Vegetarian Star

Julia Child rarely showed any love for vegetarians.

And the author of her life story, Julia Powell, admits she wasn’t keen on eating less meat until she read a book by one irritating vegetarian author named Jonathan Safran Foer.

“Jonathan Safran Foer irritates the shit out of me, but he’s right,” Powell said.

“He and I are really together in that what we’re trying to come to a decision about what we feel like we can eat. There’s got to be some middle ground between the industrial farming system and all the ways that’s broken and the various privileged ways people like me [respond].”

Powell now calls herself a “restaurant vegetarian”–meaning she will only eat meat when she knows where it’s coming from.

Working in a butcher shop allowed Powell to witness the gory details of “gruesomely grinning, fleshy half skulls, eyes still in their sockets” before meat gets to the plate.

“If you make a relationship with the people you’re getting your food from, you’re going to feel so much better, I promise,” said the author of Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.

Or lose your lunch.

Like Paul McCartney said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”

via thedailybeast.com via treehugger.com

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Jonathan Safran Foer. Credit: David Shankbone on Wikimedia Commons

Best selling author Jonathan Safran Foer recently interviewed with Grist.

Foer discussed his latest book, Eating Animals, and touched on the hypocrisy of meat eating environmentalists, his own struggles of vegetarianism and the fact that he probably didn’t have Tofurky this past Thanksgiving.

A few highlights:

Will there always be a Tofurky on the Foer table during the holidays?
I don’t really get into the whole tofurky business.

On Environmentalists Who Don’t Push Going Veg:
No, they obviously haven’t [done enough], and they know it’s the elephant in the room. They haven’t because they fear that addressing it is going to risk losing people…This is the number one cause of global warming—and not by a little bit but by a lot. The most recently revised estimate was that animal agriculture is responsible for 51 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, so that’s more than everything else put together. If we’re going to seriously think about this stuff we might have to risk the discomfort.

On Fear Of Going Completely Vegetarian:
I would say don’t think about it as becoming a vegetarian. Think about it as a process of eating less meat. And maybe the process will end with eating no meat. But if Americans lose one serving of meat a week from their diet it would be like taking about 5 million cars off the road. That’s a really impressive statistic that I think might motivate a lot of people who feel they can’t become vegetarians to remove one serving of meat.

Read the entire interview with Jonathan at grist.org.

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Jonathan Safran Foer. Credit: David Shankbone on Wikimedia Commons

If you ever get tired of hearing people describe what they think the stereotypical vegetarian is, take heart in knowing best selling author Jonathan Safran Foer has a great counter argument.

Vegetarianism is about caring, Jonathan insists.

And regardless of race, gender, geographic location or religious affiliation, most people really do care.

From expressnightout.com:

EXPRESS: And those words are so caught up in issues of identity and lifestyle. If you’re a vegetarian, it means you a certain type of person…

FOER: But caring about it makes you every sort of person. I’m not saying that as an exaggeration. Ninety-six percent of Americans think animals deserve legal protection, which is a radical statistic if you think about it. That means if you don’t care, you are way on the margins of society. It’s not Berkeley, it’s Middle America. It’s very Christian, very Judeo-Christian, and Muslim to worry about dominion, to worry about stewardship. Just mainstream values. If at my readings I could have had a mini factory farm up there with me, people would call the cops. People would leave. Nobody is okay with it in my experience, and I wish the conversation could reflect that instead of asking if you think it’s right or wrong to eat meat, which is actually a totally unimportant question. The answer to that question doesn’t really matter, given the world we live in. I don’t even know my answer to that question.

So, if most people care, how do we get more of them to go veg?

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Jonathan Safran Foer. Credit: David Shankbone on Wikimedia Commons

“Sex feels good, but we don’t go around having sex with anyone that attracts our attention. We say no to lots of things that would please us. I would like to punch people every now and then, but I don’t. I would like to have something for free rather than pay for it. I would like to skip to the front of the line… I don’t mean to brush aside the taste of meat, which is a powerful attraction. But its power is not without limit.”

—-Jonathan Safran Foer, answering the question of “What do I say to the idiotic line, “But they taste good” ???” during a online discussion of his book, Eating Animals.

Yeah, it never pays to be a meat slut. Ruins your health and reputation.

via washingtonpost.com

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Jonathan Safran Foer‘s trailer for Eating Animals features the very creature Jonathan used to despise–the dog!

“I had a particular lack of enthusiasm for dogs—inspired, in large part, by a related fear that I inherited from my mother, which she inherited from my grandmother,” Jonathan said.

Jonathan discusses french kisses with the dog, dinners with grandma and how his wife’s pregnancy with his first son prompted him to write his latest book in the trailer.

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Jonathan Safran Foer "Eating Animals" Interview

Jonathan Safran Foer was the guest of honor at this year’s Farm Sanctuary Celebration for Turkeys.

Jonathan read some parts from his latest book, Eating Animals, and took the time to talk to green gossip website Ecorazzi.

Here are a few thoughts Jonathan gave to Ecorazzi:

On Farm Sanctuary:
Farm Sanctuary was the first place I went when I did my research for this book. I had a really wonderful day. In many ways it established a tone for the rest of my research, which was that these issues all depend on how you tell them—how you present them. It’s not the case that the world needs new values, it just needs a new story—a story that more accurately reflects what’s going on in the world and more directly connects it to who we already are, not who we want to be, just who we already are.

On what famous person he’d like to see go veg this Thanksgiving:
I don’t know if I think of it in quite those terms. Like I was saying, there’s something that seems dichotomist about that—turkey or no turkey. Look, someone like Glenn Beck could not have a turkey and that’s fine, but what I would so strongly prefer is that he had a week-long series about animal agriculture in America. I have no interest in prying a turkey from his hands. Frankly, he could do so much more good in the world then his individual choice.

Read the entire interview with Jonathan at Ecorazzi.com.

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Jonathan Safran Foer "Eating Animals" Interview

Eating Animals author Jonathan Safran Foer was interviewed by Kerry Trueman of the Huffington Post recently.

Jonathan did extensive research before writing Eating Animals, primarily investigating factory farms and the conditions that animals raised for food endure.

As expected, some farms wouldn’t let Jonathan past the front door.

A few excerpts:

KT: Did you have any real expectation that Tyson–the world’s largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork, as you note in your book–would agree to give you a tour of any of its farms?

JSF: To be honest, I did, because I know that they have “show farms”. All these companies have show farms. I thought I would at least get a response–you know, “Unfortunately, we won’t be able to show you the farms because of biosecurity, but we’d be happy to give you these brochures.”

The thing that really surprised me was the total lack of a response. I didn’t get anywhere with anybody.

KT: And now, of course, after the fact, the industrial livestock industry’s accusing you of not doing your homework, which is really funny, because when they had the opportunity to throw open the doors–

JSF: –Yeah, so let’s do it! Let’s do the homework now, it’s not too late! Seriously, I would be so happy to revise my book if they showed me something else. But they’re not going to show me anything.

You can at least do your homework on Jonathan by reading the entire interview at Huffingtonpost.com.

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Jonathan Safran Foer "Eating Animals" Interview

Author Jonathan Safran Foer says that for people, including himself, going vegetarian is a lot like Mark Twain described quitting smoking.

“Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember…”

Whether you’re trying to go vegetarian, vegan, or flex the process can result in multiple attempts to “get it right” whether the failings are brought on by cravings, environment, financial issues or pure convenience.

The strictest of vegetarians would like to call anyone who even ingests the occasional animal byproduct no longer vegetarian, but is that the best approach to take?

Jonathan gives his take on alternet.org:

“But I wonder if more of the difficulty doesn’t come from the ways that we talk and think about change. When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. It’s a strange formulation, and it’s distracting. (Those who profit from animal suffering and environmental destruction want us to think in dichotomies, rather than practical realities.) Imagine someone asking you, “Are you an environmentalist or not?” For most of us, caring about the environment isn’t an on-off switch, but a set of daily choices that we try to respond to as best we can. I buy energy-efficient products, and turn off lights when leaving a room, and recycle and so on. But I also fly on airplanes. Does my occasional flying completely undermine my identity as someone who cares and tries? Should I, faced with my inability to live consistently, make no efforts to live better?”

Is being a vegetarian a continuous “process” that none of us should expect to get 100% correct?

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