We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

By Jonathan Safran Foer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux     2019

272 pages     Nonfiction

If you are expecting a “how to” about cooking and eating a plant based diet, Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, We are the Weather, will not satisfy that need. If you are looking for a fact-based study of climate change and our response to it, as the title might suggest, you are not going to find that either. But, if you are seeking a beautifully-written argument for changing our behaviors for the benefit of the planet, this book is just what you are seeking.

My husband and I read We are the Weather aloud to each other as part of the community “Reading Together” program  in anticipation of Foer’s visit on March 10. (OMG, was that just a week ago? Feels like a month!) We attended the lecture and finished the book this morning, with a lot of questions and not too many answers. (Actually, his lecture was the last public event we attended.)

What I didn’t realize until we were well into the book was that it is written as a series of essays, divided up into five sections. Primarily, Foer gives a philosophical argument for eating a plant-based diet, at least before dinner. He does this in a methodical way, building his argument step by step. One chapter is extremely powerful—even though it only indirectly talks about climate change. Foer tells the story of a man named Jan Karski, who was a part of the Polish underground. He made his way to the United States in 1943 and finagled a meeting with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to tell him of the atrocities happening to the Jews in Europe. After listening to Karski’s story, Frankfurter said that he was “unable to believe what you told me.” Foer concludes: “Frankfurter didn’t question the truthfulness of Karski’s story. Rather he admitted not only is inability to believe the truth but his awareness of that inability.” Foer concludes that the response of most people regarding climate change is much the same. We kind of know that we should be concerned, but there is a part of us that just can’t believe it. In the rest of the book, Foer tries to convince us that it is our duty to act, and one way to do that is to change the way we eat. Chapter by chapter, Foer’s philosophical argument convinces us.

The most cleverly written chapter is an argument that the reluctant Foer has with his soul. It’s a bit hard to read out loud, but it is extremely effective in convincing the reader that the change is up to each of us. Foer’s in person lecture was just as effective as that soul argument. He let it be known that he struggles with his own inaction every day. He says, “We are good at things like calculating the path of a hurricane, and bad at things like deciding to get out of the way.”

Foer’s argument, coming as it did for us in the midst of Covid-19, hit a note. Certainly, we understand with our minds what is happening, it is something that is hard to believe in our souls. Like keeping ourselves secluded from the virus, which we definitely understand, we need to come up with a plan to do our part to reduce our consumption of animal products.

The Kirkus reviewer closes his review by saying, “Foer is not likely to sway climate-change skeptics, but his lucid, patient, and refreshingly short treatise is as good a place to start as any.” I am going to prove by our change in menu that old dogs can learn new tricks. Here is a presentation by Foer at the Philadelphia Library, very similar to what we heard in Kalamazoo.