Don’t have a cow, man

When it comes to climate change, both the naysayers and the doomsayers are wrong, according to Jonathan Safran Foer.

In good news for these animals, Jonathan Safran Foer advises eating less meat to save the planet.

And now the good news on climate change. I know. It may sound as if I have just spent an hour talking impossible things over with the White Queen from Alice Through the Looking-Glass, but I am almost convinced that we could save the world, not before breakfast (obviously), but by what we eat for it.

The source of this hope is Jonathan Safran Foer, the 42-year-old American novelist revered by many and mocked by some — mainly for a relationship he never really had with the actress Natalie Portman — who has written a rare thing: an optimistic book about our ailing Earth.

We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast is optimistic not because Foer minimises the crisis, but because of his claim that ordinary people have a chance of ameliorating it.

Foer’s modest proposal is that we eat meat only in the evening. Changing how we eat, he writes, will not be sufficient to save the planet, but the planet cannot be saved unless we do so. The beauty of his idea is that, while each of us is unlikely to buy a hybrid car or order solar panels today, we are all only a short time from lunch or breakfast.

In any case, hybrid cars and solar panels are — like composting, recycling and tree-planting — “low-impact” responses to the crisis in comparison with eating more wisely.

His science — which has been independently fact-checked — goes like this. Methane, a gas emitted by cows, has 34 times the ability to trap heat in the atmosphere than CO2, a gas emitted by cars. If cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions after China and the US.

American writer Jonathan Safran Foer. Picture: Haaretz

Animal agriculture is, he writes, a leading cause of climate change or the leading cause. Scientists have not agreed whether the industry is responsible for 14.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions or 51 per cent, but a learned appendix leans towards the higher figure.

This is not, of course, him letting cars off the hook. How could he when, in another alarming statistic, it turns out Americans eat one out of every five meals in a car.

The one reason Foer does not give for reducing our meat consumption is animal cruelty. This will surprise readers of his previous nonfiction book, published 10 years ago. Eating Animals concluded, after much harrowing investigation, that we should stop doing so.

Has he chosen climate change as another stick with which to beat carnivores? “I just have to state,” Foer says, “that was not my intention at all.”

Sixty pages of We Are the Weather pass before Foer makes his pitch to us to adjust our diet. This is typical of a book that is intellectually, personally and stylistically lively to the point that some will shout: “Tricksy!”

It covers his Jewish grandmother’s flight from the Holocaust, her chicken stews and her death as he was writing the book. Also in there is his grandfather’s suicide, suicide in general, a long dialogue with his soul and some hotel-room burger lapses.

We Are the Weather, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

He is in a hotel room in North Carolina when we talk by phone. I ask if he made the book sparkle to counter the gloom of his subject, climate change being such a downer.

“I wish it were more of a downer,” he says. “I think it’s hard to care about at all. I have no idea what most people think or don’t think, but, as for myself, I find it as easy to ignore as anything in the world.

“You know, if I’m looking at images of the Amazon fires or a superstorm heading toward the coast or the wildfires in California or climate refugees or whatever else we might get of the visual evidence that global warming is much greater than it was even just a year or two ago, I find it very upsetting, and it’s easy to have strong emotions: panic, anger often, sadness.

“But then within — and no exaggeration — 10 seconds of those images changing to whatever else is new and important I just stop caring almost completely.”

The book agonises about this, but resolves the problem practically. If you are not going to be scared into taking drastic measures against climate change, here are some less drastic suggestions. How many of us regularly have a full English breakfast? But Americans? The Apollo astronauts had steak and eggs for breakfast.

Foer replies that his recipe may need regional tweaks, but that the study he relied on is not yet a year old and was specific to the US and the UK. Both nations need to reduce meat consumption by 90 per cent and their dairy consumption by 60 per cent.

“It may be that the breakfast and lunch thing is an approximation of that … but it felt like a very good place to start, a possible place. The most important thing right now is that we get in the habit of having new habits.

“McDonald’s tries to get kids to form habits. They’re a business, so that’s what they do. We, as parents, are running families, not businesses, and we have the power to create other habits. I used to eat dairy and eggs all the time, like, indiscriminately.”

Did he meet the target mentioned in the book of giving up dairy and eggs?

“Upon finishing the book. I do still sometimes eat dairy for dinner. I mean, in full disclosure — why not? — I was just in Italy and out for lunch with my publisher and the meal served included cheese.

“I am not and I don’t want to be the kind of person who pushes it away and says, ‘Oh, not for me’. I just ate it and thought, ‘OK, I’ll try at dinner not to’. It’s not helpful to try to be a human calorie calculator. It’s not in the right spirit and I think that it’s narcissistic.”

The opposite of someone who eats a lot of meat, dairy and eggs, he writes, is not a vegan, but “someone who is attentive to how often he eats animal products”. He’s not nearly as interested in engaging with boastful vegans as sharing the struggles of those who try to be vegan and fail.

He is hardest of all on Roy Scranton, who last year wrote a New York Times essay, Raising My Child in a Doomed World, which concluded that we cannot save the world through individual consumer choices because it is “a complex, recursive dynamic” with “internal and external drivers”.

Foer counters that we are the “internal drivers”. We get stuck in traffic jams because we are the traffic. This is why his book is called We are the Weather. Consumer pressure is changing the US. In August a green-painted branch of KFC in Atlanta sold out of a plant-based fried chicken substitute in five hours. In May its supplier, Beyond Meat, became Wall Street’s most successful initial public offering in at least a decade, while Burger King is using a rival, Impossible Foods, to make Impossible Whoppers available across the US.

What does he think about his friend and fellow novelist Jonathan Franzen, who recently wrote in The New Yorker that it was time to stop pretending we can prevent the climate apocalypse. “Look, when people feel vulnerable they move to extremes. He moved to an extreme. I know no climate scientist who would say, ‘It’s all over’.

“We’re not all going to die. Life is not going to end. We are in the process already of losing a lot, but there’s the question of how much we’re going to lose and the spectrum matters.

“It matters whether 20 per cent of the Amazon is destroyed or 100 per cent. It matters how many years are shaved off life expectancy. It matters whether there’s 100,000 climate refugees or 100 million climate refugees …

“It matters how many cities become uninhabitable. So I find the doomsday story as hysterical as the story that climate change isn’t happening. Neither is true. Climate change is a process, not an event, and we’re determining its process with the choices that we make now.”

Has he had it out with Franzen yet?

“I haven’t had it out with him. We just come from different places. Also, it’s not the debate to have.”

Since our perspective has narrowed to New York big shots I feel I should ask about the Portman business. The story is a few years old and followed the ill-advised publication in The New York Times Style Magazine of an email exchange between Foer and the actress, who turned vegan after reading Eating Animals.

Foer’s emails are not exactly flirtatious, but cringe-makingly over-intimate. (Foer: “What has cleared your Wonder Line in the past couple of weeks?” Portman: “Yesterday we saw five bunnies when we left the community pool and they didn’t clear my Wonder Line, but the look in my son’s eyes definitely did.”)

Publication engendered an online rumour that Foer had told his wife, the novelist Nicole Krauss, from whom he is now divorced, that he was in love with a beautiful intellectual movie star. The story’s punchline was that Portman, happily married, was unaware of any of this. (This year poor Portman had to deny a claim in the musician Moby’s memoir that they had once dated.) So I ask him straight out: did he plan to leave his wife on the basis of an email correspondence?

“You know, you’re the first person who’s ever asked me that. Can you believe that? Of course not, and my wife and Natalie would say the exact same thing. But the three of us decided it’s just not worth engaging with and talking about. It would be great for that to go away, but sometimes the effort to make something go away makes it bigger.”

I sort of apologise (for my profession). The problem is that gossip is easier to concentrate on than climate change.

“I don’t think it’s easier because it leaves people feeling bad. Do you know anybody who spends tons of time gossiping who feels good at the end of it? And I don’t know anybody who tries to engage with the big questions, even when they have to make changes that are painful and involve sacrifices, who doesn’t ultimately feel better.”

I tell him he is right. I have not had meat at lunch since I read the book, and that makes me feel even better than having solar panels.

“Good. Amazing. That makes me really happy to hear.”

And, I say, his book has left me feeling more optimistic. I think I hear something not quite being suppressed from across the Atlantic. Was he surprised when I said that?

“I don’t think I was surprised. I think the chuckles you heard was the voice inside of me that’s saying, ‘Who cares if you’re hopeful? Do the right thing’.”

Andrew Billen is feature writer at The Times.

We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
By Jonathan Safran Foer
Hamish Hamilton, 240pp, $35