Q&A: Is any meat okay to eat?

Like many youngsters trying to set their moral and dietary compass, Jonathan Safran Foer was a sometime vegetarian. But when the celebrated author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close learned he was going to be a father, eating meat became an urgent moral issue. What's actually in the chicken breast we buy from the supermarket? How do we happily chow down on pork made from a tortured pig and stroke our beloved pet dog? Four years spent researching his book Eating Animals , published this week, led him to witness the brutal conditions endured by animals at factory farms –the source of 99 per cent of our meat– and interview the makers of meat and crusaders against animal abuse in the United States. Eating meat, as it turns out, is as much about stories as it is about sustenance. He spoke with The Globe and Mail by phone.

Why was impending fatherhood the time to start thinking about meat?

[It was having] to think about making choices on another person's behalf, which is really different. It's not like thinking about food for yourself. It was certainly an ongoing question in my mind, but one that took on urgency when I was about to become a father.

Your grandmother's relationship with food also guided you.

She led me to think about all the things that food does besides just fill us up and the cultural, familiar, emotional pieces of it, and she reminded me that our food choices are guided by a lot more than just meat. It's not a coincidence that so many well informed, very smart and very good people continue to eat meat, often despite knowing that, at least as it's produced in America, it's counter to their values. It's very hard to extricate yourself from that web of resonance, emotional and psychological. And I don't think one should. The question is how can you find other residences for things that you might replace? It's much, much easier than one might think.

How so?

Like Thanksgiving, for example, that's coming up in America. The idea of not eating turkey at Thanksgiving may seem to many like tantamount to not celebrating Thanksgiving. But what would it really be like if we replaced it? I think it would actually feel more like Thanksgiving. If we were inspired to have a conversation about why [the turkey] is not there, then it's like ‘Hey, these are our values, this is why we're choosing not to have it here – because we don't think it's right to breed animals to suffer. Or we don't think it's right to raise animals indoors. We don't think it's right to create animals that can't reproduce sexually.' It's not actually a depressing conversation. It's an inspiring conversation.

Obviously people are trying to make more ethical choices about meat, but even you acknowledge the challenge.

Even if you want to be an ethical omnivore or a selective omnivore, just given the realities of farming, it means you're going to eat vegetarian almost all the time.

You talk about how organic, free range, fresh is almost mythical [i.e. the labels have become almost meaningless]. Are people who buy this stuff being fooled?

It's a good instinct, but yeah, they're being fooled. And what's particularly crappy about it is an industry is taking advantage of our better instincts. They're having us go out of our way to spend more money to buy something that will better align with the values we have.

What about factory farms horrified you the most?

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