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Eating Animals |  | Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $25.99
Buy New: $13.25
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Rating:  188 reviews
Sales Rank: 1367
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 5.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0316069906
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.303
EAN: 9780316069908
ASIN: 0316069906
Publication Date: November 2, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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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Showing reviews 1-5 of 188
 Engaging Intro to the Ethics of Factory Farming July 27, 2010
Zachary Miller
It is slowly becoming common knowledge that factory farming is disgusting and pathetic from start to finish. But most people continue to eat factory-farmed meat. Before reading this book, I knew, at an intellectual level, that factory farming was inhumane in the most extreme sense of the word, but I also continued to eat factory-farmed meat, uncomfortably managing to put some psychological distance between myself and the animal nightmare that I was helping to sustain. This book is ideal for people like me, people who are at least somewhat familiar with the facts, but haven't completely internalized them at an emotional level. Committed meat-eaters will probably find Foer sanctimonious and use this perceived sanctimoniousness as an excuse to avoid thinking further about the "unpleasant" realities of factory farming. And people who are already committed vegans for ethical reasons will probably not find anything in this book that they didn't already know or feel. But to those of you who are on the fence about eating factory-farmed meat, this book is for you. Buy it, read it, talk about it, and give it to others on the fence who need a nudge in the right direction.
Rethinking Eating Animals July 27, 2010
Abel R. Gomez
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For author Jonathan Foer, the imminent birth of his son forced him to rethink food on a fundamental level. Parents always want they best for their children, and for Foer it lead to a three year journey into the philosophical, environmental, and health ramifications of eating animals. The result was 'Eating Animals', a highly relevant and accessible book, illuminating the the truth about animal agriculture and its effects on Western Civilization.
'Eating Animals' begins with an articulate and thought-provoking deconstruction of our relationship with animals. It invites us to examine the stories and assumptions we hold about animals meanwhile show us the way most of these ideas actual play out in the world, namely, through exploitation. The proceeding chapters take the reader on an in-depth journey into the world of factory farming and its subsequent ramifications in public heath, the economy, the environment, science, and human rights. Included are interviews with farmers and activists, sharing their experience, insight, and hope for a radical transformation of systematic meat production.
Foer's writing style is both casual and engaging, filled with personal anecdotes and reflections of his own journey into vegetarianism. In fact, it is this quality that made 'Eating Animals' such a pleasure to read. The book reads more like a novel or personal memoir than an educational text. Its engaging and actually enjoyable to read, while also providing sound information on factory farming.
'Eating Animals' should be required reading to all in the Western World. It's an important book, challenging the dominant paradigm we hold about animals and how we ethically ought to treat them. More over, 'Eating Animals' spans a wide spectrum of important information in a manner that is comprehensive and approachable. Read it and be transformed!
Absorbing yet deeply shocking July 25, 2010
Beata Siwinski (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I was aware of the gruesome details of factory farming and tried to make myself watch Earth without passing out so this book isn't really groundbreaking. It does put a different spin on it because it raises the question of finding other sources of food beside the 'products' of factory farming. There were several times in the book where I did feel sick, especially when coming across a receipe that asks for a 'medium-size dog' and the unimaginable cruelty to animals at the hog farms. Those mental images will haunt me for some time. . .
What I really enjoyed about this is how Jonathan connects the dots of the spanish influenza, the avian and pig flu and the fact 1/3 of the land is occupied by factory farms, spewing deadly viruses into the environment. As well as learning that when you buy poultry up to 10% of it is actually water! I am allergic to chicken, and I can see clearly why my body is rejecting that source of food.
In a way its depressing reading about this subject, because you know how busy are those big-box grocery stores, that sell food raised that way. Will any of the people ever care to know about it? Will any of the people actually care, not only about their health but about how this whole crazy process is destroying the environment? I doubt it, most of the low-middle income shoppers the Buy-Low Foods wants food as cheap as possible.
Profound, accurate and important information! Should be required reading for all! July 24, 2010
ScottB
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
How the factory farming of animal persists is astounding. This great book lays it all out, logically and accurately. It makes it easy to never want to eat animal flesh again. I stopped and could not chew it or get it down anymore - it is just revolting if not dangerous. Perhaps it is a conspiracy to get us all sick so someone can make money on all sides of the animal protein industry!
 Diffuse, nuanced, but also hard-hitting and fair-minded July 21, 2010
John L Murphy (Los Angeles)
This book helped shift my teenaged son away from meat and fowl. He heard Foer speak at his school after last Thanksgiving, during his book tour, and while his older brother reverted to meat soon after, my wife and I have stuck with my younger son. We finally gave up chicken and turkey as we had gradually beef and pork.
I mention this as testament not to the message Foer promotes, for that's familiar. But he convinced my family of his thesis: "We need a better way to talk about animals." (33) Like billions of city consumers, we ignore factory farming and "animal agriculture," which comprise 99% of how we get our meals processed-- to use a euphemism for the slaughtering and butchering methods that Foer, in a clandestine night visit to an enormous turkey "farm," invites us to witness. He relates what "rescue" means for one small bird, unforgettably.
That is, he does not sentimentalize, preach, or pander. He stays calm. "Just as nothing we do has the direct potential to cause nearly as much animal suffering as eating meat, no daily choice that we make has a greater impact on the environment." (74) He integrates facts accessibly; the graphic presentation familiar from his novels here sharpens his data's power. 40% more of an impact on global warming than all of transport combined is due to animal agriculture; a KFC chicken (a drugged football with feet) lives 39 days and an "organic" one but 42; for all the fish discarded when serving you a helping of sushi, the true haul of that catch would need a five foot plate in diameter; cattle now last only 12-15 months; cows may live seven minutes down the slaughter line after they're supposedly stunned and bled.
He confronts how we get what's on our plates. He challenges us to engage in dialogue with our neighbors, and with our families. His visits to the touted alternative of Niman Ranch (sold to a factory farm, he finds as his chapter ends), his interspersed accounts from a PETA activist, a family-based turkey rancher, and others involved in the raising, care, and killing of animals enrich this steady narrative's depth.
Foer's grandmother during the Holocaust literally risked death rather than eating pork: such an example burrows deep into ancestral contentions where food and survival contend with conscience and commitment. His Judaism and its kosher tradition also deepen this tension. He faces disengaging from thousands of years of lamb-shanked Seders, and childhood Thanksgivings and barbecues. He examines how our "table fellowship" tests the bonds of family and friendship vs. those of individual ethics and global betterment.
At times, as with his musings on Judaism and his family, its organization jumps about, as his novels do. So, this may throw off those wanting a more disinterested arrangement of anecdotes, factoids, reporting, and reflection. But I was surprised how fast the pages flew, despite or because of its idiosyncratic pace and unflinching attention to quirky or grisly detail.
Foer spent three years researching this book, to tell his newborn son why his father chose not to eat any more animals. "Will he be among the first of a generation that doesn't crave meat because he never tasted it? Or will he crave it even more?" (63)
As with my older son--who chooses to eat meat when not at home now--we oddly may agree with Foer's pronouncement: "The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them." (63) Yet, we can not be ignorant any more. For, reading this, and honestly articulating the unease about our fried chicken, cheap burgers, and greasy drumsticks-- and the fish that I admit I still eat, more guiltily than before-- you will close this book more conscious, more humanly aware, of the choices you make three times every day.
This is why, even as he remains a nuanced proponent of vegetarianism, he finds that compromise with organic this or free-range that sells short our potential to solve the dilemmas that factory farming presents as Third World demand increases the bargain-priced flesh. We eat 150 times more chicken than our families did 80 years ago. Until 50 years ago, small farms were where we got our beef and chicken. Now, rural alternatives barely exist; family farms continue to give in, like Niman Ranch.
"We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own." (143) Suffering worsens, and the climate warps. The money that feeds animal agriculture comes from our subsidies, our taxes, our pockets as we shell out for a Happy Meal or a filet mignon. Foer ends with the "question of eating animals" as "ultimately driven by our intuitions about what it means to reach an ideal we have named, perhaps incorrectly, 'being human.'" (264)
Showing reviews 1-5 of 188
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