Eating Animals

Abstract

Like many young Americans, Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. As he became a husband, and then a father, the moral dimensions of eating became increasingly important to him. Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer sets out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Eating Animals reads like a journal, walking the reader through the author's odyssey to learn everything he can about food production and food related health and environmental concerns. It is an unusual book as both a well-researched work of non-fiction and the story of a family. It is at once deeply scientific and research-driven and a moving memoir about a new parent and erstwhile dog owner with a genuinely urgent question. Eating Animals is not a simple argument for vegetarianism. Foer is careful to clarify that he is not making a case for or against eating meat. Rather, he poses a number of questions to which he offers a number of answers; about how food is produced and how those processes are impacting the environment and our health; about how animals are treated and viewed by the human race and whether, or how much, we care, about their suffering. The title may be simple, but the conversation is not.