Eating Animals

"I read it before I started the book and it really influenced me. It’s a really powerful book and I know many people who it has made vegetarian. There’s a passage in it that says only eating animals you kill yourself is ridiculous [what Gray does for a year, in The Ethical Carnivore ], that it’s a stupid argument. He’s actually got a line: ‘It’s a way to forget the problem while pretending to remember.’ But I was a fan of this book and it was quite interesting to feel like I had to move beyond someone else’s opinion to do it on my own terms. I wasn’t living in the city, like Safran Foer, at the time, with lots of vegan restaurants about the place. I was living in the countryside, in a place where I was being offered venison quite regularly from animals that were being harvested as part of reforestation. I didn’t have a problem with this meat and I wanted to to explore that. Later in the book Safran Foer goes to see farmers who raise animals in a particular way and says ‘I would eat meat if I could do this realistically’—I would argue we could do that. “A lot of books about meat are lobbying but this isn’t a lobbying book, it’s just the author’s story” The book was also a big influence stylistically. There are a lot of books that I considered to put on this list which are about the facts and figures of eating meat, and are really interesting, but I feel like this is such an interesting book because it’s looking at the facts and figures in an emotional way. It’s about his personal history and about the people he meets. Just like Upton Sinclair’s book, it’s about the people. I just thought it was very interesting to explore our emotions, and a way of having some influence on an environmental issue but through storytelling not lecturing. A lot of books about meat are lobbying but this isn’t a lobbying book, it’s just his story. It’s an example of a way of exploring issues through telling a story, which I would argue is the only way to explore it honestly. I hesitate, when you ask that question, as I hate to to feel like I’m moralising. I would try not to be negative and say you can’t eat this or that. But I think there are so many positive messages in being an ethical carnivore. I feel like what you eat gives you control. Michael Pollan, a US author who writes a lot about food, says: ‘You vote with your fork three times a day.’ So I would say it is a good thing to discuss, because it gives people power and we don’t have much of that. “You vote with your fork three times a day” How you eat meat is especially powerful because of the environmental impact and climate change—it produces more emissions than all of the transport in the world put together, so reducing the amount we eat can make a difference. To understand where your meat comes from not only enables you to have an impact on the environment, but gives you a link to the land and the farmers and where the meat is from, and that’s empowering to you as an individual and to the small farmers getting your money. So I think eating less meat and understanding where it’s from can be a great thing for people, as can exploring the alternatives. We have got ourselves into this situation where the environment is under threat but we can find new ways which would really help the environment—like by reintroducing oysters to help waterways, or enabling smaller farmers to have an income. You can have a positive affect through eating meat. Also, there is all this amazing vegetarian food, vegan food, meat alternatives, as well as the meat. You can engage with and enjoy all of it, so less and better—or different—can work for you on a lot of levels."