Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan Safran FoerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-11-02
ISBN: 0316069906
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of Eating Animals
Book Review: A thought-provoking, enjoyable, and important book
Summary: 5 Stars
Disclaimer: I'm not a vegetarian (yet, but probably soon). I do enjoy meat. I'm certainly not an animal activist, and one recent post on my Facebook account (before reading the book) was "PETA= People Eating Tasty Animals".
Having said that, my opinion is that if everyone in the U.S. read this book, the world be a better place.
As Amazon customers, we search endlessly for those rare gems, the books that are entertaining, engrossing, and yet life-changing at the same time. Books you can't stop thinking about. Those books only appear once in a great while.
This is one of those books. It's loaded with facts, but it's not preachy. It's not JUST that eating meat is cruel. We already know that. So why put yourself through the tedious facts yet again?
Well, that's not what this book is about. You could say that it's about a father's love for his son. Or his grandmother's odd food habits learned in the Depression and the Holocaust. About his father's culinary experiments. And yes, about his dog.
It's also about the people who inhabit the "food chain", the people between the animal and the meat on your plate. Those who wanted to speak on the record were presented in their own voice.
These are the characters that inhabit the book. It's a book about food. But since many of us eat meat at every meal... well, we need to confront what it means to eat animals.
Even if you choose to ignore every fact in this book, it's reasonable to ask ourselves what it means to eat meat. One argument that sticks with me is, why do we eat pigs and not dogs? Pigs are just as intelligent (if not more so) than dogs. Millions of stray dogs are euthanized every year, so why not use them as meat instead of tossing them into the trash? Why try to control the dog population instead of allowing them to breed freely and "harvesting" the strays? Cheap meat! Free range, too. Since they are already near human population centers, transporting them would also be cheaper and have less of an impact on the environment ("eat local").
By the end of this argument, I was thinking, "yeah, that makes sense, I could eat dogs". And then you go "eww"... and then when you substitute "pigs" for "dogs"... the whole book is like this. You have no choice but to engage with this book. If you're going to eat meat, fine (I had some chicken yesterday, as a matter of fact, because I'm weak), but are you going to fully consider and confront what it means to do that, or are you going to repress it and let it fester in your subconscious, ricocheting and feeding off the other repressed, uncomfortable ideas you've got locked up in there?
(By the way, did you notice the near absence of facts in that argument?)
Isn't this why we read books in the first place? To discover more about ourselves and possibly question our relationship to the world? (another disclaimer: like Mr. Foer, I also majored in philosophy)
Is it a happy, comforting book? No. But neither is Stephen King, and he sells a lot of books, right? But that's fake horror. You can laugh that off because none of it's real. Let's see how you deal with true horror and evil.
My wife and I already buy humane meat (and no, free range and cage free and all that nonsense is NOT HUMANE). We buy directly from the couple that raises the chickens, the chickens are out pecking in the yard every day, and they are slaughtered at a kosher facility. We also buy the highest humane ratings we can find at Whole Foods.
These are still only rationalizations. There's still the damage to the environment to consider. Ask yourself, are you the kind of environmentalist that sends $25 to WWF once in a while, or are you willing to put your mouth where your money is?
Do we love our meat enough to eat, well, not OUR OWN dog (our beloved Fluffy!), but ANOTHER ANONYMOUS dog if it's humanely raised and slaughtered? If the only meat you could eat were dogs, would you eat meat then? If not, what's the difference between a dog and a pig? Or a cow?
Now think about this. What if that dog was not humanely "harvested"? What if, instead of a quick painless death, you were to slam a meat hook into that dog's face and drag it into the pen until it stops struggling (as we do with large fish)? Or, what if you were to flatten it in a cage so that it couldn't stand up and cut off its paws (without painkillers) so that it couldn't scratch the other dogs, and yank out its teeth so that it couldn't bite the other dogs? Or what if, when a dog is too "damaged" to "harvest" (they are called "downers" in the industry), they left them out to die of exposure and starvation, because they don't want to spend the money on a mercy killing? Would you eat dogs then?
What if there were dogs mixed in with the cows and pigs, and we randomly shoot into the pens, killing a few dogs in the process? Or, what if we end up killing more dogs than cows? Or we merely wound the dogs, but left them out there to die on their own? Oh well, we call that "bycatch". A lamentable but necessary consequence, given our method of "harvest". Are other methods of "harvest" available? Yeah, but not as cheap. (For 1 pound of shrimp caught, 26 pounds of "bycatch" gets tossed back. If the bycatch is not dead yet, it will die soon. Is the bycatch death a painless one? No.)
Why do we put people in jail for organizing dogfighting, when every day far worse goes on within the slaughterhouses? Animals getting "processed" while they're still alive. Sadistic workers torturing animals for fun, because there's no oversight at the slaughterhouses. Even the USDA doesn't monitor what goes on when the animals are killed. We don't put these people in jail because when it's done for a corporation, that's OK.
OK, one more tidbit. Chickens are separated into "broilers" and "layers". They are genetically different, and you can't use one for the other. OK, now, if you're a "layer"... well, we know that only females lay eggs, right? What happens to the males? Before reading the book, I always thought they got slaughtered for food, but why be reasonable when you can be CRUEL. If you want to know, search Google for "huff post chickens", and view the first video (the title gives a small hint of the subject matter: "Chicks being ground up alive: Video").
It's difficult to imagine designing a more insanely cruel system. I won't further belabor the details. Stephen King is a master of horror, but his worst characters rate favorably to Mother Teresa compared to the food industry. What's a few murders compared to billions of painful agonizing deaths every year? Actually death is a relief when it comes, it's their life that's agony.
For the food industry spokesfolks out there, I say, let us tour some of your facilities, of our own choosing. No? 'Nuff said. Go away.
And after all this, I still eat meat? Yeah, I do. I'm a hypocrite. A big one. I am an end customer and I feed money into this system, allowing it to happen. I need to change. This book will help.
Please don't let my ranting review stop you from reading the book. Mr. Foer is a far more skilled writer than I am. Unlike my clumsy attempts in this review at arguing against the food industry, his book is not full of bullet points about why the food industry sucks.
Instead, it's about something more important, about who we say we are (as human beings), the stories we tell ourselves, and how hard it is to live up to those stories. And who we want to be.
AND, the book is enjoyable, well-written, funny at times, and reads at times like an action or horror novel. Buy it, read it, and enjoy.
UPDATE: I am giving up all meat for Lent (even though I'm an atheist). We'll see how that goes.
Summary of Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting. Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told-and the stories we now need to tell.
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