Waltzing with Bears

An Edible History of Humanity
By Tom Standage
Walker & Company; 2010
$16.00 (paperback)

Eating Animals
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Little, Brown & Company; 2009
$25.99 (hardcover)

Meals have always elicited stories. For example, family traditions are passed down through the sharing of a ham on Christmas, or the food put out on the Seder plate at Passover. These histories tell us about the past, but they also allow us to perceive who we are in the present. Each narrative, constructed from a series of events bringing us to the here and now allows us to understand who we are as an individual, a community or a nation. At the moment of our birth, we fail to grasp our humanity, but as we learn where we came from, we take our place as a species, dominating the planet, its plants, animals and resources. How this imbued supremacy is reconciled and rationalized is buried in the story we tell ourselves—or the one we choose to forget.

In the last year, Tom Standage and Jonathan Safran Foer each published books that grapple with understanding our humanity though the lens of the food we eat. In both books I was struck by mechanisms of power that operated through food and agriculture, but yet was ultimately unsettled by contradictions in what each narrative then shed on my own humanity and morality.

Tom Standage is a British writer and editor, with a special interest in technology and business, who writes with a serious tone, yet lacks a more sophisticated academic formality (whereby the book is loosely referenced at best). In his book, An Edible History of Humanity—which is akin to his previous best-seller, A History of the World in 6 Glasses—Standage mainly deals with a series of historical transformations that profoundly altered the course of human history which, as he argues, were enabled by the “invisible fork” of food. Central to this idea is that agriculture and livestock are developed technologies, conferring power, wealth and control. In Standage’s opinion, cultivated crops are a technology and since we no longer consume much food from ‘wild sources,’ farming is an unnatural process (p.27) and furthermore, as humans have continued throughout history we have continuously honed “domesticated mutants better suited to human needs” (p.26).

With the level of historical detail in An Edible History of Humanity, one might be surprised to come to learn by the end that Standage actually acknowledges his enjoyment for a taste of food and could possibly appreciate it more than a technology. Nevertheless, the reader travels through an often abbreviated version of history, highlighting the intersection of food’s centrality to the construction of not only privilege, but power; not only inequality, but starvation; how agricultural civilizations were the foundation to further development which, eventually opened the door for the industrial revolution; how the ‘green revolution’ unlocked the limits of population growth; and finally, how food is a fuel and weapon in war.

Concurrently, Jonathan Safran Foer, an esteemed writer of fiction and a native of Brooklyn, New York, took on the writing of Eating Animals, to explore the question of ‘what meat is?’. Foer wastes little time in informing the reader that he is a vegetarian—but one who used to love meat at a younger age—however, his book isn’t one with a purpose of converting the reader to a plant-based diet. The value of the book is in the way he unpacks highly loaded issues on either side of the debate, qualifies the nature of industrial livestock methods, and with all the statistics that exist to “place facts in a story, a story of compassion or domination, or maybe both—place them in a story about the world we live in and who we are and who we want to be—and [then] you can begin to speak meaningfully about eating animals ” (p.14).

To accomplish a thoughtful dialogue, Foer writes anecdotally about his memories, histories and encounters with meat, animals and pets. But also, he introduces us to a whole spectrum of other characters, often speaking in their own words for pages at a time, people who interact with animals in profoundly different ways—including, ‘C’ (an animal activist who helps Foer break into a factory chicken farm), a factory farmer (interviewed anonymously), Frank Reese (a poultry farmer), Mario Fantasma (owner of Paradise Locker Meats), Paul Willis (pork farmer for Niman Ranch), Bill and Nicolette (owners of Niman Ranch), a worker at PETA (anonymous), Dr. Aaron Gross (of Farm Forward), and finally, chilling accounts of the horrible treatment of animals by workers in factory slaughterhouses, detailing what is considered the norm, not the exception. All of these voices invoke a “capacity to care that dwells beyond information, and beyond the oppositions of desire and reason, fact and myth and even human and animal” (p.263).

Both books attempt to form a comprehensive narrative–a history–of how human power has been constructed through our food. What we understand to be food today is a construction of how we interpret the past. Standage, dismisses the idea that our conception of food is somehow ‘natural’ as it has already been engineered past the point of recognition from its earliest states. Yet through improved agricultural practices of food–creating our first surpluses–civilization developed its first socially constructed inequalities and class distinctions which have managed to endure to the present. Additionally, further mastery of food production has unleashed the power of food to profoundly remake our society.

On the other hand, Foer views the power of food to be realized in our capacity to create animals with the sole purpose of killing them–animals who are kept alive by the most paltry, yet sophisticated and dramatic scientific systems. While even if we acknowledge the, controversially, inhumane treatment of animals, what do we take from this experience? How do we rationalize or forget the confusion of our exploitation of living creatures?

Standage, by comparison, would have no answer to the issues posed by Foer. In An Edible History of Humanity, there is hardly any mention of livestock practices, save for in the beginning of his book where he postulates that “corn, cows and chickens as we know them do not occur in nature, and they would not exist today without human intervention” (p.26). Ultimately, this is the last mention of cows or chickens for the remainder of the book, besides a smattering of loose references, for example, the technological breakthrough of canned meats which fed soldiers during war time. Nevertheless, Standage’s exclusion of modern mass-production practices of livestock doesn’t serve his own logic as a significant technological advancement to which effectively now allows masses of people to purchase and consume meat at a rate, and monetary cost, unprecedented in all of history. I should like to expect that any edible history of our humanity, would address this most dramatic example of our capacity to control the methods of our food production through the mechanized slaughter of animals.

But then, how are we to interpret Standage’s silence? Is it shame brought on by the realization that this story is not part of his narrative of a productive, progressing humanity he understands and wishes to extol? Possibly. But just as assuredly, there is nothing natural about the way animals are raised and slaughtered on factory farms. Therefore, on the side, this begs the question of what ideal should we expect from such a relationship. Yet, our masterful and efficient domination of our livestock is as profound an experience and realization of our own humanity as our agricultural productivity in the fields, whereby: “factory farming considers nature an obstacle to be overcome” (Foer, p.34). Foer encourages us to remember our place as animals, eating animals, but simultaneously acknowledge what each of us deliberately forget in way of eating meat.

While I read Standage, I can’t help but think of Michael Pollan’s countervailing theory on the account of how plants and humans developed together (see: Botany of Desire). Pollan posits that plants and animals aren’t just the product of our cultivation, but instead, sees humans as the unwitting participants in a relationship that has us reproduce their species to an unanticipated abundance. If Standage views the corn humans developed as ‘not of nature,’ could it then also serve to reason that the modern human would be comparatively as unnatural through the eyes of our earliest ancestors? The more I think about it, the more I come to feel that Standage, in his edible history of humanity, left out the development of what being human has come to mean.

For the sole purpose of bringing these two books into an amalgamation, for which each respectively details the human relations of power through what we eat, I must take considerable liberties with each narrative. What I would conclude is that our humanity comes at great environmental, ecological and social costs. In a narrative we construct, which propels our accomplishments to forefront of our consciousness, this is an undeniable act of forgetting at what expense this feat is realized. The profundity of food to elicit power is found in our earliest class inequalities; the expansion of agricultural productivity to launch the industrial revolution (and thus, further accumulation of capital for the rich); and a mechanism for fueling soldiers at war or starving out the besieged (the protection of power, interests and the expansion of further capital). And finally, the system of force which is currently exerted over 99% of the meat Americans consume is so extreme that it would be hardly recognizable by any civil notion of human behavior. As power continues to be concentrated through channels of our food system–whereby all efficiencies which master nature are glorified–would the only remaining obstacle be to prevail over the mouths and bodies, stuffing them full with the colossal fruition of our edible history? Or, is this history already being written as we speak (or remain silent)?