Factory farming and feeding your family

While we’re on the topic of food…one of the things I always find exceptionally annoying about the people who decry factory farming is the fact that they literally have no plan to feed the poor masses who rely on said farming to feed their families. John Williams gets at that point in a review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book about how evil eating meat is:

In promoting the book, Foer has been no less willing to duck the issue. During a recent appearance on Ellen, Ellen DeGeneres (a vegan herself) said to Foer, “I think one thing is . . . people are having hard times feeding their families. So if you can go get a burger for a dollar, if you can feed your kids and if it’s affordable and if it’s readily available, they’ll say that it may not be possible, they can’t afford to eat another way.” Foer pithily responded, “You can’t afford to eat this way,” and launched into a talk about the “externalized costs” of factory farming, namely an increase in global warming and a loss of biodiversity. Important issues, those, but someone who confuses “externalized costs” with the daily cost of living for the poor can be called tin-eared, at best. Foer is far from poor, and his inability or unwillingness to minimally address the issue of class is the book’s biggest blind spot.

It’s not just that book’s biggest blind spot, it’s the blind spot of every book I’ve read on the subject. In this country not too long ago, people used to have to choose between eating meat and eating potatoes/grains/greens. For some, proteins were a luxury. We now raise enough meat to feed everyone for a lower price than at any time in the history of the world … and this is condemned as a bad thing.

I’d prefer some honesty on the subject. Say something like “I want to ban factory farming even though it means that the lower classes won’t be able to feed their children chicken and beef and pork.” The people who are writing these books can afford to eat grass fed beef. The family eating McDoubles because they’re $1 and that’s all they can afford doesn’t have the same luxury.