Jonathan Safran Foer Speaks at Harvard

Even though the Science of Cooking lottery has come and gone, the popularity of food—and space limitations on learning about it—is clearly an ongoing trend.

On Tuesday, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer—a vegetarian and author of “Eating Animals”—came to Science Center D to talk about the ecological consequences of eating meat. The event was so popular that the room literally overflowed and many could not even enter.

During his talk, Foer argued for reduced meat-eating, focusing almost exclusively on the ecological impact of factory-farming—a point of view that diverges from the stereotypical image of vegetarians who forgo meat for ethical reasons. The slight and bespectacled Foer may seem like an unlikely rock star for the vegetarian movement, whose public faces until now have included individuals such as Pamela Anderson.

Yet the novelist seems to have developed a cult following of vegetarians of all ages. Case in point: many of the attendees were middle aged mothers, some of whom proclaimed during the talk that they were raising their kids vegetarian. (We noticed that many the kids in question who had been brought along spent the evening reading or playing handheld console games.)

Foer, who conducted much of the lecture like a question-and-answer session, attracted enthusiastic repsonses from the audience. An impromptu poll conducted by an audience member revealed, unsurprisingly, that well over 95 percent of the hall was vegetarian. Questioners competed with each other for who’d been vegetarian longest, shouting out their responses: from "five years" up to "25 years." This correspondent could not help wondering about the attempts to turn a serious lecture into moral one-upmanship, but we guess the Harvard setting breeds competition in every context.

Photo courtesy of Gianluca Gentilini.