Jonathan Safran Foer , Eating Animals, Penguin 2010
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-food World, Bloomsbury 2006
Jonathan Safran Foer is the successful author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Everything is Illuminated (2002). In his most recent book, Eating Animals, he turns to non-fiction. Michael Pollan’s, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is slightly older and was first published in 2006. Both give unflinching accounts of factory farming and the alternatives to it but in somewhat different ways. They discuss the United States and the specifics cannot necessarily be applied to Europe but the issues they raise are universally relevant – as Foer makes clear in his brief preface to the British edition: “A British reader who cares about the issues raised in this book should not find any peace in being British”.

Eating Animals isn’t simply an argument for not eating meat (though in the process of writing it Foer did become a committed vegetarian) it is instead a consideration of what it means to be human – and thus an argument against factory farming and all that that implies. And, in the American context, where 99.9% of chickens for meat, 97% of laying hens, 99% of turkeys, 95% of pigs and 78% of cattle are reared in in-your-face factory conditions, there is precious little else to eat if you want to eat meat.

Eating Animals once again finds Foer playing with form, as he interweaves horrific facts and figures with intimate dinner time memories. The first and the last chapters are both called “Storytelling”. “We are,” says Foer, “not only the teller of our stories, we are the stories themselves”.

The book is wide ranging: from an infatuation with a puppy called George to the cruelty of long-line fishing, from breaking into a poultry factory farm to the genetics of modern farm animals. There is an interview with a factory farmer and one with a vegan who designs slaughter houses. There are reflections on avian flu and a chapter on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of so many of the words central to the discussion: animal, bycatch, cruelty, free-range and fresh (both of which Foer dismisses simply as “bullshit”). Foer visits farms that try to do things differently; Frank Reeves’s poultry range, Paul Willis’s pig farm, Bill and Colette Niman’s cattle ranch nestle amongst the realities of the slaughterhouse and the dehumanisation of those who work there. All this is underpinned by Foer’s moral frame of reference, which constantly calls into question what it is to be human, asking why we allow the cruelties of factory farming, or how we can feel whole while deliberately forgetting.

The factory farm provides animal protein at a historically cheap price. But it only does so by externalising the real costs. For instance, animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined. The health costs are also severe: all kinds of pathogens (like new strains of salmonella and e coli) are spread in factory farm environments, and indeed affect much supermarket meat. It is not for nothing that the Centres for Disease Control estimates there are 76 million cases of food-borne disease in the US each year. As Foer comments: “Your friend didn’t “catch a bug” so much as eat a bug…in all likelihood… created by factory farming”.

Factory farms contribute to the growth of microbial-resistant pathogens simply because of the vast quantities of antimicrobials they consume: compare the three million pounds of antibiotics given to people in the US each year with the industry estimate of just under six times this amount fed to animals (the Union of Concerned Scientists thinks it is probably between eight and ten times as much). It happens because animals fed antibiotics put on weight faster than they otherwise would, and because animals in the overcrowded conditions of the factory farm get ill, so it’s better (for profit) to treat them prophylacticly.

There is every reason to believe that factory farms are creating the conditions for a new super pathogen. All flus have an avian origin, transmitted to humans either directly or via other animals, farm pigs being common. As recently as 2005 it was proven that the Spanish flu epidemic was avian in origin. The recent scares over SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and ‘swine fever’ are harbingers of what is to come; 6 of the 8 genetic segments of the currently most feared virus in the world, reports Foer, have been traced directly to US factory farms. Due to factory farming another epidemic like the Spanish flu is waiting to happen.

Whilst slaughterhouses in the US are notionally inspected and controlled, Foer shows how little such controls mean. In the late 80s former inspector Temple Grandin witnessed “ ‘deliberate acts of cruelty occurring on a regular basis’ at 32 percent of the plants she surveyed during announced visits in the United States”. If this is observed during announced visits the mind-boggles to think what day to day practices are like. Drawing on Gail Eisnitz’s interviews with workers in her book Slaughterhouse, Foer argues it is impossible for people to remain human when working in a slaughterhouse.

The known horrors of intensive meat production ought to be enough to radically transform the practice of the factory farm. Instead there has been only a tinkering at the edges. As Foer summarises “the factory farm industry (in alliance with the pharmaceutical industry) currently has more power than public-health professionals”. Eating Animals give some insights into the political economy of the factory farm: how the mass producing monolith has almost eliminated the family farm, sometimes by outcompeting it, and sometimes by buying up and closing down the local hatcheries, slaughterhouses, grain-storage facilities and other services farmers require to survive outside the vertically integrated chains of the giant food corporations like Tyson, Smithfield, Monsanto and the handful of others that control the food industry in the States. Foer’s account would have been strengthened by giving these elements further attention.

Despite these omissions Eating Animals is an important and unique book but it has to be acknowledged that Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is the more comprehensive. Pollan’s structure is simple: based on his own preparation of four meals that have their origins in radically different ways of raising food.

Pollan’s first section on the industrial food chain is hard to beat as he follows the triumphal march of government encouraged cheap corn (maize) from the field to the feedlot, to the mill and eventually to the supermarket – where more than a quarter of the forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket contain processed corn products. It’s fascinating stuff and the short account of cattle being fattened on the feedlots is not for the squeamish.

In looking at alternatives, Pollan’s analysis of what he calls ‘industrial organic’ is an eye-opener for anyone who is starry-eyed about pesticide free meat. Pollan critiques the use of the term organic when it is used to symbolise alternative in every sense – a diverse polyculture based on small-scale, local, non-exploitative social relations of production – as well as eschewing artificial fertilisers, pesticides, herbicides. A substantial section of the organic sector has been transformed into a capitalistically intensive, exploitative monoculture, often transporting its produce hundreds or even thousands of miles to its (super)markets. It is better (organic fertilisers, no pesticides), but it is very often not what you think it is.

Pollan then proceeds to look at the best of the alternatives he found, Polyface Farm, where Joel Salatin manages to produce a substantial output of chickens, turkeys and beef cattle on grass in “a food chain rooted in a perennial polyculture”. Grass is once again the basis of the farm (as it used to be before the age of the factory farm which incidentally barely existed anywhere before the Second World War). Animals are brought up out of doors and rotated on pastures, living a healthy and as “natural” a life as can be for any animal whose purpose in being raised is eventually to end up as food for others higher up the food chain. If there is animal food production which we can accept, it should look something like this.

Pollan’s writing is lucid, his storytelling rooted in a clear understanding of the economic underpinnings of the various choices farmers make, or are steered to make, in today’s agribusiness-dominated system. I found it is a more analytically coherent book than Foer’s fragmented and sometimes quirky form of presentation (though Pollan’s final odyssey, cooking a meal entirely of ingredients he had gathered or hunted for himself, including wild boar, has a quirkyness all of its own).

In many ways Foer and Pollan end in similar places. They both agree that the factory farm is the enemy. It simply has to be stopped. Support for any animal-centred farming philosophy is vastly preferable to the industrial factory where animals are treated as things (as are the people who have to work in these monstrous enterprises). But while Foer is now a committed vegetarian, Pollan is not. (Curiously, Foer never explicitly explores the vegetarian-vegan divide; but the logic of his argument would seem to place him firmly with the vegans.)

Foer goes where Pollan doesn’t really want to: asking why eat meat and what the real costs are to us, as human beings, of so doing. Of course Foer does express views – sentiments – but this is not, despite some reviewers’ criticisms, a ‘sentimental’ book. He provides plenty of countervailing arguments made by interviewees who are meat eaters and even the odd factory farmer. Pollan isn’t really troubled about eating meat in the abstract; Foer has become so. In a short, sharp snap at Pollan who claims that the moral clarity of the vegetarian depends on a denial of reality Foer asks simply which of them is denying the reality they both describe so graphically.

Pollan’s book made me very angry about the feedlot and the factory farm, but Foer’s sentiments got under my skin. I can no longer make sense of my own attitudes: an abhorrence of factory farming, a preference for organic meat which I eat occasionally, but a willingness, nonetheless, to eat factory-farmed produce, generally knowing-but-not-knowing that it is such – bacon and eggs, that stunning jerk chicken off a street stall at the Notting Hill carnival, food at friends where it wouldn’t occur to me to upset anyone by asking about the provenance of the fodder.

I was struck while reading Foer by the connexions to a book I’ve long admired: Stanley Cohen’s award-winning States of Denial (2002), a study about reactions to unwelcome knowledge, particularly the suffering that some people inflict on others – how people know but don’t know or at least don’t notice, process, digest, forget. Cohen was brought up in South Africa and lived for eighteen years in Israel so had plenty of primary material to underpin his enquiry. It ranges widely, but is focused on what people do to other people.

Foer (like Peter Singer, Tom Regan, J M Coetzee and many others) extends this enquiry to animals: “The secrecy that enabled factory farming is breaking down” he writes. “We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?”

This book arose out of a long article, originally commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly in 2002, developed in close consultation with Atlantic’s editors and delivered in January 2005 – only to be rejected. Published in the London Review of Books in March 2006 it immediately provoked a firestorm of criticism: here were renowned academics giving credence to what many critics saw as at best a misguided thesis, at worst an openly anti-semitic one.

What is the book saying? Centrally, that US policy in the Middle East runs counter to its ‘national interest’, arising neither from strategic nor moral concerns. It can be understood only as the result of the power of the Israel lobby, ‘a loose coalition of individuals and groups that seeks to influence American foreign policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that will benefit Israel’ (page viii).

Many, on both left and right, eager to explain apparent unstinting US support for Israel have embraced the argument.

Reason to be cautious

There is reason to be cautious, even before reading a single word. The authors are not bleeding-heart liberals but highly respected, hardnosed bruisers, hawkish members of what is known as the neo-realist school of international relations (IR): a state-centric approach which focuses on states as rational, self-interested actors seeking to maximise their relative power. This is not how even moderate progressives wish to see states act in the modern world. International law and human rights are central to progressive approaches, and not, as perceived by this school of IR, likely barriers to the pursuit of rational state interest. Mearsheimer himself comes from the heart of the system, a West Point graduate who served for five years as an officer in the US air force.

All this should give us pause. Yet, there is a case to answer, as shown in the first part of the book, which establishes the general parameters of the argument, particularly in its stunning opening chapter ‘The great benefactor’. This shows in detail the quite extraordinary economic and military support the US gives to Israel, let alone its ‘diplomatic protection and wartime support’. It is by far the best thing I’ve seen on the topic.

‘Israel became the largest annual recipient of US foreign assistance in 1976, a position is has retained ever since’ receiving ‘about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year … roughly one-sixth of America’s direct foreign assistance budget.’ About three-quarters is military aid, the rest economic. It amounts to a direct subsidy of more than $500 per year for each Israeli. Egypt, number two recipient of American foreign aid, receives only $20 per head. Furthermore, ‘the canonical $3 billion figure omits a substantial number of other benefits and thus significantly understates the actual level of US support’ – estimated at ‘more than $4.3 billions’ ‘because Israel gets its aid under more favourable terms than most other recipients of US assistance’.

For example, ‘since 1982, the annual foreign aid bill has included a special clause specifying that Israel is to receive its entire annual appropriation in the first 30 days of the fiscal year’ – an early transfer costing the US taxpayer an extra $50-60 million per annum. And while the foreign military financing programme normally requires recipients to spend military assistance in the US, Israel has a special exemption to spend around a quarter on its own defence industries. ‘Remarkably, Israel is the only recipient of US economic aid that does not have to account for how it is spent’ (all quotes, pages 26-28). And on it goes.

This ‘singling out’ of Israel and the host of tax supports and financial breaks it receives from the US really does require explanation.

Chapter Two argues that while support for Israel may have had some strategic value in the cold war, this is definitely no longer the case, whether in the ‘war on terror’ or in confronting rogue states. As Mearsheimer and Walt (MW) put it provocatively (page 64): ‘The United States did not form an alliance with Israel because it suddenly realised that it faced a serious danger from “global terrorism” and urgently needed Israel’s help to defeat it. In fact, the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it has been so long supportive of Israel.’ Chapter Three argues that there is a dwindling moral case for supporting Israel and the next three chapters look at what the ‘Israel lobby’ is and how it works both within the political structures and in attempting to direct the wider national debate.

The second half of the book is devoted to the lobby in action: against the Palestinians, on Iran, Syria and the Lebanon war. In each case the authors argue that the Israel lobby very effectively steers such actions, outside US interests. For example (page 334), ‘It kept the United States firmly aligned with Israel during the [second Lebanon war] conflict, despite the strategic costs and dubious moral position this entailed’.

Finally, there is the briefest what is to be done which entails identifying US interests in the Middle East, outlining a strategy to protect them and, in turn, developing a new relationship with Israel.

Lines of critique

Two lines of critique have been advanced against MW’s argument: first, that their conception of the ‘Israel lobby’ is at best misleading, at worst antisemitic; and second, that insofar as the lobby exists, it doesn’t have the power they claim for it. I will add a third: their very notion of the American ‘national interest’.

The original article was heavily criticised for having presented ‘the lobby’ in conspiratorial terms. In fact ‘the lobby’ is conceived of in reasonably nuanced terms. The centrality of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations is recognised, as is the role of the Christian Zionists, Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Above all, the legitimacy of lobbying in the US political system is fully recognised and affirmed. The argument is not that anything wrong, unusual or conspiratorial is being done, simply that the lobby is too damned good at it for America’s – or indeed Israel’s – own good.

Though the concept of ‘the lobby’ is sometimes deployed by MW as an actor that ‘has concerns’ (page 168), ‘a desire to mould debate’ (page 178) and so on, this seems to me reasonable shorthand. They make it quite clear that they view it, as already cited, as ‘a loose coalition of individuals and groups that seeks to influence American foreign policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that will benefit Israel’. Just because they don’t continually repeat this point, they are not suggesting that there is a central committee that issues instructions to its members.

They do say, however, that a critic of Israeli policy ‘stands a good change of getting labelled an anti-semite’. Exaggerated perhaps, but far from fanciful in a situation where Norman Finkelstein was recently refused tenure at DePaul University after a vicious campaign spearheaded by Alan Dershowitz; where Shulamit Reinharz, a senior professor at Brandeis, can label a host of Jews critical of Israel as ‘Jewish anti-semites’; or where Pluto Press was threatened with having its book distribution arrangements with the University of Michigan Press terminated because of objections to its publication of Joel Kovel’s Zionism and its Discontents.

And among those central to the campaigns of vilification of radical critics of Israel are members of Aipac, the ADL and so on – central components in any conception of the ‘Israel lobby’.

Alan Dershowitz’s response to MW in the London Review of Books (20 April 2006) is revealing: ‘It is the “music” as well – the tone, pitch and feel of the article – that has caused such outrage.’ It seems to me that Dershowitz and the like are tone deaf or, rather, can hear only one tone – that of vindictive anti-semitism. And it doesn’t even have to exist for them to hear it. So while they aver that ‘legitimate’ criticism of Israel is always justified, their assumption in advance is that criticism is likely to be suspect.

The real criticism of MW is that they ascribe far too much influence to ‘the lobby’ in the formulation of US foreign policy towards the Middle East. Blaming the Israel lobby for the war in Iraq, say, simply lets the administration off the hook. If the administration is out of step with most western governments over Middle East policy, it is, too, over Kyoto or the decades-long embargo against Cuba. If the Iraq war was motivated by a desire ‘in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure’ (page 231) by ending the threat of terror, it has been singularly ineffective. Nor did the US have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into reluctant support for Israel in the Lebanon war in 2006 – however much its failure may be against both Israel’s and America’s interests.

America’s real interests

MW have a simplistic view of what America’s real interests are. When the US administration does not pursue what MW want, they feel obliged to blame the Israel lobby. A simpler explanation is that the administration sees the national interest differently. For in reality, the ‘national interest’ is never clear and unambiguous. It is always contested: by fractions of capital, by cliques in administrations, by NGOs and other agents. Never has this been truer than with regard to the neocon agenda. And while this agenda might have focused on Middle East policy, its aims are much wider.

Political analysts often claim to perceive the national interest better than the government of the day, but governments are rarely single-minded in the pursuit of what neo-realists see as their rational self-interest. Successive US governments, for example, needed no Israel lobby or its equivalent to lead them to disaster in Vietnam. Rather than there being a static, unified national interest there is a dynamic jostling over direction and winners and losers in any concrete policy direction adopted. The real talent of governments is finding ways of extracting partial victories from the disasters their own policies so often generate.

There is no simple way of saying that American Middle East policy is against America’s interests, as MW do. Yes, it alienates Arab states the US wants support from – but rarely sufficiently for the consequences to be truly upsetting; yes, it is feeding the terrorist threat rather than reducing it; yes, the US looks inconsistent in its support for human rights and international law or its opposition to nuclear proliferation.

But there are also enormous gains from the ‘irrational’ policies it has pursued: from the battlefield testing of US weapons to the tied market for US arms exports, from the ability to use Israel as a proxy in supporting dirty operations the US would rather not be openly seen as supporting (from Africa in the 1970s onwards) to the lessons Israel has been able to give the US in how to conduct irregular operations in Iraq and elsewhere. Even the disaster in Iraq looks like it can be turned into a major victory for US oil interests and the arms industry (and thus for US capital as a whole) if Jim Holt’s scintillating argument ‘It’s the oil’ (London Review of Books, 18 October 2007, see http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/ n20/holt01_.html) is even partially valid.

To put it another way, someone in the US has coined a fast buck from every twist and turn of US foreign policy and its Middle East policy is no exception. If you want an interest that really has benefited over decades from the support given to Israel simply cast a glance at the arms industry. Highly organised, and funded beyond the dreams even of the Israel lobby, the arms lobby has seen the US ‘investment’ in aid to Israel returned many fold, with the employment generated, spread over most of the country, providing a ready reason as to why politicians are loathe to challenge it.

It is this that goes a long way to explaining the extraordinary financial and military commitment that the US has to Israel, outlined in chapter one. That the Israel lobby has reinforced these policies with every resource available to it is not surprising. But its success in doing so – very real indeed with regard to the various financial breaks, both for Israel directly and for US private donors to Israel – is attributable to it going with, rather than against, the grain of what the heaviest weights in the American economic and political system are pursuing.

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy can be purchased here.

But isn’t this still unfair? In the sense that any politics ought to strive for consistency it would be wrong to condemn Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian lands while allowing China’s continued occupation of Tibet to escape criticism. But saying that there are worse cases than Israel should not imply that what Israel is doing is therefore somehow acceptable. And even if you did care about both causes equally, the calls for action in each case might well be different depending on the political circumstances and perceived modes of influencing the situation in each case.

Critics are unhappy with this. They see Israel as singled out – out of all proportion. Other states in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia or Iraq under Saddam Hussein, have been far greater violators of human rights.That is true. But it seems to me that there are a number of very specific reasons why Israel is legitimately singled out

First, Israel singles itself out and presents itself as special. It sees itself as a state based, as its Declaration of Independence declares, ‘on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets’. In the words of Isaiah, ‘We are a light unto the nations.’ Israel is constantly lauded as the ‘only democratic country in the Middle East’ with the ‘most moral army in the world’. It invites evaluation in terms of its own founding principles and it constantly reaffirms its commitment to these values. It claims to be defending western values and presents itself as an outpost of these values. What better criteria to judge it by?

Second, Israel is special in that it controls a number of religious sites that are of special significance to three world religions. They have been contested over millennia. In recognition of this reality, UN resolution 181 of 1947, on which Israel’s legitimacy is based, called for the creation of a special international zone, encompassing the Jerusalem metropolitan area. Since then, religious concerns and motivations have deepened worldwide, and there are hundreds of millions of Christians and Muslims, in particular, who have grave concerns about their holy places. You don’t need to be religious yourself to appreciate the profound part that religious conflict has played historically and continues to play in the modern world.

Third, the United States clearly considers Israel special in that it has been far and away the largest single recipient of US foreign aid since the 1960s. From 1949 to 1996, the total of US aid to all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean combined was $62.5 billion – almost exactly the same amount given to Israel alone in the same period. Total aid to Israel was approximately one third of the US foreign aid budget until the Iraq invasion, and still remains at a very high level. The extent to which the US has singled out Israel as its most loyal ally in the region is indeed extraordinary. Insofar as one believes that the US plays a dominant role in the international system, its choice of countries to support is of legitimate concern. When the US, often standing alone, vetoes resolution after resolution concerning Israel in the UN security council, Israel is singled out. Israel is singled out by the US, too, as the only country in the Middle East that it permits to possess nuclear weapons with no demands being made for their control.

Fourth, Israel singles itself out with regard to Jews everywhere. It presents itself as their real home, as opposed to the multiplicity of countries in which Jews have settled and integrated. Integration can never be permanently successful, the argument goes; anti-semitism is ever-present and persecution is always just around the corner. In that sense, there is always an implicit accusation of disloyalty made against Jews who do not give Israel their wholehearted support. And Jews who speak out against the actions of the Israeli government are often accused of ‘self-hatred’ or worse from within the Jewish community.

What so incenses many – and is felt so strongly by Jewish critics of Israel – is its claim to occupy the high moral ground. ‘Nobody should preach to us ethics, nobody,’ declaimed former prime minister Menachem Begin while engaged in daily prima facie violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention: administrative detention, torture, confiscation of land, collective punishment, house demolitions and so on.

The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem reported in February 2005 that: ‘Since the beginning of the al-Aqsa intifada, the IDF has opened only 90 military police investigations into Palestinians killed and injured, although soldiers have killed at least 1,694 Palestinians who did not take part in hostilities, including 536 minors. These investigations led to the filing of only 29 indictments. Only one soldier has been convicted of causing the death of a Palestinian.’

And the IDF’s self-description? ‘The most moral and most humane army in the world.’ In December 2004, in the face of criticism of the IDF, a cabinet communique from prime minister Ariel Sharon expressed ‘complete trust and appreciation for the IDF and its commanders [and] said that he does not know of any other army that would be able to act with such high moral standards.’

In an interview broadcast in March 2003, Jack Straw, in a rare moment of candour, said that there was real concern in the Arab world ‘that the west has been guilty of double standards – on the one hand saying the UN security council resolutions on Iraq must be implemented; on the other hand, sometimes appearing rather quixotic over the implementation of resolutions about Israel and Palestine.’ Asked about double standards, Straw responded: ‘To a degree, yes … and we are going to deal with it.’ He added that he understood Arab concern about ‘injustice against the Palestinians’. The headline to a Times report of this was ‘Straw interview upsets Israel’.

Double standards predominate in any discussion of Israel, but rarely in the way its supporters claim. Throughout much of Europe and the Muslim world it looks as though Israel is indeed singled out – for favour, for support, for exemption – when others are condemned. It is time to stop singling out Israel in this way and to hold it accountable to the same values and criteria it claims to be embodying: values that are liberal, democratic, non-discriminatory and just. If that is singling out Israel, so be it.