Safran Foer is a wonderful writer. Whether you agree with or understand the tact he takes in a given piece, it is always well put and stylistically elegant. For him to take on a topic like our diet and its relationship to climate change was exciting.

As he shows clearly in this book diet and specifically eating fewer animal products is one of the most powerful levers individuals have over their environmental footprint. Just by switching a few ingredients in what they eat, they can directly impact, as the United Nations says, many of the worlds environmental problems from local to global. The only problem in this feel-good story is that studies show us that many people would rather watch the world burn and animals suffer than give up eating animal products. Safran Foer feels this himself, painfully, intimately. Someone who has toured the world talking about the ethics of eating animals and the topic of climate change is unable to completely break with the habit of eating animals himself.

Of course, there are different perspectives we could take on eating animals. One is a utilitarian one that says eating one animal is better than eating two. That any reduction in the number of animals forced to live through the factory farming system, polluting the world is a good one. That we should nudge people, get them to eat a vegan meal a couple of times a week, or for lunch, or just choose more ethically or sustainably produced animal products when they do feel the need to indulge.  The other point of view says that eating animals is an immoral act. You are either moral and abstaining from eating animal products as far as practicable, or you are immoral. This immorality is the same whether you are having an egg sandwich once a month, or are someone who eats meat three times a day.

Safran Foer wavers between these two perspectives. He admits to snarfling an animal-based burger guiltily behind his locked hotel room door fairly regularly but is tortured by his own weakness. Given people's usual daily consumption of animal products in the affluent world, most environmentalists or utilitarians would scoff at Safran Foer's self-flagellation. Ignoring the immorality of the act from an animal rights perspective and instead taking a climate change and environmental perspective, people eating animal products once or twice a month would mean a new day for the sentient beings and ecology of the world. For myself as an animal rights person with a utilitarian mindset, he would be wrong, but less wrong. Whilst less wrong is all we may hope for in life, gradients of it matter.

I haven't eaten animal flesh since 1996, and have followed a fully vegan diet since 2000. I don't miss animal products, and indeed after a few years of being vegan, they began to disgust me. So whilst I can sympathise with his struggles and think Safran Foer is perhaps too hard on himself, I don't share them. You may think "meat stinks" is a slogan, but actually to someone who has lost the taste for it, it actually does. I can't walk down the flesh aisle at the supermarket, I don't want to sit in a cafe where bacon is being cooked. Whatever a carnist smells here, whatever I once smelt there, I now smell putrid death. Also as something of a lover of food, I find plant-based foods fulfil all my culinary desires. I'm quite happy eating a veggie burger, including ones where the texture is meant to resemble animal flesh and I prefer it that the taste isn't quite the same. Although I support it I won't eat cultured meat if and when it comes, I don't see any reason to any more than I'm hoping for cultured human flesh now that our species once common cannabilism has gone out of fashion.

Animal flesh is a living system, full of sensual nerves, to enable feeling in a sentient being that doesn't want to suffer. We know that "higher" animals such as cows and pigs lead rich internal lives, so why would we want them to be harmed on our behalf if we can easily avoid it?  I couldn't help making assumptions about Safran Foer's perspective not having really shifted when he recounted the difficulty of giving up animal products.

Anyway, here I am focusing on one small part of his book when it is vast, complex, and wide-ranging. There is so much I could talk about. His discussions about the holocaust and its comparisons to the mindset of people who ignore climate change are deep and thoughtful. They are comparisons that in this world of identity politics only someone with his heritage is able to make without inviting a major backlash, maybe that is for the best. The inability of humans to think clearly about climate change is something I've seen talked about before but not from this unique perspective. Our flawed human minds, our individualism, our need for status, to fit in with a culture that doesn't think things like climate change are important, so many things are leading us away from focusing on the train hurtling towards us on the tracks.

I like that he didn't obsess about climate change denialists. There is often a strong focus on them, but really they are a tiny minority who might have achieved nothing without the backing of corporations who profit from destroying the earth. We may call them out on social media but this is almost a feel-good distraction. Anyone who flies without thinking much of it, who drives their car too much, who eats meat often, who consumes carelessly, are all practising a form of climate change denialism and should think carefully before pointing fingers. As so often it is the majority of us, that according to opinion polls believe climate change is real and requires action, that matter. We need to seriously put our ideals into action. We need to find the strength to change, to think and live differently.

If you haven't been to a climate change protest recently, if you probably won't go to the next one, if you haven't made major changes in your life to reduce your carbon footprint, if you are voting for political candidates who don't prioritise a response to climate change highly, if you aren't donating money to a climate change action group, you need to be reading books like this because sometimes the motivation to do what is right, gets lost amidst the clutter of our everyday lives.

This beautiful, challenging book, reminds us of something we let too easily slip from our mind, the world beyond our small lives and desires. I too need to think about my response to it.