Reporter Eating Meat Makes You Sick

Eating animals is making us sick
By Jonathan Safran Foer, Special to CNN

New York (CNN) -- Like most people, I'd given some thought to what meat actually is, but until I became a father and faced the prospect of having to make food choices on someone else's behalf, there was no urgency to get to the bottom of things.

I'm a novelist and never had it in mind to write nonfiction. Frankly, I doubt I'll ever do it again. But the subject of animal agriculture, at this moment, is something no one should ignore. As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.

If the way we raise animals for food isn't the most important problem in the world right now, it's arguably the No. 1 cause of global warming: The United Nations reports the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined.

It's the No. 1 cause of animal suffering, a decisive factor in the creation of zoonotic diseases like bird and swine flu, and the list goes on. It is the problem with the most deafening silence surrounding it.

Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science, that something terribly wrong is happening. We know that it cannot possibly be healthy to raise such grotesque animals in such grossly unnatural conditions. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. Read More

Foer is desperately trying to jump on the anti-agriculture bandwagon that was hitched by Michael Pollan. If it wasn’t so serious, it would almost be comical how people like Foer repetitiously use indefinable buzz words like factory farming (more than 20 times in this piece) throughout their articles. He never does tell us what a factory farm is. All of this is in an effort to scare people about the safest food supply in the world. Our livestock aren’t sick or tortured. True torture will come if people like Foer get their way and we have to watch our fellow human beings starving to death because we aren’t growing enough food. People like Foer and Pollan are the true picture of greed. They are the ones advocating reckless policies that will cause a decrease in the food supply at the very time when we should be doubling it.