Eating Animals

I just finished Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals (albeit much later than I'd hoped to read it) and I cannot stop thinking about kind of cultural "storytelling" that surrounds meat consumption, particularly in the U.S. What kind of new stories can we tell around otherwise tradition-ladden holidays? What kind of cultural rewriting allows us to sustain our connection to heritage? Or do we even need to sustain that kind of tradition? Should our new-found ethics take the precedent over tradition and remind us of the newness of this new kind of ethical tradition we are forging? As a vegan, I love holding the cultural paintbrush right in my grip, and know that culture is a flexible and malleable thing. But reading Foer's book reminds me so much of the positive role that culture and tradition play for so many people.

Unlike many seemingly die-hard vegans and vegetarians (I often fall victim to this), Foer examines the importance of digging deep into the reality of things and then living one's life according to one's values -- something which I respect wholeheartedly. Framing the entire story through the need to choose what kind of life he should create for his son (more specifically, whether his son should eat meat or not), Foer does in-depth research on factory farms, family farms, and activist to pull the veil off of a world that is all too frequently forgotten.

What makes Foer's book so unique is that his story is one of paradox, of seemingly philosophical contradictions-- at the core, a nuanced understanding of how ethics and meat consumption can manifest in this country. As an accomplished writer, he dances through his sentences and hybridizes his space as both a quasi-narrative and quasi-non-fiction scientific literature, using no footnotes for his text chock full of statistics, but leaving all citations arranged by chapter at the end of the book for his readers.

To order a copy, visit Amazon.