Eating Animals

Eating Animals a new book (as in 09', as in he cites current events like the outbreak of H1N1) by Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close offers readers new insight on ethical eating. For Foer ethical eating means simply not supporting, by eating, factory farms. His quest begins when his first son is born. As he puts it, "Feeding my child is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (his physical health matters, the pleasure of eating matters) and because the stories that are served with the food matter."

Foer opens and closes the book with chapters of storytelling, focusing on his life and culture of food: being Jewish with a Grandmother who survived the Holocaust and who now obsesses over the body weight of every family member. These were my favorite sections of the book. In between those sections were other chapters ranging from: Words/Meaning, Influence/Speechlessness, to Slices of Paradise/Pieces of Shit. Foer's cheeky style holds the reader captive as he wittily draws grand analogies attempting to make unfathomable statistics easily digestible (no pun).

For example, "Smithfield [hog factory farm] alone annually kills more individual hogs than the combined human populations of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Detroit, Jacksonville, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Columbus, Austin, Fort Worth, and Memphis--some 31 million animals. According to conservative EPA figures, each hog produces two to four times as much shit as a person...That means that Smithfield--a single legal entity--produces at least as much fecal waste as the entire human population of the states of California and Texas combined."

As you may have guessed from the above excerpt this book is not for the weak at heart, nor for those of you uninterested in changing any aspect of your culture of eating animals. He does not call for EVERYONE to convert to vegetarianism, but he does insist that we must all become more vocal about stopping the animal cruelty and abuse of the environment inherent in the mass production and consumption of factory farmed animals.

For me at times it was hard to take. I skipped a couple graphic paragraphs, I cried. It isn't hard for me, having been raised vegetarian, to support what Foer asks us as citizens of the nation consuming the most meat per capita in the world to do: Stop eating factory farmed animals. But if you're considering a change toward ethical eating I highly recommend you read it.

"From one angle of vision, meat is just another thing we consume, and matters in the same way as the consumption of paper napkins or SUVs--if to a greater degree...Food matters and animals matter and eating animals matters even more. The question of eating animals is ultimately driven by our intuitions about what it means to reach an ideal we have named, perhaps incorrectly, "being human"."