The Shadow Editors: Meat and Real Estate are both Murder
Tom Scocca: Did they time this whole rollout around Jonathan Safran Foer's vegetarianism book so as to get the maximum number of semi-precocious 15-year-olds to ruin their family Thanksgiving dinners?
Choire Sicha: Well it may just be the need for a Hot New Nonfiction Airport Book for fall, as Malcolm Gladwell only had a "best of" book. And I think David Sedaris is off this year.
Tom Scocca: Nice of J.S. Foer to swing over from the fiction team to fill the gap.
Choire Sicha: He took one for the team.
Tom Scocca: My advice to young would-be reporters is to write a novel, because once you've written a book-length made-up story, you're qualified to write about any sort of factual business you please.
Tom Scocca: Though you do have to be able to get your novel published, which raises a bunch of (sorry) chicken-and-egg questions about how one gets connected enough to get connected.
Tom Scocca: But at any rate, on the strength of two novels and sundry other connections, Jonathan Safran Foer is now an ethical philosopher.
Tom Scocca: He appears to belong to the I-Know-You-Are-But-What-Am-I tradition.
Tom Scocca:
Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about 'eating animals,' they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.
Tom Scocca: Now suppose we change the subject of the book from vegetarianism to nudism.
Choire Sicha: That sounds neat!
Tom Scocca: I am writing a book inquiring into the justifications for the practice of wearing clothes.
Choire Sicha: Why? Do you hate clothes?
Choire Sicha: I bet you hate clothes!
Tom Scocca: See? You recognize that you secretly hate clothes yourself, and that the wearing of clothing is indefensible. That is why you assume that I am writing my book in favor of nudism, rather than against nudism.
Choire Sicha: Well that would be my, you know, whattaya call it. Suspicion!
Tom Scocca: Does that possibly have anything to do with the fact that most people in most cultures all over the world wear clothing, with only minimal qualms if any about doing so?
Choire Sicha: My expectations are that most people either enjoy clothing or at least do not find clothing objectionable.
Tom Scocca: It is a funny way to ground an inquiry into behavior, this starting from the premise that the majority of people agree that the behavior is wrong, even though the majority of people engage in it.
Choire Sicha: Maybe everyone* has just been ruined by Christopher Hitchens books?
Choire Sicha: *that Jonathan Safran Foer knows.
Tom Scocca: That is an important footnote.
Choire Sicha: Well it always is. It's not like I'm a great pulse-taker of North Carolinian pig farmers or whatever.
Choire Sicha: JSF, having done some hog farm traveling, is probably slightly better off in that department!
Tom Scocca: Yet the hog farms present a whole different problem.
Choire Sicha: But they caused swine flu!
Choire Sicha: That is what JSF said on the Ellen DeGeneres TV show.
Tom Scocca: Foer is very bothered–and wants the reader to be very bothered–by the hideous quantities of untreated sewage that these hog factories produce.
Choire Sicha: I am bothered by those!
Tom Scocca: Natalie Portman was so bothered by reading it, she switched from vegetarian to vegan activist. and is now hectoring her friends to do the same. And the readership of the Huffington Post.
Choire Sicha: Well, it's not a terrible choice, all told! If you really like legumes.
Choire Sicha: And also becoming uninvitable to dinner.
Tom Scocca: But if the hogs are producing as much sewage as major cities, why do hog farms not have municipal-grade sewage-treatment plants attached?
Choire Sicha: I don't know, why!
Tom Scocca: We can probably come up with an answer involving inertia, the creeping innovations of megacapitalism, legislative cowardice, and so on.
Tom Scocca: It seems quite reasonable that they should treat their sewage. I support it wholeheartedly.
Tom Scocca: But what does that have to do with the question of whether humans should eat the flesh (or organs! I do love scrapple) of other animals?
Tom Scocca: Factory farming is disgusting and evil and should be fought.
Choire Sicha: Perhaps they are temporary vegans. Just until the farms are, like, better.
Tom Scocca: That seems not to be the case.
Choire Sicha: One plate of free-range bacon would fix most of them.
Tom Scocca: It is as if an author arguing for nudism were to devote much of his book to an expose of clothing sweatshops.
Tom Scocca: Or it is like the Spartacist Youth Club denouncing the Ku Klux Klan. Or the LaRouchies showing up at the antiwar rallies.
Choire Sicha: He's said that he wants people to "to think, to investigate, to question what's at the end of the fork before putting it in your mouth."
Tom Scocca: And yet he is against Michael Pollan.
Choire Sicha: That's where I get confused as well!
Tom Scocca: In Foer's analysis, that is because you and I are blinded by our sentimental attachment to meat, which is a sentimental attachment to murder, because Meat Is Murder. Q.E.D.
Tom Scocca: Again, it's a pretty bold tactic for the person arguing against eating meat to accuse the meat-eaters (including the non-argumentative ones!) of sentimentalism.
Tom Scocca: And it was pretty telling when he personalized it.
Tom Scocca: Setting aside the incredible condescension toward his grandmother, and by extension toward all peoples of the earth who have not been properly socialized to the most right-thinking norms of 21st-century collegiate-literary Brooklyn.
Tom Scocca: I was even more struck by this, about when a babysitter told him and his brother that chicken came from poor little chickens:
Tom Scocca: I put down my fork. Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken as I type these words.
Choire Sicha: Ha! I think that's actually pretty funny.
Tom Scocca: Sure! Jonathan Foer is not a bad writer, at the level of putting words and sentences together, and he is clever about putting nice things in the foreground. It's down below, where the ideas and values have to go, that things get awkward and ugly.
Choire Sicha: I did get stuck at "The greatest chef who ever lived wasn't preparing food, but humans."
Tom Scocca: This needs to get a little ad hominem, because this is all about a particular homme inflating his own decisions into ethical pronouncements, at the expense of other people. Including his brother. So let's have a look at the Brothers Foer, here.
Tom Scocca: One brother cares deeply about the chicken. He cannot ignore moral issues.
Tom Scocca: The other brother is callous.
Tom Scocca: Now. One brother is Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic.
Tom Scocca: I make fun of the New Republic a lot, and it deserves a lot of it, though less so under Foer than under Peter Beinart.
Tom Scocca: [DISCLOSURE: PETER BEINART COLD-CALLED ME TO INVITE ME TO INTERVIEW FOR A JOB THERE, THEN AFTER THE INTERVIEW HAD AN UNDERLING CALL ME TO TELL ME THEY WERE HIRING SOMEONE ELSE.]
Tom Scocca: But though the New Republic is over-serious and self-serious at times, it is nevertheless serious. What Franklin Foer does for a living is to weigh great global issues of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, etc., and to try to give voice to people who are trying to address those issues and influence policy, in ways that might make the difference between millions of people dying and hundreds of millions of people dying.
Tom Scocca: What Jonathan Foer does for a living is sit around and write twee lit-fic.
Choire Sicha: Well. Very laboriously!
Choire Sicha: I have a Foer brother sidebar?
Choire Sicha: Remember when Joshua Foer got an advance of $1.2 million for his book, "Moonwalking with Einstein"? That was in late 2006. That book is currently listed on Amazon with a pub date of "Dec 31, 2025."
Choire Sicha: Wouldn't that be wonderful? I am jealous.
Choire Sicha: Anyway, back to those two other Foers!
Tom Scocca: Gosh, yes.
Tom Scocca: So I have trouble digesting an anecdote which is designed to showcase Jonathan Safran Foer as the one of the two who is the more serious thinker about ethics or about the way the world should be.
Choire Sicha: Well, he's always been obsessed to the point of self-demolition with the evils of the world.
Choire Sicha: This is a not-unreasonable quality.
Choire Sicha: And I think this is him actually finally trying to grapple with it.
Choire Sicha: Instead of being paralyzed by it. Because paralysis is something that is natural to him. He's a very anxious critter!
I would like to eat Jonathan Safran Foer. Over a parmesan risotto. Bill Buford says Chianti and Fava Beans are so The Old Standard.
I'd like to make JSF bacon. Is that possible?
Emily Gould, you have mail.
Aw, perhaps I am a softie, but I took the chicken anecdote as self-deprecating. JSF is the tortured sensitive nerd and his brother is carefree! It really doesn't have to be self-admiring.
I can't actively dislike him because if you let him talk long enough he'll shoot himself in the foot, which.. is in his mouth..? Ugh, I'm bad at metaphors! I guess that's why I had tomove out of Park Slope.
So Portman's anti-meat-eating, but pro-child-rapers?
Indeed.
It's so great that we have this to beat celebrities over the head with from now until doomsday. Although I must say I find Emma Thompson's anti-teenage-Moldavian-sexual-slavery but pro-child-raper stance even more poetic.
There's a lot to digest here. It's pretty anecdotal, the morality of our lives and choices, eh?
Anyway, I ate all my clothes. But my doctor prescribed a high fiber diet.
Plus: someone is showing me side-by-side photos of Natalie Portman and chickens, and, I have to tell you, I'm thinking hard about this.
No one ever wants to grow up to work in a slaughterhouse.
Also, tl;dr
Someone help a non-texting person out and tell me what that means…
Too long; didn't read. (Just trying to be servicey. I read it.)
Thanks, Setec! Appreciate the servicey-ness.
Actually, Setec is a little off in their definition of the "lulztastic" phrase "tl;dr". It's basically the quickest way for someone to convey the idea: "Hey, I'm a giant douche! Look at me! I have no REAL opinion on this(or probably anything else actually substantial in life), and just want to make myself heard because I'm SO important! My time is already much too filled with valuable activities–such as leaving "tl;dr" comments on snarky weblogs such as theawl–to actually READ something of substance!" Take your asshat text-speak somewhere else if you don't like the length of the article.
"(or organs! I do love scrapple)"
Aw, man, why did you have to say this? Can't I just go on believing that the delicious fried cornmeal-stiffened slices of meat slurry I get from the diner up the street all come from the less gross parts of the pig?
Re: JSF's enormous Brooklyn house. Last week I was home in Buffalo and toured one of the city's surprisingly large number of Frank Lloyd Wright house's, which is really more of a compound — giant main house connected by a long walkway to a sort of pseudo-greenhouse, with a couple of Wright-designed outbuildings for servants. It was a really interesting tour but one of the troubling (and still really interesting) aspects is that, after the plutocrats who had the house built lost all their money in the Great Depression, the house was vacant for nearly 20 years; then in the '50s an architect bought it, demolished the rear parts of the structure (which were in a state of collapse already), and sold the land upon which were built some ugly low-slung apartment buildings; he lived in the main house, but even that he subdivided himself, into a reasonably sized main dwelling for himself and a couple of one-bedroom apartments in one of the side wings.
Now, you might think "this is blasphemy against art!" and it kind of is, and Wright was never shy about telling the people who bought his creations exactly how they were supposed to live in them, forever. But really, isn't subdivision part of the natural lifecycle of a large house in a city neighborhood? And isn't it kind of cool that an ordinary schmoe who could only afford to rent a one-bedroom could say that he or she lived in a genuine Frank Lloyd Wright house?
In the 1990s, a conservancy group bought the estate, and has since, at the expense of several millions of donated dollars, torn down the ugly apartment buildings and meticulously rebuilt the Wright structures that had been demolished (the original foundations were still there to use as a basis). This struck be as kind of obscene, as what had been living housing in one of the nicer and healthier neighborhoods in a contracting city was transformed into a museum. The absurdity of it was really brought home when our tour came to an end in one of those reconstructed sections, which had been the horse stables and was now a gift shop. "Ooh, is this what the original gift shop looked like?" I asked, and the tour guide didn't really get the joke.
I enjoyed reading this comment.
Ditto. The ongoing struggle of Art vs. Real Life and all that.
Aw, thanks! I totally recommend going on a Wright house tour sometime, if only to learn that Wright was kind of a nut and is currently a cult! For instance, Wright HATED gutters with a passion, and tried, with varying degrees of success, to design roof drainage systems that didn't require them. Our tour guide told us a story about one Wright house that developed a substantial leak in the dining room in fairly short order upon completion, and when the owner called Wright to complain, Wright told him he should move his dining room table. This was told in a sort of rhapsodic tale of the great man's passion for his work, and not as "Ha ha, Frank Lloyd Wright, a genius but kind of an ass, right?" In the gift shop there was a picture of the house from the '50s with the gutters that a sane later owner had installed, with a very sniffy caption about the "non-Wrightian gutters" (which were now, in the gloriously restored house, gone, obviously).
He made his poor wife walk around in dun-colored sacks so she wouldn't clash with his interiors. (And then there is the terrible story of his mistress and her children being killed by his housekeeper?)
Read Loving Frank!
I heard he once said "Of course it leaks, that's how you know it's a roof." The genius part was getting people to put up with his non-functional art.
Awesome commentary, for sure. I lived with architect students, and was always among plenty, in college; I definitely heard my fair share about FLW. Most of my friends had a love/hate relationship with him. He certainly was…eccentric. I think jfruh here makes a very interesting point, in that, aren't architects striving to find a way to make the line between art and life blurred? Practical art, so to speak. The bit that ends with "…an ordinary schmoe…could say that he or she lived in a genuine Frank Lloyd Wright house?" touches perfectly on this: what could be a better application/appreciation of your work as an architect than to have it utilized, as opposed to just preserving it. Now THAT is the travesty. And, I genuinely LOL'ed at the gift shop thing.
On the practice of wearing clothes. . . Montaigne's been there and done that.. Great essay.
Perhaps this was mentioned later on, cause it's a bit tl;dr.
I don't shop at Whole Foods because I'm cheap; I don't drink Starbucks because it tastes like hell. And also because I am cheap. MORALS AND ETHICS AND CHOICES, PEOPLE.
(Also. Coffee Connection 4 Life, Scocca!)
I don't shop at Whole Foods because there is no way for me to justify paying an inflated price for food I could buy at any other grocery store for one third to half the price. They do not carry a single product that is exclusive to Whole Foods. I am not particularly cheap I just don't enjoy throwing money away.
So here's what I don't understand: I went around and compared Safeway and Whole Foods prices for the produce section, and Whole Foods came out on top every time. Is it Safeway that's the problem, or does no one buy produce at Whole Foods?
Yes, it all comes back to Coffee Connection! (And the Kurds, and Roman Polanski).
Yes! The Coffee Connection. Good I'm not the only one who remembers.
I mostly use Whole Foods for meat and fish, and for the few fruits and vegetables they have that the Giant doesn't. Persimmons now, for instance.
Their $3.99/lb boneless pork shoulder is particularly nice. Also they'll cut up their pork ribs into little rib-segments.
Coffee Connection reset. Not expected, just like the Spanish Inquisition, but appreciated.
I am unsure about what is "problematic" about getting a sandwich in a place so close to Sunny and Annie's. I think it's pretty much a solved problem.
"Tom Scocca: I don't want my child to be more whole than I am.
Tom Scocca: In some sort of endless process of improvement of the line.
Tom Scocca: I just want him to hang in there."
I noticed this comment too and wonder if Tom and I are somehow related. Tom, if you're ever in the Boston area, you can come over for a nice bacon 'n' waffles brunch and we can amiably argue about who resents Mom more.
Goodness gracious, no. My parents didn't try to make me more whole than they were, either. They just tried to take an incontinent yelping animal and get it reasonably civilized. I couldn't be more thankful for that.
Not no to the bacon, I mean. Just to the argument.
This is always a strange debate for me! I grew up in a pescetarian/vegetarian household in the middle of the rural midwest. And the only rationale my mother ever gave was that eating meat was gross and therefore we didn't do it.
That was all, but for that, I spent my childhood picking pepperoni off of my pizza at friends' birthday parties, ate warmed-up lentil soup in the school cafeteria, never let a chicken finger dipped in ranch pass the threshold of my mouth at various fast food restaurants in high school. At 26, I'm still a vegetarian, and my younger sisters (20 and 17) are as well. It just stuck, became something that identified our family as a cohesive unit, different from others around us. Ideological reasoning for it (factory farms are pretty gross, eating some animals while living with others as pets is kind of silly) came later, to give a firmer underpinning to what was a lifestyle I couldn't give up now if I tried.
I guess this is my way of saying Safran Foer's kids probably won't be sneaking out to the Steakhouse. Most of us eat the way we were raised, and challenging that is extremely difficult.
I have a vegan friend who's raising her kids vegan. (Soy formula!) And she says she'll let them decide whether they want to remain vegan once they're old enough to make their own decision.
Problem is, won't they simply be unable to digest meat at that point, even if they want to eat it? Thoughts?
Naw. I know a couple of people who grew up vegetarian and then went through meat eating stages. They cope with the physical act of meat eating but often seem to return back to the vegetarianism. Maybe a mix of being raised that way and not feel the need for meat/bacon craving etc.
I feel like I should call this comment 'my life as a confused dyke'.
Trying to live according to our morals: hard! But I'm not sure I understand if your arguments are with Foer's having written an entire book about his personal struggle to live according to his morals, or with the struggle/morals the book is about.
Or, both, but which more so? It seemed like you were going one direction and then you went another, and usually The Shadow Editors are pretty clear on where they stand (even if "where you stand" = "in a gray area").
My bouts of vegetarianism in high school — inspired by lefty UK punk bands like Crass — didn't stand a chance when faced with a Carney's chili cheeseburger.
I'm perfectly happy voting with my wallet these days.
External control are you gonna let them get you?
Do you wanna be a prisoner in the boundaries they set you?
You say you want to ba yourself, by Christ do you think they'll let you?
They're out to get you get you get you get you get you get you get you
Foer's motivating factor for the anxious hand-wringing and waxing precious and serious-face is mentioned here but overlooked: That huge goddamn house doesn't get paid for by being right about stuff. Ol' Saffron needs to shuck and jive to move the maximum number of units just like every other shithead who dines on public opinion's dime.
Unlike Sicha and Scocca, Foer has a built-in audience of smug dinks from the novels (well, a bigger built-in audience anyhow, no offense guys). He probably just figured "this is the non-fiction message my novel readers would pay money to read" and went with it.
Let's not begrudge some guy for figuring out how to get paid making well-covered "meat=murder" pronouncements we heard annoying girls who wouldn't fuck me in college make. Yeah yeah, pretty sure the girls' choices were based on more than simply what i ate for dinner.
Anywho, the guy is like King Midas but with shit instead of gold. When I hear "Safran" I know he's brewed up another middle-brow eye-roller for people who don't comment in blogs (and some that do!) to gobble up like so much veal cutlet.
Lastly I heard from his personal trainer or some shit that he calls his penis "Foer by Foer" but I might have just made that up right now. Is "Foer Inches" a funnier name for it?
The Foer for her.
Ahh, it's so nice to live in a world where the tough decisions get down to things like should we eat the plants, the animals, both, sub-sets of either, etc. Should we personally beat wheat into flower with stones, or should we go buy one of 1000 types of bread at the corner?
Hopping off that horse, I loved this post (I even read the entire thing!).
I am fortunate enough to live in a place with a well-developed local food system; I was a vegetarian for more than a dozen years, but living where I live, and being able to buy meat and milk and eggs from *people I know,* whose farms I have seen, is something that I give thanks for every day. If anyone reading this is interested in these food issues, read Nina Planck, read Michael Pollan if you haven't already. Sorry to be so earnest.
um, that wallace comment? maybe a smidge over the line.
I guess I don't get why the guy would advocate vegetarianism without taking the further step to veganism. Issues of cruelty and environmental damage aren't limited to the industries involving the death of animals for their meat. Why condemn so much, and give up so much in your life and diet, while stopping short of the egg and dairy factory rackets? It seems that if you cared enough to forgo meat, or at least if you're as convinced you're right as JSF is, then veganism is an unavoidable next step.
This from a girl whose suitcase is full of Benton's bacon. Smoky, smoky heaven and you can fry eggs in the grease later. Team Omnivore.
Also haha sorry for this comment being a thousand years late! Just realized.