Review: Eating Animals
I’m taking a break from poetry this month to talk about Jonahan Safran Foer’s new book Eating Animals. I was so impressed by this book that I just had to write a short review.
Foer combines quaint stories about childhood, family, and food, with statements and interviews from individuals from all walks of life, including a vegetarian rancher and a vegan slaughterhouse designer. As eloquently written as Dominion by Mathew Scully, and containing impeccable research reminiscent of Slaughterhouse by Gail Eisnitz, Eating Animals took me on a personal and impersonal journey I won’t soon forget. Foer is not a vegan advocate. And he is.
We see a piece of meat on our plate. Foer shows us the hows, the whys and the whos that put it there. He shows us the “good”, the bad, and the really, really ugly. From seafood to cattle, we are shown one by one, the affects our food choices have on us, other human beings, the animals, and the environment. We realize his imperfections and our imperfections along the way, and we are forced to take a deeper look into our own souls.
This isn’t a book about animal rights. This is a book about the humans we are and the humans we could be. This is a book about understanding, seeing, caring, questioning, changing, doing, being. It’s about forgetting and not forgetting, acting and not acting. It’s about weighing convenience with cruelty, weighing our desires with another’s desires, weighing greed with compassion. On a moral scale, where do we stand now? Where do we want to stand? How do we get there?
I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone. To vegans and non-vegans. To anyone who wants to make personal and not impersonal choices in their daily life. To anyone who wants to be a conscious consumer. To anyone who has a beloved companion animal they would not mutilate, lock in a dark closet, or kill. To anyone who doesn’t have a companion animal, but still would not mutilate, lock in a dark closet, or kill someone else’s.
Look inside yourself. Look outside yourself. Read this book!
