Although I am based in Leeds, I come down to London every other week for work. This week, my travel down to London coincided nicely with the start of Jewish Book Week. I’d almost completely missed out on this momentous London Jewish event, but lucky for me I was kept in the loop by a reliable source. I was pleased to see two talks on Monday night that caught my attention: “Extremely Bad and Incredibly Cruel” with Etgar Keret and Jonathan Safran Foer speaking about vegetarianism and “Defining a Moral Compass for the 21st Century” with Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Susan Neiman discussing both religious and secular ethical challenges that we face today. Saying that I was excited would be an understatement…

    Jonathan Safran Foer is a wonderful author of fiction. I came across “Everything is Illuminated” in my first year of university and enjoyed both the book and the film that it was made into. He has a very different and interesting style of writing. His novel “Eating Animals” is his first work of non-fiction where he explores vegetarianism, something he dabbled in since the age of 9, but was really brought on by the birth of his son. Etgar Keret is an Israeli author and graphic novelist, who we studied as part of our UJS training. He became a vegetarian at the age of 5 after watching the film “Bambi.” When he asked his father what had happened to Bambi’s mother, his father replied that she was killed so Etgar could eat schnitzel.

    Etgar and Jonathan discussed the environmental and ethical implications of eating meat. I’ve yet to read “Eating Animals,” but it seems to be replete with hard-to-swallow facts about the treatment of factory-farmed animals (the method in which 93% of animals are farmed in the United Kingdom, and 99% in the United States), how farming contributes to 18% of greenhouse gas emissions and how the mass consumption of meat is making antibiotics less effective in children. Etgar and Jonathan did not set out in their discussion to guilt the audience into becoming vegetarian, but they did stress the importance of thinking critically, asking questions and being aware of what we eat, where it comes from and the impact it has.

    I gave up meat (but not fish) for about seven months in 2008 as a bit of a test, and because it was easy. My group of friends in Leeds was mostly vegetarian and I was delving into trying to keep kosher. I ate a lot of tofu and quinoa and enjoyed experimenting with all sorts of new vegetarian and gluten free recipes. Because I have Celiac disease, I have one more, slightly large hurdle to jump in terms of my diet...at the same time, keeping kosher means that I don’t eat non-kosher meat and have to stick to fish anyway.

    I now see vegetarianism/reducing meat consumption as more of a challenge. Meat and fish taste good; for us, they are easily accessible and can be an important part of our diet. However, the bad outweighs the good in this case and the negative implications that fishing, farming, and meat production have on the world are incentive enough to reduce meat and fish consumption, if not remove it from your diet completely. The phrase that Jonathan used that really stuck with me was “we are emptying our oceans.” Fish and seafood are another example unfortunate victims of our tastes. A quick search will reveal several sources online that say that tuna could face extinction due to overfishing.

    I don’t know if I’ll become a vegetarian (or pescetarian). There are several people in my life that I admire greatly who are vegetarian and their resolve and morality behind their lifestyle change is inspiring. We always wonder what we can do to ensure that our ‘footprint’ on this earth is as small as possible. We take public transportation, recycle our papers and plastics, compost our food, use energy-saving light bulbs and donate our used clothing to charities. However, there is always something more; another step to take towards being ‘green.’ For me, removing meat from my diet is just one way I can try to make the world a better place for my friends and family. Every little bit helps; do not underestimate the impact you have and the power of one.

    Send me an email at elana@ujs.org.uk if you have any questions about the talk on vegetarianism. Jewish Book Week runs from Saturday, February 27th to Sunday, March 7th, 2010. Stay tuned for my next blog about Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Susan Neiman’s discussion about religious and secular ethical challenges that we face in the 21st century.