By now you've probably read a bit about Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals, but if not, here's a quick recap: the author, who previously stuck to fiction, was inspired by the birth of his son to take a deep look at where food comes from, specifically animal-based foods. What follows is several hundred pages of writing on and around the topic of, well, eating animals.

I'll be honest, when I first heard about the project I was more than a little worried that this was going to be a bandwagon book, riding on the past successes of stuff like Fast Food Nation, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (I've read the first one but not the other two.) Basically, there are a whole lot of ways that this could amount to a bunch of mental masterbation wherein the author proves how clever and insightful he is without inspiring any need for actual change. Worse yet, from the vagueness of the title, there might even be a case/rationalization/excuse for meat eating contained inside.

Not to throw spoilers your way, but my fears were thankfully unfounded. The book's really well written and manages to make a lot of good points within the framework that's laid out.

Now, the author is vegetarian (having spent many years bouncing between that and a conventional diet,) and even though reports suggest he's considering veganism, I think it's important that this is an "outsider" book. Very few people in the meat eating world want to read yet another vegan activist's rant about how everything they're doing is wrong, and Jonathan Safran Foer manages to come across as a real person who simply took the time to find out where his former food was coming from.

That said, the focus of the book is largely, as the title implies, about food containing animals, and while there's a little bit of attention to battery cages and veal, the milk and egg industries get a bit of a pass. With a focus on cruelty, birds get the most attention, cows not so much. There are also a number of interviews/essays with animal farmers, who all seem like very nice people, but I believe the book makes the case that these nice people simply can't feed the world without resorting to cruelties that we should find unacceptable.

With an early November release date, it's probably not a coincidence that the book covers Thanksgiving a fair bit, but I think it's an effective centerpiece for a lot of the arguments made in the book. Thanksgiving is a holiday that typically involves a bird who's been treated like crap and bred to a point where a "natural state" is pretty much impossible, and it also involves some of North America's deepest food-based traditions. I don't think that many, if any early readers of the book will both be inspired enough and have the courage to invoke a vegan or vegetarian Thanksgiving feast this year, but it may well plant the seeds for future growth.

Eating Animals isn't a "game changer" from an activism standpoint, but it's an important milestone. For years now we've been seeing an increasing transparency into how factory farming works and some decent growth in media coverage in movies, TV shows, and books like this. At the same time, while awareness is certainly on the rise, veganism doesn't seem to be. I haven't figured out if everyone's simply doing it wrong, or if a critical mass of knowledge needs to be reached at which point society will just say "enough," or if there's a key piece of the puzzle yet to come out that will put it all together for people, but Eating Animals certainly isn't hurting the equation and will probably save a number of animals' lives over the next few years.

If you're already vegan, you might enjoy the book for a reminder of why that is, but the odds are you won't find anything new in here. What you will find are talking points and a common point of reference with your friend, neighbour, or co-worker who eats animals but also reads books like Eating Animals, and in that regard you can be the best "next step" possible.

Eating Animals is in stores now, so please check out your local independent bookstore, make sure your library carries it, and if you do decide to buy it off of Amazon you can help raise it on the charts, which gets it more attention. As I write this it's the #45 bestseller, and like I said earlier, I don't know if a book that's against factory farmed food in the top ten will necessarily convert people to veganism in droves, but I don't think it'll hurt.

(And yes, the Amazon link is an affiliate one, as are others on this page, which means if 10 of you buy the book through it I think I can buy a Clif Bar or something, but it also helps me to track stats. Which makes me hungry for that Clif Bar.)

Have you heard of this Facebook thing? People seem to like it, and I've largely stopped pretending I understand it (which is largely a factor of free time,) but in my line of work I need to keep up to speed with its various uses and abuses, and hey, did I find something fun today.

Facebook has updated their rules about what marketers can promote on the site, along with how they can do it. Wanna know what can't be promoted? Product categories including gambling, tobacco, firearms, prescription drugs, or gasoline. Oh, and dairy. Oh, and if the prizes from your campaign include, wait for it, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, prescription drugs or... dairy.

Now, I don't think this means that everything on Facebook has to be dairy free (for instance, I'd guess that milk chocolate would be allowed but cheese wouldn't) but hey, I could be wrong, and in any case, suck it, dairy board!

No idea what this means for Barnivore, our vegan-friendly booze guide which has a Facebook page, but we don't use it much, so I don't think I'll lose much sleep over it. For now, this is just an interesting loophole that makes me smile.

Oh, and I love when work-related research becomes part of "The Work" instead of just regular everyday work.

A thousand pardons for the lack of posts (and newsletters) over the past little while! Partly I've been crazy busy, but I've also been thinking about the format of the site and I want to make some changes.

You already know that factory farming is ridiculously wrong, that meat consumption has been linked to a ton of diseases, and that some people do horrible things to animals from time to time. Being reminded of that on a recurring basis might help maintain your commitment to a plant-based diet, but it'll also bum you out, and let's face it, as an individual you're not going to be able to change most of this stuff. As a group, that's a different story, and I'm working that part out still, but on the whole, the kinds of posts I've tended to write have come across as whining. Brilliantly witty whining, yes, but this isn't a competition to see who can find the most things that are wrong with the universe. The major media outlets do a fine job at that already.

I'm still working out how this will affect the site, but I want to focus on the awesome, so I can help you be awesome. Now, you may have noticed that news outlets focus on the negative as well, so this might prove to be a bit of a challenge, but I guess we'll have to make our own news if it comes to that.

Stay tuned, more posts coming soon...

Environmental footprint stats aren't messed up enough yet, but they're getting there. In the latest round, a mid sized dog is being compared to an SUV. According to researchers, the dog will go through 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals in a year, which is the carbonastical equivalent of driving a big-ass car for 10,000 kilometres.

Now, it should be mentioned that I've seen dogs thrive on a plant-based diet, but on the whole I'm not a fan of these metrics. Sure, it's great to be proud of the reduced environmental impact of your diet, but now some nut just has to point at your dog and somehow that becomes an excuse for their meat-eating ways. In some ways it's an extension of the "animal rights activists need to focus on 'real issues' like child labour" (or whatever Big Issue doesn't require an immediate lifestyle change) nonsense, but how many of you have ever thought that you diet gives you "credit" to "spend" on other indulgences, like, OK, a dog?

Put another way, while environmental footprint calculations can be useful to put impact in terms relative to things we're familiar with, they shouldn't be seen as budget line-items in your life. What do you think about these calculations? Do they actually help, or do they give everyone something that they can use as a credit/excuse against something really nasty, like eating meat?

It's not that I'm lazy; I simply can't find a way to describe this viewpoint other than "agriculture can't let people tell the public what's going on because it'll really hurt business." Linkylink.

People die every year from eating live shellfish, but it looks like this might finally change as the FDA introduces rules to ban the sale of untreated oysters, at least in the hot summer months.

Whatever. Check out the lead: "Lovers of oysters on the half shell may want to indulge now, while they can. A new Food and Drug Administration plan to cut deaths from one of the deadliest types of food poisoning means that soon, live U.S.-grown oysters will become much harder to find from May to October."

That's right, if you want to risk your life over a piece of food (because eating animals is essentially entertainment anyway,) you'd better hurry!

I haven't posted very much stuff about swine flu, aka H1N1 but more amusingly bacon flu, but that's largely because the mass media is doing a heck of a job. There are a few aspects that interest me, and one of them is how well the original, non-sanitized name is holding on.

I think we'll make Fridays into Swine Flu Watch days, where we don't track deaths or any real news other than the number of instances of Swine Flu versus H1N1 in the news. At the moment, according to Google News, the score is 42045 for swine flu (10019 without mention of H1N1) and 106630 for H1N1 (78049 without mention of swine flu.)

Anyone want to make this into an automated widget?

Here's a quickie on beef safety: there was a 925 pound recall of ground beef this week, which isn't huge by industry recall standards, but I though the wording of the news was interesting. According to this version, nobody's gotten sick and the company involved says that their own tests didn't find anything.

So why the recall? Well, as per this version, the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service found it.

You make the call: multi-layered safety system at work, or damned lucky break?

Q: When is Jason going to stop making jokes about Wednesday being Business Time?

A: Jason is NEVER going to stop making jokes about Wednesday being Business Time!

Seriously, everyone has to do a little work to understand the economics of animal agriculture, because frankly, the farmers aren't doing their share. Take this recent report from a Canadian Pork Industry publication: according to some dude on the Manitoba Pork Council, pig farmers have been losing money for two and a half years and don't see anything getting better for at least the next 12 months. Amazingly, banks have been reluctant to give them more money, and while the government is introducing new support programs, there seems to be growing interest in using these programs to get out of the industry altogether.

Unfortunately, this is probably bad news for animals. Despite farmers' hard times, people still eat pork. Fewer farmers is going to mean increased industry consolidation and growing reliance of imports from other countries where animal care standards are going to be harder to monitor and enforce.

It's almost looking like the best way you can support your local farmer is to encourage people to eat more crops. Huh.

There was no story yesterday (and no newsletter either, sorry I forgot to warn y'all about that) due to the Thanksgiving holiday we had up here, but here's how I'm going to make it right: I'll write about two stories today, and since I know you're busy, I'll cram them into the same post so you don't have to do any extra work. How cool is that?

In fact, I'll even make both stories about pigs. No, this isn't a magic trick; I just have two pig stories I want to talk about, is all. They both involve how frigging smart pigs are, especially when it comes to getting food. I realize that seems to be what most pig intelligence stories are about, but despite having killed baziliions of them, humans really haven't figured out much of their motivations other than they like to eat. If we're not careful, we might even realize they hate getting slaughtered.

Anyway, in story the first, we learn that pigs are able to understand how mirrors work. Pigs are so smart I can barely explain the setup, but apparently if you see food in a mirror and don't automatically look behind it like it's a piece of glass, you've got an awareness level at least as good as a pig's, and it's something that hasn't been observed in that many animals. It's one of those "signs of complex cognitive processing" that someday might mean something. For now it'll likely get discussed over ham sandwiches by people who think they're clever but don't understand terms like cognitive dissonance.

In story the second, we get to watch a movie! Be warned, it starts playing automatically. Pigs would know better than to do that. Anyway. Some farms have some kind of RFID tagging system for their pigs where the food gets dished out once per day in a certain amount per pig, as per the tag on their collar. The pigs have figured out that the collar's the key, and some have taken to bringing extra collars into the feed chute so they can get seconds. They get the collars from pigs who haven't figured out the food trick but have figured out the "remove a collar" trick, which means they go hungry, which means the farmer is dumber than his or her cleverest pig and needs to find a new vocation.

I think we're going to see more and more stories about pig intelligence, simply because it's not hard for researchers to get pigs. Great apes are getting rare, and they look more like people, so research is tricker. I'm really wondering how far along the research has to get before people figure out that these animals deserve a little more respect than they get from being turned into a pile of bacon for the breakfast buffet.