Eating Animals

Best for: Anyone looking for both a philosophical and a reality-based discussion about the decision to consume meat.

In a nutshell: When he realizes he is going to be a father, Mr. Foer decides to examine the food he eats and the morality of it.

Worth quoting:
I underlined and starred so many lines that I could put here, but I think this one sums the entire question up for

“Whether we’re talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that’s not the question. Is it more important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That’s the question.”

Why I chose it:
I’ve been vegetarian (and even vegan) at a few points in my life. I pretty much never show more cook meat at home. Lately I’ve been wondering if I can justify my decision to even intermittently eat meat, so when I saw this book at Shakespeare and Co in Paris, I decided it was time to jump in again.

Review:
What does it mean to choose to consume meat in the US (or UK) these days? What has it meant for the last 50 years? Realistically, unless you are raising your own meat or purchasing it from one of an infinitesimally small number of family farmers, your meat is coming from a factory farm. And even if you do purchase it from a ‘humane’ farmer, that animal is still being killed in an unimaginably cruel slaughterhouse. We know this, and yet we (unless the person reading this is vegetarian or vegan) still consume meat. And eggs. And dairy.

Why? This book explores the reasons we give, in beautifully written prose. Seriously, I’ve read many a book in my day about vegetarianism and veganism, but none have affected me in this way. They all have some variation on the same statistics, the same horror stories. The same glimpses into slaughterhouses, the same reminder that the workers in these facilities are often paid poorly and treated horribly. They tell us how pigs are much more like dogs than we’d probably feel comfortable knowing as we bite into our BLTs. How fish are much more intelligent than we’d probably imagined, and how both farmed and wild-caught seafood are just utterly horrible for the environment. How ALL of this factory farming — on land and sea — is destroy our world.

The book doesn’t provide an easy out, and I love that. Mr. Foer opens and closes his book with anecdotes about family meals. He describes the best (and only) meal his grandmother — a holocaust survivor — makes: chicken with carrots. He recognizes, and explores deeply, how food matters to us all culturally. How so many of our memories involve meals. And he asks if that is enough to justify consuming meat? What about if we are 100% certain that the meat was raised humanely (which is nearly impossibly to do)?

I’ve gone back and forth on this. I’ve read many an article about how pushing a vegetarian — or vegan — life on everyone can be culturally and economically insensitive. When vegetarians and vegans point out how poorly factory farm (e.g. all farm) animals are treated, they’re often responded to with the fact that people who pick our fruits and vegetables are treated poorly, so why don’t we care about them. Which is a completely insincere comment, given the shit labor standards that cover slaughterhouse workers.

Here’s where I’ve landed, once again, and after reading this book: I cannot justify consuming meat. Me. A woman with no medical issues, who has access to sufficient money and time to prepare an all-vegetarian diet. I do care about the welfare of animals. And I do care about their rights. I care about the environment. I care about public health (side note: Mr. Foer’s section on antibiotics and flu pandemics is one area that other similar books don’t cover nearly enough). And by choosing to not eat meat, I can be closer to living my values. I just had become complacent, and this book helped push me back on the right path.

As I write this review, my cat Tigger keeps jumping in my lap. My partner and I adopted him and his brother Jameson 6 1/2 years ago. They’re our buddies, our friends. We love them dearly, and even brought them with us when we moved to London. I can’t imagine life without them, and I certainly can’t imagine eating them. So how can I justify eating their animal friends? And why do I keep trying to? Because burgers are tasty? Sure. But, as Mr. Foer asks, is that taste more important than the life of another animal? Of course, this raises the question of how to feed them humanely. Cats are obligate carnivores, so chances are that the meat I need to feed them was procured in an inhumane fashion. I don’t know how to square that circle, but I’m going to try. show less

Should we eat animals? Jonathan Safran Foer asked himself the question and, beyond, questioned the meat and fishing industry when questioning how moral or not, healthy or not is what he would feed to his son. Bottom line: in Western societies overfed on factory farming and fisheries, is what we put into our mouth and feed our kids any good at all?

The health argument first: as he clearly remind by relying on the scientific literature, a vegetarian diet is -at the very least!- no better nor worse than a meat-including diet. Like a meat-including diet, in fact, a vegetarian diet will be healthy or not only insofar as you care or not about what you put in your mouth. It might seems like "duh!", but then again you see a lot of misinformation show more circulating around... Interestingly enough, though, he also notes (also relying on the scientific literature) that countries eating the most meat also are the ones the most impacted by all sorts of cardio-vascular diseases (on the rise when it comes to children), as are the ones consuming the most dairies being also the ones the most impacted by osteoporosis. Ti dum, di dum: could it be that the powerful lobbies selling us these products are (GASP!) lying to us to make profits? He doesn't go much into that line of reasoning. What concerns him the most is, mostly, the issue of animal cruelty. What about it?

Now, to anyone having bothered even a tiny bit to question where on earth our meat and fishes and dairies are coming from then there will be nothing quite new here. From the chicken industry to pigs farming, from the milk industry to cattle and the fishing industry, it's well-known (or should be well-known!) that the whole process is indeed from plain disgusting (no matter the wishy-washy about food safety) to downright cruel (we're talking about mass murdering animals in appalling conditions just so as to feed on their flesh, after all...) when not, above all, completely unnecessary (again: you don't need to eat animals to be healthy). But then so what?

What I really appreciated is the author's open-mindedness. Jonathan Safran Foer is not a fanatic animal right activist, and he is not self-righteous either. He perfectly admits that people have always eaten meat and probably always will too. What he does, then, is to try and draw a line between animal rights and animal welfare. He is, for instance, very open about family-run farms as opposed to factory farming, although he regrets how dwindling they are; even, how some of their methods are no better either when it comes to cruelty (e.g. the branding of cattle on ranches...). Is it a good thing?

Quite frankly, I don't share his open-mindedness. I had been a meat-eater for decades before becoming a vegetarian (I am now moving towards becoming vegan...) and so I, for one, find the arguments put-forth by so-called "conscious omnivores" to be hypocritical to say the least. If we really care about animals as beings deserving any sort of compassion, then murdering them is just plain unethical and shouldn't be. Full stop.

Now, you may disagree with me and that's perfectly fine. What you can't take away from the rest of this book, though, is that family-run farms are such a minority in our consumption market that they are next to irrelevant. What you can't take away either is the other arguments advanced by the author and pertaining from environmental issues to health. Most importantly, you can't take away the human right issues too since, as it currently is, we are wasting an astounding amount of land and crops just so as to feed our food-to-be; land and crops that could be better used to feed human populations in poor countries. Regardless of his stance, then, this book remains a must-read for anyone daring to think about what we put in our mouths. And so there goes: should we eat animals? No! Thank you. show less

This book started out good, but ended up really disappointing. It's no different than any other book about meat-eating, and no different from any other expose about factory farming. I already knew that animals were treated badly before I read this book, but I am still not a vegetarian. Maybe there is some large group of people that is oblivious about the meat industry and thus ripe for conversion to vegetarianism based on the knowledge they would gain from reading this book. But would they really be the type to pick up this kind of book in the first place? I doubt it.

The one thing I did appreciate was the names of family-farms and organizations that support them. Now that I know more about them, I will try to be more aware of what meat show more I'm buying. The least I can do is not buy Perdue, Tyson, or Smithfield meat.

But then JSF tells me that even if I buy family-farmed meat whenever possible, I'm still a failure if I EVER eat factory-farmed meat, and really I'm a failure for just eating meat AT ALL. I feel like my favorite teacher just embarrassed me in front of the whole class. If you need me, I'll be crying in a stall in the girls' bathroom. (I'll get over it.)

I have a question for you, sir. If you're so against animal cruelty, why aren't you a vegan? I'm sure dairy cows and layer chickens get treated just as poorly as beef cows and broiler chickens. And if you think about it, they probably get mistreated for longer, because they are not killed when they are just a couple months old. But dairy and eggs are not even mentioned in the book. I would think that vegetarians are more open to conversion to veganism than omnivores are to vegetarianism, and thus this book would actually serve some kind of purpose.

I saw JSF once talk about this book and read from the first chapter (the first couple chapters being the only insightful part of the book), and he talked about meat-eating in moderation. I liked what I heard. How hard would it be for everyone to give up meat for ONE DAY a week? Or two days a week? And wouldn't 700 people giving up meat one day a week have a similar effect on the environment and the meat industry as 100 vegetarians and 600 people who eat meat every day? But there is NOT A WORD about this alternate solution in the book.

JSF openly admits that one vegetarian doesn’t really make a difference. (Should that have come with a spoiler alert? Oops.) The point of being a vegetarian, according to him, is to try to force the other people around you to become vegetarians as well. I may not have very strong opinions about meat-eating, but I do have strong beliefs about personal choice. I don’t think it’s right to have a GOAL of converting your friends to a cause, no matter how noble. I know that JSF will inform his son of the horrors of factory-farming. I hope that he will also inform his son that his parents will love him just the same if he one day makes the choice to eat meat in spite of those horrors, just as JSF’s grandmother, to whom meat was very important, still loved her vegetarian grandson. show less

Two years ago, Eating Animals made me vegan. For a while. Foer's unaggressive narrative captured my attention at first, when the book opened questioning the necessity meat-related taboos. Foer seemed to leave me with a freedom to make my own choices, once I was provided the information in his book. As I got through the pages of this book, I became increasingly grossed out with animals products, however. This, surely, resulted from his descriptions of animal suffering, but augmented with the philosophical and economic context of it.

Foer's personal research (I think he traveled to industrial production facilities to check out food production in person) was particularly vivid. One phrase I still remember, two years after reading it: show more "Although one can realistically expect that at least some percentage of cows and pigs are slaughtered with speed and care, no fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did."

Now, two years removed from reading this life-changing book, my perception of eating animal products is still morphing. Suffering isn't the biggest question I struggle with these days, but, rather, whether or not I can reduce my contribution to the economy's demand for industrial animal production.

This book won't scream at you in an effort to "convert" you to the vegan church. I encourage any thinking individual to pick this up for a quick dip into reality. show less

To call this a book about meat would be like calling The Bible a book about a carpenter. Foer provides the clearest, fact-based justification and motivation I've EVER read for carefully considering what we put on our plates at every single meal. A recommended read for anyone who chews.

Here's what I don't understand: why was Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma all over the place but I never even heard of this one until I accidentally saw it in the cookbook section of my library? It could be because I don't keep up with The New Yorker's book reviews, because they apparently loved it. But there was a period of time when I couldn't turn on the radio without hearing Michael Pollan's voice, and yet Eating Animals didn't even show up on my radar.

Maybe it's because Pollan's message is more palatable. He tells us that it's okay to eat meat as long as we make ethical choices around how we eat it. Safran Foer offers no such comfort.

For seven years, I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian who occasionally ate fish. I began to eat show more poultry when I became pregnant with my daughter and found my bread-and-cheese diet insufficient to meet my nutritional needs. Several months after I gave birth, I was about to go back to a vegetarian diet when I discovered that my daughter and I both had food sensitivities that ruled out so many foods in our diet that I couldn't bring myself to eliminate meat as well. At that time, I ate only poultry, fish, and vegetables, but when I became pregnant with my son, my cravings for red meat became overwhelming, and I began eating beef as well.

When purchasing meat, I always tried to buy from ethical, non-factory sources. I bought local grass-fed beef, local pastured pork, and local eggs from "galavanting chickens," as the labels on the egg cartons said. I knew the farmers personally, picking up pork and beef from the farmer and his family when the meat CSA shares came in, and passing the time with the poultry farmer when she dropped off eggs every week for me to sell from my porch. I got my Thanksgiving turkeys from my egg supplier, which brought awareness to the difficulties of finding slaughterhouses for small farmers. I carried a Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch card in my wallet to help me make sustainable seafood choices.

But when preferred sources weren't available---like when the farmer's heirloom turkeys were all preemptively slaughtered by raccoons a few weeks before Thanksgiving---rather than go without meat, I would buy from the most ethical source available, even if that source wasn't ethical at all (i.e., was a factory farm). After we moved cross-country, I was unable to find small, local farmers to supply our meat, so I just bought it from the grocery store (Whole Foods, mostly, but a national chain grocery store nonetheless).

I was already swinging back towards a more vegetarian diet before I read Safran Foer's book (the result of talking with an ethical-vegan friend while engaged in an eight-week meditation program which had reawakened my desire to consume foods from less violent sources), but I think Eating Animals has pushed me over the edge into---*shudder*---veganism.

Safran Foer tackles the ethics of eating animals from many different angles. He points out the environmental costs (e.g., polluted water sources) and human health costs (e.g., antibiotic resistance) of factory farming, along with the workers' rights violations endemic in the industry, its calculated contribution to the demise of the family farm, and, of course, the extreme and widespread animal cruelty.

I admit: sometimes he almost pushed me too far on the animal cruelty side of things. There's a point at which I'm reading yet another account of cruelty---cattle hung by their back legs and skinned while still conscious, male chicks of egg-laying hens being funneled into what is essentially a wood chipper because they are unnecessary byproducts of the egg-laying process---that I say, "Enough." There is a point at which, instead of becoming too much to ignore, the cruelty becomes too much to pay attention to. I wanted to put the book down and go eat some bacon. And when he drew back the curtain on egg production and commercial fishing techniques, I had a moment of fear as I wondered what on earth I was going to eat.

But luckily this wasn't the whole of the book. His starting place is with facts, but he argues that the decision of what to eat is one based in relationships, culture, and compassion. This resonates with me because it's not denial of the facts that keeps me from eating a plant-based diet, it's fear of alienation from the people I care about. Safran Foer spoke to the social discomforts of choosing to eat differently than the mainstream. The section on what to have for Thanksgiving dinner was particularly poignant to me, as Thanksgiving was a sticking point for me every one of my seven years of vegetarianism. Saying, "no, thanks," to a serving of turkey was saying, "no, thanks," to a shared experience, a tradition of culture and family that draws loved ones together. To refuse to take part is to refuse to be a part. Safran Foer offers a different take on this, suggesting that hosting a vegetarian Thanksgiving can be the opener for discussions about compassion and can actually help us to be even more aware of the purpose of the holiday. I found this comforting until I imagined telling my kids we wouldn't be having turkey for Thanksgiving. They're not that old (only seven and three), but that tradition is already ingrained in them. A vegetarian Thanksgiving wouldn't be popular with them, but it wouldn't fly at all with most of our other relatives (but then, we've not shared a Thanksgiving with our extended family for eons, so this probably won't be a very big problem).

Safran Foer recognizes the discomfort of talking about one's food choices at the same time that he asserts the importance of doing just that. In the midst of reading this book, some friends offered me spring rolls with shrimp in them. All I could think was "26 pounds of by-catch for every one pound of shrimp," a stat that had shocked me from the book. I asked myself two questions: do I eat the shrimp? and, if not, do I tell them why I won't? I couldn't bring myself to eat the shrimp, but neither could I bring myself to say the reason out loud. "No thank you," I said. "I ate before I left my house."

The personal reflections Safran Foer offers hit much closer to home than those in most of the books on American food production that I've read (The Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation are the titles that are most prominent in my memory). The only other book that struck me so personally was Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which is where I first learned that commercial turkeys are unable to reproduce without human assistance. The similarity between these two books is that they were both written by novelists, people who make a living conveying and eliciting emotion via the written word. It's not surprising that their books had this effect on me, but it was still rather delightful anyway. I felt understood, which is always nice when standing on the brink of a socially awkward lifestyle change.

So, now that Safran Foer has practically guaranteed that my father-in-law is going to make fun of me next time we eat together and raised the thorny issue of what to do about feeding my own milk-drinking, bacon-loving children, I'm not entirely sure where to go from here. I never wanted to be vegan because the majority of my experience with vegans was with the shrill, all-or-nothing ideology of the PETA-vegans on my college campus. I did not want to associate myself with that level of fanaticism, nor did I want to make every social outing that involved food into a rant about animal cruelty. I have enough trouble with social interactions as it is. But, as Safran Foer writes, now that I know, I don't think I can go back to the way I ate before without some heroic act of self-deception.

Safran Foer recognizes in his book the strong emotions surrounding food choices and the defensiveness with which people respond when confronted with someone who chooses to eat differently than they do, but he stops short of telling us how to bridge the gap and maintain connection from our perch atop the moral high ground. With any luck, he'll write a follow-up book that focuses only on how to be an ethical vegan and still nurture one's relationships.

In the meantime, I'll keep eating before I leave my house. show less

"If nothing matters, there's nothing to save" - Jonathan Safran Foer's grandmother...

Wow, this book is such an important book. Throughout my whole copy of this book are notes, comments, highlights, teardrops, and folded corners. I absolutely will hold this book near and dear and give many thanks to [a:Jonathan Safran Foer|2617|Jonathan Safran Foer|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1466172069p2/2617.jpg] for creating such a book. This book is a window to information, not an attack against meat-eaters, it is, however, an attack on factory farming - which should be shut down completely because it is dirty, disgusting, and cruel.

"ranchers can be vegetarians, vegans can build slaughterhouses, and I can be a vegetarian who supports the

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best of animal agriculture."

This book is not explicitly dedicated to making someone vegetarian/vegan. It is a book full of facts and the curiosity that Foer (and perhaps many of us) had about agriculture. This book is impressive because he tries on everyone's shoes, which is usually not the case when trying to argue 'sides.' Foer talked to cattle ranchers, turkey farmers, PETA, etc.. there are stories from all sides in this book. It is full of information, and that is perfect, I learned so much from this book (specifically that I never want to eat a poor pig or salmon again - but that's okay with me.)

"Where should I respectfully disagree with someone and where, for the sake of deeper values, should I take a stand and ask others to stand with me? Where do agreed-upon facts leave room for reasonable people to disagree, and where do they demand we all act? I've not insisted that meat-eating is always wrong for everyone or that the meat industry is irredeemable despite its present sorry state. What positions on eating animals would I insist are basic to moral decency?"

There were a few times I had to put this book down, not because the content wasn't interesting but because the content was examples of some of the horrors that happen in factory farming or slaughterhouses. Sometimes this book is not for the faint of heart (I am the faint of heart...), but I care about this information, so I pushed through and could not even fathom some of the things people can do. Not only that but slaughterhouses and factory farms are gross.. the way they do things is not healthy for A N Y O N E, especially you and me. most animals are pulled through a lot of blood and feces before being "rinsed off" & packaged. Lots of bacteria and disease. I can say the content is worth it. I cried happy tears for a turkey farmer and sad ones for a vegetarian. This book is just a book of information and a Foer brother trying to understand. show less