Natalie Portman on moving from vegetarianism to veganism

Natalie Portman has a piece in the Huffington Post responding to Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a book she credits with moving her from being a vegetarian to being a vegan activist. I’m experiencing a bit of that myself, having recently returned to veganism, even though I haven’t yet read the book and won’t have time to for months yet. (I’m writing a book of my own).

This is just an extract — do read the whole article.

The human cost of factory farming — both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals — is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and the origins of the swine flu epidemic, whose story has gripped the nation, in factory farms.

I read the chapter on animal shit aloud to two friends — one is from Iowa and has asthma and the other is a North Carolinian who couldn’t eat fish from her local river because animal waste had been dumped in it as described in the book. They had never truly thought about the connection between their environmental conditions and their food. The story of the mass farming of animals had more impact on them when they realized it had ruined their own backyards.

But what Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs: Catholics take communion — in which food and drink represent body and blood. Jews use salty water on Passover to remind them of the slaves’ bitter tears. And on Thanksgiving, Americans use succotash and slaughter to tell our own creation myth — how the Pilgrims learned from Native Americans to harvest this land and make it their own.

And as we use food to impart our beliefs to our children, the point from which Foer lifts off, what stories do we want to tell our children through their food?

I remember in college, a professor asked our class to consider what our grandchildren would look back on as being backward behavior or thinking in our generation, the way we are shocked by the kind of misogyny, racism, and sexism we know was commonplace in our grandparents’ world. He urged us to use this principle to examine the behaviors in our lives and our societies that we should be a part of changing. Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.

Remember that Friday Nov 13 is the date for my online book-launch party to celebrate the arrival of my book on Buddhism and vegetarianism: Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

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