As Thanksgiving approaches, I am reminded of this passage from Jonathan Safran Foer's We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2019):
Ninety-six percent of American families gather for a Thanksgiving meal. That is higher than the percentage of Americans who brush their teeth every day, have read a book in the last year, or have ever left the state in which they were born. It is almost certainly the broadest collective action—the largest wave—in which Americans partake.
If Americans had set a goal to eat as many turkeys as possible on one day, it's awfully hard to imagine how we could surpass the forty-six million that are consumed on the third Thursday of November every year. If President Roosevelt had asked us to eat turkeys to support the war effort, if President Kennedy had inspired a moon shot of turkey consumption, I doubt we would have eaten this many. If turkey meals were given out for free on every street corner, I don't believe more than forty-six million would be eaten. Not even if people were paid to eat turkey. If there were a law obligating Americans to have Thanksgiving meals, the number of people celebrating Thanksgiving would drop.
That is indeed an incredibly high number. Although the thesis of Foer's book, delineated in the sub-title but actually quite delayed in its revelation, regards eating less animal products for the sake of the climate (specifically, Foer advocates only eating meat at dinner, if one must eat meat), the reason he brings up Thanksgiving is simply because of just how goddam much turkey we eat on that day, and pondering why that is.
He continues:
If you celebrate Thanksgiving—or Christmas, or Passover, or any collective commemoration—do you do so because there are external incentives, like a law or monetary compensation? Because you are spontaneously moved? Or because, like allowing an ambulance to pass or rising when the wave approaches at a baseball game, it is there and it is what you do?
...
How many people actually decide to celebrate Thanksgiving every year? If the possibility of abstaining were built into the culture—as it is for many national secular holidays, like the Fourth of July—would 96 percent really make the same choice? We arrive at the table not because of feelings but because Thanksgiving is on the calendar, and because we've never skipped it before. We do it because we do it. Often, merely participating in an activity produces the feeling that was meant to inspire it in the first place.
His ultimate point in this passage of the book isn't Thanksgiving-related, of course, but focused on the way that collective action works: It needs a structure. "The collective action occurs because the structure encourages it," he writes. "[O]ur amorphous, un-urgent emotions about Thanksgiving need a scaffolding."
What Foer is ultimately pondering is the scaffolding that could encourage addressing climate change, what architecture needs torn down, and what architecture needs erected. Just as the impending holiday reminded me of this passage about how incredible Americans' collective action regarding the consumption of turkey dinners on a particular day is, though, it also makes for a good example of why Foer chooses the vegan-before-dinner strategy for reducing meat consumption (and thus climate change).
In one of the "Dispute With The Soul" sections of the book, in which he essentially argues with himself before the reader, he writes of the efficacy of this strategy:
It would be both disingenuous and counterproductive to pretend that eating only plant-based foods before dinner won't require some adjusting. But I bet that if most people think back over their favorite meals of the past few years—the meals that brought them the most culinary and social pleasure, that meant the most culturally or religiously—virtually all of them would be dinners.
Like, for example, Thanksgiving dinner.
This particular Thanksgiving is different than past ones for many Americans, however, as this one will be occurring in the midst of a viral pandemic, and gathering indoors in large groups to share a meal is a very risky practice. Unlike the Thanksgivings that Foer was writing about, then, this is a year when many Americans will actually have to make a decision regarding whether or not to celebrate Thanksgiving, and, if they choose to do so, how they will do so.
Hopefully many will choose not to do so at all, or at least to do so differently than in years past—one would hope, for example, that there will be fewer people in attendance, as people choose to eat with their immediate rather than extended families, and that there will be fewer people traveling by plane or train or bus to get to celebrations out of town.
I'd highly recommend Foer's book, which is full of thoughtful framing of ways to think about the climate crisis, and ways to address it, and shows real, genuine struggle on the part of the author to attempt to do what is right, even though it is extremely difficult for him to do so.
But limiting the amount of animal products is the most direct and easiest thing everyone can do—we don't get to vote in elections, we don't decide whether or not to have a child, or fly on airplanes often, let alone daily, but we will all be eating a meal again shortly, and thus have an opportunity to make some small decision that will have some impact on the climate. And we don't necessarily all have to decide on an all-or-nothing course of action, like going vegan or vegetarian or even following Foer's suggestion of going vegan before dinner, we can, as he tells himself, focus on the meal before us.
