Read Vittles Vamp's review of Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals" on The Book Studio.

The first chapter reads like an update to A Modest Proposal; where instead of focusing simply on economics the author also comments on ethics and environmentalism. It's a very well-written book on the subject which elucidates some common ideals behind vegetarianism.

Everyone should read this book. Vegan, vegetarian, omniovore, carnivore - everyone. If you eat, you should read this.

I've read many books on the subject of factory farms, our health, and the food we eat. This one is by far the best. Foer didn't start out as an activist or even a vegetarian. He began researching this book because he was about to become a father and wanted to make the best and healthiest choices for his son. Because he had no preconceptions or agenda, the book is all the more honest and thought-provoking.

Many of my omnivorous friends have told me that they don't want to read this book. They don't want to know how their food is treated before it becomes their food because it's too appalling for them to handle. They don't want to consider that by purchasing factory farmed meat, they are supporting the very methods that they find so appalling.

The food we feed ourselves and our family each day is one of the most important choices we will ever make. Yet most of us know far more about the manufacturers of our TVs than of our food.

As consumers, our choices drive the market. If you purchase factory farmed meat (which is almost all meat, unless you are actively seeking alternatives), then you are supporting an industry responsible for horrific animal abuse, a major contributor to global warming and pollution, and the biggest reason for antibiotic resistance and new, dangerous viruses. The government regulation in these places is slim to none. And none of this will change unless and until the consumers make the demand.

I read Foer's novel, Everything Is Illuminated, and I enjoyed the book, more so than did many others in my book group, who were frustrated by the style used in parts of it. (That may have been because I read similarly styled Shalom Aleichem stories as a youngster, and had learned to like it; others in the group from similar backgrounds felt the same as I did.)

This book explores the world of the factory farms that produce the chickens, pigs, fish and cattle that humans eat. He he made a couple of his own surreptitious trespasses onto farms but primarily relies on interviews he conducted with people who work or worked there and in the slaughterhouses. He vividly details the cruel conditions the the animals must experience before they end up on our tables (although he mostly leaves out any description of the conditions under which cattle are farmed and just wants us to accept his judgment that those are not so bad.

The savage conditions in which the animals must live are only part of the case presented by Foer, but it constitutes the prime focus of his polemic. He also relies on the contribution of animal production to global warming, the depletion of the world's great fisheries, the overall waste of food and water caused by feeding animals, etc.

Early on in the book Foer presents a case for the eating of dogs, to demonstrate how those who are willing to eat other animals should think more carefully about the choices they make. It reminded me of Swift's A Modest Proposal.

By the end of the book, he has made a most convincing case that no caring person, no one who thinks at all about the issue of how the food has ended up on the plate, should continue to eat meat the way it is produced today (even that meat produced by ethical farmers) if they agree with this statement: “Well, I have no ethical objection to eating meat, but the animals should at least be treated humanely.” Because the animals on factory farms are treated cruelly, even often sadistically, and they experience great suffering from birth to death. ( )

I came to Eating Animals after having loved Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and after having found revelation in Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder. So I was eager to see Foer apply his trademark creativity to an exploration of factory farming. I’m distraught to have come away disappointed.

The strength of the book is its memoir-ish exploration of Foer’s path to committed vegetarian. In childhood, he’d been happily force-fed an omnivore’s diet by a grandmother who had survived starvation and WWII by hiding and foraging in the European forests. In adolescence, he’d internalized the kosher dietary laws (“…a compromise: if humans absolutely must eat animals, we should do so humanely, with respect for the other creatures in the world and with humility. Don’t subject the animals you eat to unnecessary suffering, either in their lives or in their slaughters”) but learned that violations occur even on approved farms. In adulthood, having grown to love his dog and, by extension, all animals, he became a sometimes-vegetarian. But when he became a father, he finally had to decide: What should he feed his son?

Readers at all familiar with factory farming will glean little new information here. Fans of Foer will find some interesting personal narrative and a remarkable chapter of definitions. The book is sketchy, however, roaming and repetitive, its accessibility leading to superficiality, and with some dead ends (for example, Foer’s night-time trespass on a farm, which was exciting in a police-ride-along kind of way but had little payoff on-topic; and a glaring omission of veganism, which Foer surely must support, given today’s industrially operated egg and dairy farms.) Eating Animals is best for readers who are new to the topic ... or those desiring a surge of motivation to change their diets. ( )