Recently I shared my thoughts on the beginning of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Eating Animals” in an article entitled “Eating meat means eating animals.” I want to continue this discussion because of how important it is to wrestle with this topic in food politics. Foer begins his chapter with this startling statistic: “Animal Agriculture makes a 40-percent greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.” Eating meat affects not only your personal health and the food industry in the United States but also the future of generations to come. Clearly, we need to start caring.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the particulars of language (i.e. pain, suffering, happiness), as these are all generally abstract feelings and ideas —  it is words like these that help us separate ourselves from the animals. I’m not saying that there should be no distinction between humans and animals, but I do want to recognize that this deliberate separation only furthers the problem of the food industry today because it allows us to distance ourselves from the reality of the animal’s experience.

Foer captured this complexity when he explained, “Language is never fully trustworthy, but when it comes to eating animals, words are as often used to misdirect and camouflage as they are to communicate.” He gives examples of how we give meat names like veal or beef instead of simply saying cow. In addition to this, words like cage-free, free-range or natural are all relative and can be quite misleading. This recognition of complexity in the language surrounding the meat industry is vital to engaging in the dialogue about the changing meat industry.

Suffering is arguably one of the most debated and important words when it comes to talking about the animal experience. Foer points out that while most people regret that animals suffer and recognize that they feel pain, they do not equate the emotional aspect of pain to that which humans experience. Unfortunately, this concept is abstract and complex, relative to each person’s opinion and understanding. However, what Foer does leave the reader with is this: “What is suffering? I’m not sure what it is, but I know that suffering is the name we give to the origin of all the sighs, screams, and groans — small and large, crude and multifaceted — that concerns us. The word defines our gaze even more than what we are looking at.”

I hesitate to delve into stories of animal suffering because I think that most readers are aware of the situation — they just don’t know how to approach the problem. I feel that most of us have seen documentaries, news stories, pictures and read books about the atrocities of factory farms in the United States. We are aware that our meat is pumped full of growth hormones and antibiotics and that animals are fed corn instead of their natural diets in order to raise animals quickly and cheaply for slaughter. I highly recommend watching “Food, Inc.” and reading books like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” and Foer’s Eating Animals to learn more about the reality of factory farming and meat production. These books and documentaries have more to offer than shock value and gruesome details because they explore the issue and try to offer solutions, which is valuable and necessary for change. Stories like these have the power to bring this issue to the public’s attention and demand change.

When we think about how we engage with and support the meat industry, we need to educate ourselves about the issues and consider the implications of our decisions as consumers. We need to consider the importance of animal-human relationships and the stress of relationships between growers (farmers) and corporations. We can blame the lack of knowledge and availability of meat today, but the reality is that we must consider what we are putting in our bodies. What will you decide to feed your children? Is it possible that we will ever stop eating factory farmed meat and return to smaller, sustainable agricultural practices? Please consider these questions before your next trip to the grocery store.

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Kristen Daily is a junior in English from Orange City, Iowa.