difficult story to tell and learn why Jonathan thinks reserving meat for dinner is a productive form of climate activism.
Resources
We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
‘Options for Keeping the Food System Within Environmental Limits’ in Nature
Kate Knibbs on Reversing Climate Change S2EP12
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene by Roy Scranton
Write to me through Substack @ rosskenyon.com.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season 2 of Reversing Climate Change. We’re doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon.com slash Nori podcast. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what [unclear] are reading that week? Be a part of a Nori book club? Get special access to Nori events? Go take a look at patreon.com slash Nori podcast for what we’re offering.
And in that spirit of being lean and that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do this, this list of goodies is subject to change, and we’d very much like your feedback. Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast@nori.com, or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter, which you can find at nori.com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change.
Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. I am the lead strategist at the Nori carbon removal marketplace. Today I have with me Jonathan Safran Foer, writer and author of many books, including Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Here I Am, Eating Animals, and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, which just came out in a new paperback edition. So if you like what we’re talking about today, if it catches your ear, go pick up a copy — the link is in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Jonathan.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Hey, thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: It’s my sincere pleasure. I did a lot of research for this show and caught up on the books of yours that I had not read previously, and your relationship to meat is such a big part of your work in fiction and also nonfiction. I think people remember, probably from the movie Everything Is Illuminated, this scene where Elijah Wood is trying to explain what a vegetarian is in Ukraine, and it does not go very well. And that has continued throughout your work — your relationship to what it means to be a human and to be consuming and killing animals.
But it seems like you’ve softened a bit, because I remember in Eating Animals — which, by the way, there are some images from that book that still haunt me and I think about and I have to push them down, but amazing book — that book has a very strong opinion. In fact, you even take a few swipes at Michael Pollan’s focus on more like local, grass-fed animals with much better quality of life than they have in CAFOs. But We Are the Weather seems like you’ve chilled a bit and are more accommodating to meat eaters than you’ve been previously. So I guess, how would you describe your relationship to meat overall, and how you’ve gotten to where you are at this point?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, I’ve described it as a process. I guess that’s what you’re describing — you know, have I softened? I don’t know. I guess it really depends what you mean. Like, there’s also the kind of interaction between the ways we think about things for ourselves and the ways we think about things in the world. My last novel, Here I Am — I hadn’t thought about this until just now — is very much about that conflict. You know, the principles that we have, the ideals that we hold, the people that we imagine ourselves to be or want to be, and how that is so often in conflict with having to live in the world, which includes the norms of the world, which includes our own personal histories, the cultures that we live inside of.
You know, I became a vegetarian when I was nine because of a babysitter. I didn’t want to eat that fried chicken that my older brother and I were eating, and when I asked her why, she said, I don’t want to hurt animals unnecessarily. I found that utterly persuasive when I was nine. I still find it utterly persuasive. I imagine — maybe I’m wrong — that you probably find it persuasive. If we were to talk about it for a little while, I imagine that most people find that idea persuasive. Ninety-six percent of Americans think animals should have protection from cruelty. I don’t want to hurt an animal unless it’s necessary.
So as an idea it’s very simple. It’s simple to a nine-year-old mind and it’s simple to a 43-year-old mind. The reality, as somebody who lives in the world, is complex. You know, it’s complex because what does it mean to hurt? How do we even talk about that, given that it involves so many assumptions, things we can never know about animal consciousness and its similarities or differences to our own? To what extent those similarities or differences even matter is itself a really complicated issue.
I have found that the older I get, the more open I am to allowing in the complexities, because these are very, very complicated issues. Sometimes I’m proud of my — I don’t know — willingness to engage with those complexities. Sometimes I end up feeling kind of disappointed in myself when I suspect that I’m allowing the complexities in because of convenience rather than because it’s a more sophisticated or mature position. What I can say is, I’m really glad to have spent as much of my life as I have inside of this argument with myself, having this argument with myself. I think that they are very, very rich questions to ask, that have implications that are far broader than just what we eat or what our relationship to animals is.
And it gets at — for me, it gets at, what kind of person do I want to be? And what are the limits of my attentiveness? What are the limits of my empathy? What matters to me in terms of pleasure, and what matters to me in terms of making sure that other people can feel the kinds of good fortune that I felt throughout my life? So it’s a very animated conversation, a very dynamic conversation. You’re right that my ways of thinking about it have definitely changed over the years. But if you were to really press me, if we had hours and hours to have this conversation, and if we had like a couple of beers in front of us, I do think I would come back to what my babysitter said when I was nine. That sort of clarity is really beautiful and simple, and because it is that simple, it’s hard to argue against.
Ross Kenyon: And since you do have that clarity deep in your writing and your way of thinking, one of the things I connect with so strongly in your writing about meat is the sense of hypocrisy and of letting yourself down, and having these cravings which are either biological or just memories from my childhood, before you had the curtain pulled back on meat. And this is just a part of you that you live with, and recognizing that you’re going to fail. And despite you being a very prominent writer on animal rights and vegetarianism, still falling into it, still craving it, flying around an airport and you’re getting like the worst hamburgers that came out of just terrible factory farms — and just admitting this publicly. I imagine that’s somewhat liberating. I feel good when I’m able to admit that I am a moral failure in that kind of way. Does it help you to do that too?
Jonathan Safran Foer: It helps me, certainly, in the sense that I wouldn’t want to lie. I also felt that it would be — I don’t know if I thought of it as cathartic or relieving at all, and it’s not, by the way. Just for whatever it’s worth, it’s not the case that I was bouncing from airport to airport eating burgers. It was something that happened once or twice and I thought was worth sharing — not so much to get something off of my chest, because I didn’t really experience it that way, but because I thought it would be a more honest and productive conversation. And I thought of this book, We Are the Weather, as a conversation, often with myself, but more often with the reader.
And in my experience, when somebody shares their ethical accomplishments with me, I tend to find it very annoying, and if anything I want to go do the opposite behaviors to offset their righteousness. When someone shares their struggles with me, I find that I’m drawn into that, and I actually find it inspiring. You know, like if someone says, I bought an electric car, I’ve never felt better, I can’t believe I ever owned a gas-guzzling automobile, I don’t understand anyone who does, it’s such a better way to be, and with the government refunds it wasn’t even that expensive — I just start to turn off. It doesn’t mean anything to me.
But if somebody says, God, you know, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my carbon footprint, to the portion of it that automobiles are responsible for, I want to do better but I just can’t afford an electric car, I have to drive to work because I live in a city like most cities in our country that were designed to require automobiles, and I don’t really know what to do but I’m trying to figure it out, like I can bike sometimes but realistically I can’t do it every day — you know, that’s the kind of conversation that actually gets me excited and inspired. I want to be a partner with that person, and it makes me want to question my own decisions.
Nobody is perfect. Nobody is remotely close to perfect. That seems like a good starting point when addressing ethical concerns that require change. And our climate is an ethical concern that requires change. So I think when we are inside of these big conversations that we know have really profound stakes, they can understandably leave us feeling very vulnerable and very insecure. And vulnerable and insecure people tend to race toward extremes, like rhetorical extremes, philosophical extremes, psychological extremes and binaries. Do this. Do everything or do nothing. Be perfect, or you’re a hypocrite. Hypocrite was a word that you used, and I find myself using it all the time when thinking about things like food or climate change, or my relationship to, you know, the homeless problem in my neighborhood, or thinking about national politics.
And I think there’s a real danger in our fear of hypocrisy being so great that it inspires us to do nothing at all — like it’s better to do nothing than to be imperfect. So when it comes to talking about food and its relationship to the climate, which, you know, this is a non-controversial statement to say, it’s a very important relationship. It’s one of our most important relationships as individuals to the climate. When thinking about that, I think it’s good to be honest, you know, about the full picture; to be honest about the science, which I think we have not always been; and to be honest about our cravings and our culture and our personal histories, and all of the things that might make it difficult to do the things that we all agree we ought to do, the things that we want to do. I think there’s a lot of good in there.
Ross Kenyon: And I hope you don’t feel I have mischaracterized your airport meat consumption points.
Jonathan Safran Foer: No, not at all, not at all. Although one other little small amendment I might make is, I didn’t feel like I took swipes at Michael Pollan.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] I don’t think you were unfair or rude to him. But — sorry, continue.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Yeah, I wouldn’t have written my book were it not for him. I actually really revere his approach. I also think, just on the level of sentences, he is as good a writer as anybody. I think one of the things that, in fact, I love about his writing is how it’s open to kind of back-and-forth conversing, to making amendments, to revision. He is constantly revising his own thinking. And there were definitely moments in his book, in Omnivore’s Dilemma, where I thought, oh man, why is somebody so smart and so psychologically astute taking me to this place and not a tiny bit further? Why does it feel like his intellectual vigilance is easing up right when we get to this moment of controversy, or breaking, or having to stake a claim?
Ross Kenyon: So which claim is that, by the way? Where do you see him stopping, and what are you pushing on that we’ve referred to obliquely here?
Jonathan Safran Foer: I think the inevitability of meat, the kind of like shrugging one’s shoulders. Like, we all know how terrible this is. We all know that animals have the ability to experience pain, and we all know that the way that we eat meat — which is to say the factory farms that produce 99.9 percent of the animals that are eaten in the United States — we know what the environmental effects are. So let’s just look at it squarely in the eye and say it as it is, and not pretend that the exceptions that prove the rule are scalable or possible for everybody at the current levels of meat-eating.
I do think there’s plenty of room to talk about regenerative agriculture. There’s plenty of room to talk about the kinds of farms that aren’t factory farms. But we do have to begin this conversation and end this conversation by acknowledging that they are less than 0.01 percent of what’s available right now, and that in a world of 8 billion people we cannot have those things while continuing to have the diets that we have. So that, I think, was the source of my frustration.
Ross Kenyon: It’s a fair point, too, and it is not easy or cheap to eat meat in that ethical kind of way, which I suppose should be the point. We should probably be inflicting less pain on animals, probably be eating less meat, and the meat that we should eat should probably be of higher quality and have a much higher welfare standard than they currently do. But I can’t even say that I always do that. And I know you’re more of an Old Testament guy, but let me throw in some New Testament here. The people that Jesus is always hardest on are the people who have the most moral certainty, and those are the people that get put on blast, usually. The, you know, the tax collectors and the prostitutes and everyone else, they get a bit more leniency, or understood.
And I had an experience recently too — sorry, this is a little bit off topic, but I hope it’s rewarding for you. There was some sort of guy outside of my apartment building who was having an incident. I imagine he was on drugs. It was a cold night and he didn’t have a jacket on, and the security guards at the hospital near, like, across the street were watching him too. He was like, hey man, can I have your coat? Can I have your coat? And there’s literally in one of the gospels, Jesus says, like, if you have two coats, give away one. And I’m just, like, trying to get out of there as fast as possible.
Just, like, the level of hypocrisy that is just built into all of these things is so extreme. And I fancy myself being a somewhat ethical person, but I think being confronted with just how far short of the standard that you fall every day is really just absurd. And it isn’t just me, or this one quite dramatic example, but I imagine there’s lots of things that you believe that you don’t live up to. But I do think if you’re trying to persuade people of something, I think showing your own failure —
Jonathan Safran Foer: I think you’re totally right to say showing yourself, putting yourself low in that kind of way, is trust building, and I hope — I think, yeah, yeah. It’s very hard to maintain. I mean, nobody achieves perfection, but whatever your closest version is, it’s really hard to maintain. It feels like a position that you can fall from, as opposed to something that you want to rise to. Like, when you — that story you just told, it’s a nice story, it’s interesting, and what I wanted to ask you is, what did it leave you with? Did it leave you thinking, next time I might respond differently? Did it have any sway over how you think about your choices? Or is it only a story?
Ross Kenyon: That’s something that I’m still wrestling with, because it isn’t that I haven’t had plenty of opportunities to replay that scenario in my neighborhood, similar to yours, I’m sure. I’m in Seattle, and I haven’t done anything differently. I still mostly ignore the problem. I’m not even necessarily as warm and smiling, which costs essentially nothing. I don’t even really do that. But I’m sure there are cases like that where I like to think that I’m better than I am, but I have had a chance to prove it and I did not do better. So what do I do with that now?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, you know, I have a friend, one of my best friends is a magician, and he’s a genius, absolutely genius. And I asked him, what happens if you screw up a trick? And he said, what do you mean? That’s about it — oh, like, you drop the cards or something, or what happens if the person you’re doing the trick for just lies to you and says they picked a different card? You know, that must happen sometimes. And he said, it’s okay, because I’m never performing a trick, I’m always performing a process. I don’t need it to end in any one way at any one time. There’s something much more improvisational about it.
And I think a lot of these ethical choices, it’s the same. It’s not as if you’re a good person or a bad person because you give the jacket one time or don’t give the jacket one time, or eat a burger from McDonald’s. You know, life is long, and there’s lots of opportunities to revisit decisions and to make better decisions in the future. For me, in the case of food, it’s really been a process. You know, I told you I became a vegetarian when I was nine, but it was not an event. It was the beginning of this process, which I’m still very much inside of, because I wasn’t able to maintain it, because I just loved meat, you know? And I wanted to eat it.
And then a couple of years or months or weeks, or sometimes even days after, I would say, no, no, I really do believe that thing that the babysitter was saying, that thing that sounds so unbearably simple that it just can’t be true, you know? It can’t be responded to. That I don’t want to hurt animals unless necessary. Yeah, no, I believe that. And so I become a vegetarian again, and then years or weeks or months, or sometimes days later, I start eating meat again for all the reasons you can imagine — which, by the way, aren’t only that it tastes good. It’s also because that’s what people around me were eating, my parents and brothers were eating; that it was so tied into different kinds of celebrations, whether it was like July Fourth or religious rituals.
So I’ve really gone back and forth, and I don’t beat myself up when I find myself doing things that — I guess the best way to say it is, I wish that I weren’t doing, or I wish that I could do better. I don’t beat myself up, and I definitely don’t sort of, like, you know, put my hands up in the air and say, well, that’s it, it’s over. Instead I try to take it as an opportunity to think about, basically, what I can learn from it, you know, how I can do better the next time. And I think that that’s the way most of us respond to most sort of ethical issues, like truth-telling, for example.
You know, I assume you think of yourself as somebody who tries to tell the truth. I do. And yet every single day I tell at least one lie. I remember reading somewhere that, you know, the average person tells a lie every, like, I don’t know, four minutes or something like that. But it’s not as if when we tell a lie we throw our hands in the air and say, well, there they go, my efforts to tell the truth. You know, it’s just, we understand that it’s a process, and an imperfect one. For some reason with food, people tend not to see it that way. They see it as an event.
You know, I’ve met so many people — really, I couldn’t count them — who have said to me, I was a vegetarian for four years, or I was a vegetarian for eight years, or was a vegetarian for two months. Oh, and then what happened? Well, I, you know, I ate this chicken because I was at this place, or I ate this shrimp. Okay, and then what? Well, then I was done, you know, and then I wasn’t a vegetarian anymore. Which is one of the reasons that, you know — this is to return to your first question, if my thinking has changed. I think it’s away from seeing these things as binaries, and away from seeing them as identities.
I am a vegetarian, I am somebody who never eats meat, as opposed to, I’m doing my best to eat as little as possible. If I were to eat some, that doesn’t shatter an identity, and it doesn’t make me a failure. It might give me occasion to, like, think about things, and it might not, and it doesn’t necessarily even matter. But I’m doing my best. I think if people were less intimidated by hypocrisy and less caught up in thinking of these things as identities, but instead, you know, I’m trying to eat as little as possible while being rigorous about that and honest about what that even means, as little as possible — I think we would change the world. I think we would save the planet, if, you know, across the various choices that we make, we looked at them that way.
Ross Kenyon: And this is a big part of your new book, We Are the Weather. I know you have a specific proposal in mind for a potential compromise position, maybe very much on this theme. Maybe you could explain that proposal, and just the book overall.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, so, you know, yes, that was a proposal of mine, but it was based in science that is not mine. And I think it’s absolutely essential to acknowledge what the science says, and that it’s not ambiguous and it’s not controversial, and it’s not brought to us by, you know, the slow food movement, and it’s not brought to us by PETA. Science makes abundantly clear that we have to eat fewer animal products in order to save the planet. We cannot save the planet only by changing what we eat — there are many other things we need to do as well — but we have no hope of meeting the goals of the Paris climate accords unless we reduce our consumption of animal products.
The most comprehensive analysis of the relationship between food and the environment was published at the end of 2018, and the authors studied food systems all over the planet and found that people who live in certain parts of the world, where simple nourishment, you know, caloric intake, is challenged, and where animal agriculture is one of the only food sources available — those people can afford to eat a little bit more meat and dairy than they do now. But people who live in the United States, live in Europe and the UK, need to reduce their meat consumption by about 90 percent and their dairy consumption by about 60 percent, in order to avoid what the authors called irreversible catastrophic climate collapse.
So I don’t think you will ever talk — correct me if I’m wrong — I don’t think you’ll ever meet or speak to a climate scientist who doesn’t acknowledge that animal farming, as it is currently done, is a very big piece of this puzzle. When I was on book tour for We Are the Weather, I was very often, in fact almost always, paired with a climate scientist on stage in conversation. Unless I’m mistaken, every single one I was in conversation with was a vegetarian, and that really shocked me. And in the beginning, when I was more shocked, I would ask them like, whoa, I had no idea, you know, why? And they said, why don’t — you know, I don’t drive an SUV, I don’t fly in private planes, and I don’t eat red meat. Like, it just goes without saying.
It didn’t go without saying for me. I didn’t know that that was the case, even after I’d written We Are the Weather. I still sort of assumed that was something that people didn’t talk about very much or take very seriously. So the science tells us we have to eat less. As I said, the most comprehensive and contemporary study argued that Americans need to eat about 90 percent less meat and 60 percent less dairy. So how do you figure — what do you do with that? And that’s where my prescription, you could call it, comes into play.
I suggested — you know, I’m not somebody who’s going to eat with the calculator. I don’t really want to keep, like, charts of my daily meals. I don’t do well when I have to make a decision over and over and over and over. I tend to do better when I just have a framework, by removing choices rather than adding choices. And so what I proposed is eating no animal products before dinner. There are plenty of other ways to respond to the science. I don’t know that mine is any better or worse. There’s a kind of elegance to it, it’s simple to remember.
I think most people find that dinner is the meal that matters most to them, both in terms of, like, culinary pleasure and in terms of culture, whether it’s like celebrations or just going out to a nice restaurant, back when we used to do that. And that for most people — and not always, but most of the time, for most people — breakfast and lunch, like, we’re happy enough, it’s easy enough to make some modifications. When people eat meat for breakfast and lunch, I think maybe sometimes it’s because they absolutely loved it, and maybe sometimes it’s because it’s fulfilling some important social function. My guess is most of the time you eat it because it’s there, you know, it’s what you ate yesterday, it’s some sandwich that you don’t even really like, but it’s okay, and it’s there, and it fills you up.
So, you know, it’s the low-hanging fruit. There are certain kinds of changes that really are difficult, and some that clearly people aren’t going to be making in any kind of big numbers. So, you know, what’s the low-hanging fruit? I think breakfast and lunch are far closer to the ground than dinner. And if we could do that, it would make a really profound difference.
Ross Kenyon: What’s been the reception? Because I can imagine there are people listening, or maybe read this book, and they love bacon. They want to go out to brunch and party in that culinary kind of way. And I imagine there are very strict vegans — really, what is this compromise nonsense? Like, you’re allowed to do this, like, one meal a day. So have you found crossover, or did everyone find a reason to take issue with it?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, I don’t really know, because I only know what I know, you know. I only get the feedback that people give me, and that’s a tiny, tiny portion of the actual responses. So I’m sure there’s been both, and I think there are good responses to both. You know, to somebody who says, I just want to eat bacon, I would say, all right, I get that, I think everybody’s got a favorite food. How often do you eat it? You know, are you really eating it seven days a week? If so, there’s probably a lot of other lines of thought that might suggest you should eat less.
But for example, my editor in England, when Eating Animals came out, he said to me, I find your book very, very persuasive, I feel convinced. I’m going to admit something to you, and you might think that I’m a child or an idiot or just weak, but I love sushi, and I just can’t imagine a world without sushi, a life without sushi. And I said, okay, well, you know, sushi’s great, I get it. How often do you eat it? He said, I don’t know, maybe three nights a week. I said, well, eat it, eat it three nights a week. But don’t let those three nights a week be a reason for not making any movements on your other 18 meals that you eat in a week. So with the bacon lover you’re imagining, I might say something similar. Three nights a week, do that for sushi.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve got to get into the publishing business in London, it sounds like it’s quite — yeah.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Yeah, that’s right. You know, England and Ireland. So there you go. Yeah, yeah. To the vegan, I actually haven’t encountered that, and I think there’s been real movement in the kind of animal rights world away from absolutes, away from a certain kind of rhetoric — not because of a softening, but because of a desire to change the world. And what is the best way? Like, if the goal is to decrease the amount of destruction, decrease the amount of violence, what is the best path to get there? So, you know, what are the odds that half of Americans will be vegetarian in 10 years? Zero, or that’s what I would say. What are the odds that half of the meals eaten in America will be vegetarian in 10 years? I think it’s going to happen.
Those outcomes reduce the amount of violence and reduce the amount of destruction equally. One of them has to do with identity, one of them has to do with changing the world. And I think, you know, this is just anecdotal, but my interactions with people in that movement — and I’ve had a lot of them — have suggested to me that it’s become much, much more about changing the world, whereas it used to be more about identity.
Ross Kenyon: That’s an interesting change. I guess I’m not plugged into that literature nearly as much as I should be, but it does seem like a welcome change. One thought that I have in reading your work on this is, we have a lot of interaction with people involved in regenerative grazing, holistic management. We just had the Savory Institute on a couple episodes back, and they’re talking about how you can use livestock to actually repair the earth, and this — the way that you move them around on land mimics the way that predators chase prey on the Great Plains, you know, in sort of pre-modern times. And how do you create that? And that can actually be carbon sequestering and a healthier food option, and actually relatively humane. The line that they always say is the animals only have one bad day.
But given that there is a possibility for animal agriculture to become truly regenerative, if you buy that story, how might that change what you think about meat in general? Obviously it’s not going to get over the hurdle of inflicting pain. Maybe it changes how you think about climate.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, I’ve never heard anybody say that we could produce nearly the amount of meat that we produce now with those methods. Yeah, I mean, there’s enough humanely raised chicken in America now to feed the citizens of Staten Island.
Ross Kenyon: What was that? [unclear]
Jonathan Safran Foer: So, one of the things about animals that we just can’t get around is that it’s just very energy-intensive, you know. It takes between six and 26 calories fed to an animal to get one calorie out, and they take a huge amount of space, even the most efficient ways of raising them. So if you were to say to me, does regenerative animal agriculture excite me, I would say, yeah, yeah, I think it sounds great. It sounds much, much better. It’s so much better for the environment. And I’ve met plenty of farmers — Bill Niman comes to mind — who treat their animals well. They really do.
And if I were to imagine myself into the life of that animal, which I think is something we all — as impossible as that is, it’s something we all inevitably do and probably have to do — I can imagine signing up for the deal that he offers, which is to say getting to live a reasonably long life, eating the foods that I digest naturally and want to eat, being able to participate in most of the species-specific behaviors that are innate to me, and then having as quick and painless a slaughter as is possible. Those kinds of farms are always going to be boutique. If we want to move toward that kind of eating, then we have to get used to eating meat once a week rather than 21 times a week. And anybody who wanted to make that argument, I would be an ally of that argument. I don’t think that I would eat it myself, but that maybe comes down to what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation, the difference between what’s true for you and what you think should be more broadly applied globally to others.
But there’s also a problem of scaling systems. And I don’t mean that only in terms of the energy and land, just the environmental resources that it takes to raise animals, but also in terms of what happens when you scale a system that has an enormous power imbalance. If you were to say to me, hey, I encountered this craft workshop halfway around the world in a very, very poor community that employs 13-year-olds, and these are 13-year-olds who weren’t going to school, and by having these jobs they’re able to help support their families and keep themselves and their families healthy — what do you think about that? I might say that sounds like a good thing. But it doesn’t make me an advocate for child labor, because we know what happens when child labor is scaled, when those who have vastly more power than the people that they employ, and there are no laws protecting the people who are at the crappy end of the power imbalance.
So animal farming is as profound a power imbalance as there is, and we see what happens when it’s scaled. And this is — I don’t just mean factory farming. It’s always been true, it’s just more true than ever now. And in a world where human population is so out of control, and there’s going to be so much demand and so much need for efficiency in a system that is inherently, grossly inefficient, I guess I find it hard to imagine how that’s going to end well. Again, that’s not to say that there aren’t people who are already doing it well, who could do it in ways that I would support. But when we are consumers in the world, we’re not usually — very, very few of us are lucky enough to interact with farmers, or to have any kind of real and honest insight into where our products, whatever they are, come from. And we end up trusting, or at least investing ourselves in, these larger systems. And, you know, the system of raising animals for food, I can’t imagine ever wanting to be a part of that.
Ross Kenyon: Well, one thing I was thinking about with regard to scale — I’ve been reading enough Wendell Berry in the last year, couple months, that I am less convinced the pace and scale of urbanization is always so good for how we were evolved and how our minds work, and maybe being more boutique would be fine for me. And the most boutique, I think, you can get, or one of the most boutique ways, is — I’ve been hunting a number of times. But I have to tell you, and this is not not uncomfortable to talk about on the air, but I’ve been deer hunting and javelina hunting, other things, and I don’t know that I’ve ever not cried standing over the body of an animal that I am in the process of killing.
I think it’s really — being able to see it up close. And of course vegetarians and vegans have long said that if you saw what happens in factory farms you would not eat meat, which is, like, objectively true. I don’t think anyone could stand watching that and be okay with it. But I don’t know, I thought that made me more empathic, or I connected with it in some sort of way. But then again, it didn’t really change my behavior or get me to stop eating factory-farmed meat either. I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m trying to say there. But surely that scale question needs to play a part in this?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, the more experience we have with things, the better understanding we have, and the more we care about them. So I don’t believe that one needs to slaughter an animal to know why it’s wrong to slaughter an animal, if that is your belief, if that is your conclusion. You know, I’ve never killed a human, and I don’t need to, to know that I don’t want to. Reason is enough of a resource. Hunting is something that I have just zero interest in, and, you know, with all due respect, I just don’t understand why anybody would have any interest in it.
A lot of things have gotten much worse about farming in the last 50 years. One thing that’s actually gotten better is slaughter. It’s still, like, an incredibly dangerous enterprise for the workers as well as for the animals, and a lot of things can go wrong, but generally speaking it has gotten better. The design and the techniques ensure that there is suffering less often than there used to be. If I were an animal and you gave me the choice of being slaughtered in a contemporary slaughterhouse or hunted, I would choose the slaughterhouse 100 times out of 100.
I think if the interest for a hunter is to be close to nature and to be able to do all that is involved in hunting short of killing the animal, I would say great, why don’t you take a camera instead of a gun, or carry a gun that has a camera on top? You know, I think hunters hunt because they want to kill, and that’s an instinct that I want to have nothing to do with, and which — certainly, we were talking about parenting — you know, that wouldn’t conform to my idea of what it is to, frankly, be a good person. And clearly there’s no future in which we’re scaling hunting as a way of eating. There are 8 billion people on earth, the majority of humankind lives in cities. It’s just not going to happen. That having been said, like, I really appreciate the vulnerability it took to admit that you cried when you did it.
Ross Kenyon: Well, let’s take a little bit of a side step away from meat, so directly, for a moment. And you mention in We Are the Weather that you don’t believe climate change is an easy story to tell, or even a good story, as a story. Tell us — why do you think that is?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, the things that make good stories, memorable stories, resonant and lasting stories, are clear heroes and villains, a clear arc of a narrative, memorable moments of crisis. And climate change is so complicated, it expresses itself in so many different forms. You know, like, if you are asked to explain to somebody what the wildfires in California have to do with climate migrations in the Middle East and species extinction and the burning of the Amazon and the flooding of coastal cities, you could do it, I assume, but it wouldn’t be elegant, and I don’t know how memorable it would be. But maybe even more to the point, it’d be very hard to tell that story in a way that was immediate, you know, that didn’t feel distant.
It’s interesting why it is that we’ve responded as we have to coronavirus. You know, who would have thought governments were even capable of closing down economies, of persuading or forcing the sheltering in place of tens or hundreds of millions of people? This is something we know far less about than we know about climate change, and as profound as the stakes of coronavirus are, they’re obviously dwarfed by the stakes of climate change. And yet the response was relatively immediate and pretty dramatic, certainly outside of the United States it was. And why? I think it’s because there’s an immediacy to it, namely, we’re afraid of dying. We are afraid of losing our own lives, we’re afraid of losing the lives of people very close to us.
You know, can you imagine if we were told that we had to shut down the economy, otherwise people in Bangladesh would get coronavirus? There’s just no chance. I mean, no chance. Can you imagine we were told, you have to wash your hands scrupulously, otherwise people in Bangladesh will get coronavirus? I don’t even think people would wash their hands, because it would take an empathic leap. You know, it’s not because we’re evil, it’s because we’re human, and humans cannot ignore what is close and threatening, and have a hard time engaging with what’s distant and threatening.
Climate change, even though there are immediate effects — it’s being felt now, and tragically in America primarily with superstorms and wildfires — you know, I don’t know many people who feel personally threatened. So our care has to extend beyond ourselves and our loved ones, to either people who live in other parts of the world or to people who will live in the future. And it’s very difficult to extend one’s care across those distances. I speak personally. You know, I’ve known about climate change for years and years, and I’ve cared about it, or I’ve thought that I’ve cared about it. I’ve described myself to others and to myself as somebody who cares about it. I have attended marches, I know the right things to say at dinner parties, and I believe them when I say them. [unclear] But the truth is, I have had great difficulty feeling it in the ways that we have to, in order to inspire the kind of change that’s absolutely necessary.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we had Kate Knibbs on from Wired and we were talking about cli-fi and doomer lit and these new genres and subgenres within literature about climate, and we were trying to talk about why this story is so hard to tell. It’s a hard one to even articulate sometimes. But we ended up talking about horror monsters and sort of the allegories that are just built into them. When you think about something like Godzilla, that is about the threats from nuclear energy and the nukes that landed on Japan — that was a very passive way of saying that, the nukes that were dropped on Japan. And climate change doesn’t have that yet. There’s not, like, a nice wrapper for it. We thought about maybe doing Abominable Snowman, maybe that’s a literary device I can employ to tell a story about it. But there isn’t a nice little neat package to deliver it in. It kind of hurts the brain to try to make one.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, I think that’s just exactly — just exactly what I meant when I said it’s a difficult story to tell, not journalistically but in a way that will really move people, and move people over time. The Uninhabitable Earth, for example, is a very good book, and it really moved me, but only for a little bit, you know. And that’s not a critique of the book. I literally don’t know how he could have done it better. I thought it was just beautifully researched, beautifully written. I don’t know how it could have been better. I’m critiquing the subject. Because, I really — you know, when I was 50 pages into it I wanted to buy it for everybody I knew, and I was certainly citing statistics from it, anecdotes from it, like, all the time. And then I finished it, and then I stopped. And I have yet to read anything about climate change or hear anything about climate change that stuck in the way that it needs to stick, you know, that not only moved me, but moved me in a sustained way.
Ross Kenyon: Not even something like Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, which I’ve read and you reference quite a bit in your book, and the form of a response to it, your engagement with it. Maybe that didn’t make a big impression on you.
Jonathan Safran Foer: It did, in the sense that I did think about it a lot, and I wrote about it at length in my book. It obviously frustrated me. It frustrated me in part for the same reason that Michael Pollan frustrated me, which is he’s just such a great writer and such an obviously great thinker. You know, it’s a little bit like you were saying, when you were talking about how Jesus sort of was — what — slowest to forgive the — how did you put it? — the absolutists.
Ross Kenyon: You’re like the Pharisees, people who feel like they know the moral law inside and out, and inside their heart they’re corrupted, is the claim Jesus makes. Something like that.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Yeah. Like, I never really get frustrated by ignorant people. You know, if I turn on the Republican convention — maybe this is a shame, but I find it vaguely infuriating, but only vaguely. I feel like I save my frustration for the people I most admire, when I feel like they don’t go to the place of our shared values. I don’t mean even my values, but the sort of lines of thought that they have already traced, they don’t extend them. So yeah, Roy Scranton, I took issue with what I felt was a kind of defeatism, or an unwillingness to — more than just — I feel like he reverted to sounding beautiful, to writing beautifully, in a way that didn’t do justice to the argument that he was making, which is that we are in this unprecedented, profound crisis, trying to figure out how to be citizens and how to be parents in this moment, and what it is we’re going to teach our children who are growing up inside of this. I found the setup to be just so beautiful and provocative, in all the good ways, and then it just let up.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I had a similar arc reading that book too. I love the story that it’s based on, about him being a soldier in Iraq, and I think he’s an officer, and an NCO tells them, like, the only way to be a good soldier is accept that you’re already dead. I think that moment happens in Band of Brothers too, now that I think about it. And then how do you apply that to climate change? We’re done. Humans have caused climate change, and we still haven’t accepted that we’re already dead. And what do you do with that information, in particular if you’re a parent? Which is a fantastic question, but I think the borderline nihilism sort of left you wanting something more complete.
I think that’s where you end We Are the Weather too, as you’re trying to find something — it was having children, right? Like Children of Men, when you can’t have children, it’s the death of optimism, you don’t believe in the future anymore. This is a terrible thing for humans. Having a kid is the ultimate act of optimism, and thinking the future is worth having. And then what happens if you can no longer believe that? And this seems like — I can just tell, reading your words, it did not feel good for you to try to come out of Scranton’s book with nothing to help you in that regard.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Well, I don’t believe that we’re doomed. And I don’t say that because I’m so optimistic, I say that because I don’t think the science — first of all, to me, we’re doomed, it feels like what I was talking about before, like a race to an extreme, to a binary. You know, what does it even mean when we say save the planet or lose the planet? We are not going to lose the planet. Clearly the planet’s going to be just fine, and humankind is not going to go extinct either. I’ve yet to speak to a climate scientist who would ever put things in those terms.
What seems to be true is that we are already well into a process of loss, and there’s going to be extreme loss, some of which is baked in, and in that sense certain things are doomed. Since the Industrial Revolution, 100 percent of climate change has been due to human causes. So the loss that we experience will correspond directly and only to the choices that we make. We are going to lose some number of species. We’re going to lose some number of coastal cities. We’re going to lose some number of days of the year that we can be outside. We’re going to lose some number of lives to climate droughts and climate flooding and climate wars. We’re going to lose some portion of the Amazon. We’re going to lose some portion of the ice sheets. We’re going to lose, lose, lose, lose and lose.
But what is the end of that loss? How much loss can we tolerate? And that’s what we are in the process of, like, questioning and figuring out now. So this idea that, oh well, we’re toast — it’s not a response to science, just as the response which you also hear, and we’re going to be okay, you know, I don’t know how but we’re going to be okay, is not a response to science. And that’s really what I was getting at in the book when I talk about how often conversations about climate change begin and end with the question of hopefulness. Hope this conversation won’t end that way — I bet, because we’re talking about it now — but virtually every conversation I’ve ever had about climate change has ended with somebody asking if I feel hopeful or not.
And I try to redirect the conversation, because, you know, having hope implies that the future won’t be determined by our work, and hopelessness suggests that our work won’t ultimately impact our fate. And I feel like Scranton was expressing a hopelessness that felt a little bit self-indulgent to me, and not in keeping with, like, the struggle that’s ahead of us.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that sort of focus on structural rather than individual, even in cases where it’s true, becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. People perceive themselves to have less agency, they may do less. And your focus, at least with this book, is very focused on consumers and individuals changing their eating habits. Threatening their sense of agency could have real ramifications for what you perceive to be a big opportunity to make some progress on climate change. Do you think that’s an accurate way of seeing this?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Yeah, I mean, yeah. We were talking earlier about how good or bad a story climate change is. There are a lot of different stories to be told about it, and some of the stories, based in the same information, are motivating and some are not. Some suggest that we have a degree of power in determining our fate, and some suggest we don’t. And in that way, some stories are more useful than others. I don’t mean that they’re more true necessarily, they can be equally true, but one can be more useful. So I’m interested in the useful stories.
Ross Kenyon: So, my wife and I have a Weimaraner, and the color is actually officially fawn, like a deer, and she looks like a deer. When I see a deer, I think of my dog. And there’s something about — humans are partial, right? And so animal liberation legend Peter Singer, a lot of his philosophical research was written against partiality, against having these sort of preferences: a life in Bangladesh should matter just as much as one in the town in which you live, and the fact that we are more partial to one than the other is actually our brains doing something that they should not be doing. But I just see my dog everywhere with animals, and I’m partial to my dog. But given that I can see this sort of, like, universal life spark — I don’t have the words to say it without it sounding kind of New Age-y, but I feel like that’s been working on me a bit lately. Does that make sense?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Of course it makes sense. I have dogs, I’ve three right now, as is maybe obvious or not. I find the question of meat a kind of — it’s an open question for me. Like, I don’t want to eat it, but I’m not positive that I’m right, whatever that means. I’m definitely interested in hearing other people’s perspectives on it. I’m open. When I hang out with my dogs, I’m not open. I’m just not. I look at them and say, like, there is absolutely no questioning, there is no questioning that they have some kind of rich experience, even if I can’t know the details of it, and it is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong to eat dogs. I just think it’s wrong. It’s categorically wrong.
So then what’s the difference? What’s the difference? I mean, science doesn’t suggest any difference between dogs and pigs, except for the fact that pigs are probably smarter and probably have more of a life experience, probably experience pain more acutely, or the anticipation of death more richly. So there are moments when — and, you know, this again comes back to the very beginning of our conversation, when you’re asking me about how my mind has sort of changed on these issues, or developed, my opinions have developed. Yeah. Like, getting in — anyways, you become an adult, these ethical binaries soften somewhat and you become more accepting, and you often hide behind the supposed, you know, complexities of the supposed real world. But at the end of the day, if you were to really push me on it, I think I would say it’s wrong. It’s just wrong.
Ross Kenyon: I think this is a good place to wrap it up. Are you — are you content with, yeah, ending point here?
Jonathan Safran Foer: Yeah, I appreciate — I appreciate this conversation and your time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Jonathan Safran Foer — you should pick up the paperback edition that just came out of We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. If you like the timbre of this conversation, there’s a whole lot more where that came from in that book. So thanks, Jonathan.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Thank you, take care, be safe.
Ross Kenyon: You too. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher. Writing a review really helps get this content out to more people. And thank you so much for listening.
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