Wednesday, November 11, 2009

A friend for the turkey

Turkey is much happier this morning, roaming all over the yard, hiccuping lustily.  Meanwhile, I found a woman in Rohnert Park who has three heritage toms for sale at a fair price. Should I? I think I should.  I have emailed her with queries as to their temperament and flying abilities and if the answers are to my liking, Owen and I will take a short drive north tomorrow afternoon and bring home a friend for our girl. ONE friend. We have another errand in the general vicinity involving miniature goats, but we will not be bringing home miniature goats. Not yet, anyway. Probably not ever.

*****
I have a tough, but (I think) fair essay about Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals up on Doublex today. You can read it here. I wrote a balanced review a few weeks ago; this is a more personal reaction. I keep wanting to undercut myself and say it's a bitchy essay, but I just wrote what I thought and believe to be true. 
 
The coverage for this book has been non-stop and almost universally adoring. Here's the opener to Laurie David's review, which I read this morning:  "A young, self-effacing, quiet, humble novelist from Brooklyn has written a powerful, groundbreaking book that might very well save our lives and the planet, if only everyone would read it." 

At first I thought it was parody. It is not. 

22 comments:

  1. GROAN.

    Your review was terrific and spot-on, at least from my limited exposure.

    Are you revising your plans for the turkeys? Are they now Adam and Eve? Do tell!

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  2. I've been thinking about Adam and Eve. I believe my current turkey is of the variety that can't reproduce without mechanical assistance, but does the lady need assistance, or is the man? Maybe the heritage tom would be flexible and vigorous enough to do the job even with a clumsy, fat hen and the babies would be something else entirely.
    More research needed.

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  3. tipsy, i'm a fan, and i have been for a while. when it comes to your impressions of big hulking cookbooks, i defer. when it comes to your impressions of housing animals and bees all over your property, i laugh along. however, when it came to your review of "eating animals," i'm pretty ruffled. your urge to label it "bitchy" is right on. i went and saw j.s. foer speak last night at my local library, and even if his writing style and his relative young-new-yorker-glasses-wearing-elitism is off-putting (which it is, and that's fine!), he stated over and over, with clarity and strength, that all he's asking everybody to do is to eat based on their existing values. don't change, don't subscribe to his beliefs, just look at what you already know to be right/wrong, and eat based on that.

    i'm a little upset that one of my favorite bloggers has gone to the mud so fervently over this guy. my hunch is that it's a personal irk you've got against the book, which you're entitled to have, but it gets sticky when slate.com starts posting it. i look there for both-sides-of-the-story, well written accounts of what's happening in the world. like i said, i'm usually right there with you, but i really feel like you missed the mark here. or, more accurately, hit the mark with a cream pie and laughed at it.

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  4. I still haven't read the book, but your Doublex review doesn't seem bitchy to me at all. It seems fair, informative, and well-considered. The quote "I spent the first twenty-six years of my life disliking animals" really tells me everything I need to know about the author's point of view: he's a zealous convert, and his writing is going to reflect that.

    I'm sort of curious how a "city boy" could dislike animals. My farm wife grandmother disliked the chickens because she hated having to clean their dirty eggs, and found the cows with their noises and clouds of flies annoying; I find this understandable. But to dislike animals without ever having personally experienced them is odd.

    I like your summing-up paragraph especially.

    I'm going to be baking a coffee cake tonight and it's your fault...

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  5. I haven't gotten far into Foer yet, but I very much agree with Tipsy's point that there is a kind of cultural geographical elitism implicit in his variety of ethically-motivated vegetarianism. (In her point about the necessity of meat in Uinta.) There are large, rich, healthy native food cultures that have grown up in parts of the world where vegetarianism is not an option without jetting in out-of-season vegetables from warmer or more fertile climes. Are those cultures "naturally" less ethical?

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  6. I'm sorry you feel that way, Rae. I read the book three times, very carefully, and those were my impressions. It wasn't at all a casual pie-throwing piece, but I'm aware that everyone will read it differently.

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  7. Hi Rae,

    As far as showing "both-sides-of-the-story," Tipsy said that the vast majority of reviews have been positive. So her view *is* the other side. Also, note that the review is not on Slate.com, but it's more judgmental sister DoubleX.

    Have you read Tipsy's other book reviews? Try ew.com. She is opinionated and unforgiving, as she should be. We see her soft side when it comes to the animals; but she is a "book critic" in every sense of the phrase.

    Finally, I had to point out the ad next to the review. It's for a T-shirt that says "BACON makes everything BETTER." So funny!

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  8. Regarding the heritage toms, those are beautiful turkeys!

    Knowing nothing about turkeys, I am a bit concerned that 1) the tom would not be a companion to the hen since they were not raised together; 2) that the tom would constantly ride the hen in a manner that would cause further stress to the hen; and 3) any such riding would cause an already top heavy hen to fall on her face.

    Finally, are you getting any turkey eggs? If so, photos please!

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  9. Loved your review. Also thought Laurie David was way over the top but maybe she's been so focused on global warming she's entirely missed Michael Pollan. I do agree that he's asking interesting questions and he's fun to listen to. But while on the one hand he is very, very, very insistent (to your point Rae) that he only wants everyone to eat according to his/her own values, he also is clearly convinced that virtually all Americans despise cruelty to animals and so should stop eating meat. I happen to live in a hippy-dippy town with all cruelty-free meat raised at open-for-visits farms (ok, and Niman Ranch and I don't know about them beyond good pr). He dismisses this less-than-1%ism as inconsequential. I don't. I have taken my meat dollars and put them where my values are. We eat less meat but I feel better about its origin and comfortable with explaining it to my kids. I applaud him for living his values in a way that works for him, and respectfully ask him to not wave away my 1%ism as a legitimate option.
    His radio persona reminded me of Jon Hodgeman's Daily Show persona. No idea how close either is to reality, and I find both entertaining and enjoyable. As I suspect you are, I am right there with him on factory farming and overuse of antibiotics (I try not to even buy antimicrobial soap if I don't have to because of the the specter of drug-resistant pathogens). But some of his conclusions really are not possible for everyone.
    Waiting impatiently for the continuing saga of your turkeys!

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  10. I am hoping to taste your orange scones soon.

    Will you/I be eating the turkey?

    as for coffee cake: one of the world's greatest taste treats. mark used to make a wicked coffee cake. i should send you the recipe.

    i for one am sick of all the hoopla over Jonathan Foer's book. what is the big deal? do people think he invented "be nice to animals"?

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  11. Great review of the Foer book. Not bitchy. just well reasoned and on the mark. it sounds like foer is pretending to be non judgemental and sweet when in fact he is very judgemental and terribly full of himself.

    declaimer: i have not read the book myself.

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  12. Jessa Crispin wrote this at Blog of a Bookslut:

    http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2009_11.php#015356

    "I am trying so hard to be nice to Jonathan Safran Foer, by which I mean I am trying to forget he exists on this planet. His book Eating Animals, however, is making this goal very, very difficult. It was bad enough when he was writing shitty novels, but now he's indulging in my least favorite form of nonfiction: the "I have never thought about this thing before until now, and despite the fact that other people have thought about this for years and wrestle daily with the implications, I think my brand new thoughts should be shared with the world." Whatever the topic -- religion, marriage, gender, food politics -- the books are always shallow, yet for some reason a lot of people take them seriously."

    Just because it may be bitchy doesn't mean it isn't true.

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  13. To this is rae: if you look to Slate (or Doublex as the case may be) for well written accounts and both-sides-of-the-story, you should have been thrilled to see Tipsy's well written approach to the other side of the story about Eating Animals there. Why is the appearance of her essay there "sticky?" Should she have kept it to herself? Put it only on this site? Should Slate/Double X keep the personal off the table? Geez, so much for that gazillion part series on "Freaky Friday, How My Wife and I Switched Jobs for the Week (Part 8: Our Toddler Weighs In!") She gave the book a B in a shorter, simpler review in Entertainment Weekly, which shows she can see beyond the "personal irk." What you're reacting to is a passionate (bitchy demeans it) response that goes beyond a simple review. Maybe Doublex shouldn't have labeled it "book review," but rather something more complex. But that's not up to Tipsy...and what you're upset about is that you disagree with one of your favorite bloggers about something. This will happen, from time to time, because your favorite blogger may appeal to parts of you, but is in fact, not you.

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  14. It appears that your white feathered turkey might be able to mate naturally. See this article that mentions white domestic stock popping out black feathered babies.

    http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2009/01/02/how-domestication-has-affected-the-turkey/

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  15. Azure Song -- that is very exciting, actually. I don't think wild turkeys will come into my yard, but that post suggests procreation might be possible with a heritage tom. We'll see.

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  16. I enjoyed your doubleX review. I read a New Yorker review that wasn't fawning, so I don't think you're alone. Although I enjoyed his other books, I probably won't read this one. Good luck with the turkeys.

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  17. tipsy, you've come a long way from "America's Richest."

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  18. Tipsy, I read your review and while I have not read the book, I have read a few of the online interviews with JSF and I do not find your review bitchy at all. I agree with your assessment of this book, and if you do get meet him, you could just tell him that life is messy, no matter how much you want to avoid the subject. Birth, death, eating, everything else. Becoming a vegan will not change this, and if you were really principled in this, your children WOULD NOT be eating eggs. Just ask anyone who really keeps Kosher.

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  19. Thank you for the review Tipsy. It was reasoned, thoughtful, great writing like all your other pieces.

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  20. I love your review/essay. I don't find it bitchy at all, just a necessary alternate view of a book many people are ecstatic about. Personally, I can't imagine what he discovered that hasn't been addressed by Pollan--granted with a different conclusion. I haven't read it yet, and I may even disagree with you when I do, but that doesn't make your perspective invalid or bitchy.

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  21. You make a great point about screeds like Foer's giving liberals a bad name. As a meat-eating gun-sympathetic rural lefty, it sometimes seems like many liberals fit Mencken's (or is it Ambrose Bierce?) definition of Puritan: someone who lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.

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  22. Your review said so eloquently and logically what I was thinking but not quite able to put my finger on when I listened to the interview Foer recently gave on NPR. I'm not clear how a person can claim to be both neutrally, objective as a researcher and passionately subjective as an advocate at the same time, and your review reveals this strange paradox for what it is. Just found your blog tonight through a dear friend who's a wonderful cook and look forward to visiting again! From one Jennifer to another, thanks!

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