Eating Animals

At least two of the last decade’s most important books have been about food. In 2001, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation made the case against fast food. Five years later, Michael Pollan extended the critique to industrial agriculture with The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Both books have altered consumption and industries. With Eating Animals, celebrated novelist Safran Foer hopes to complete the trilogy with an impassioned case for vegetarianism. With a gentle but unflinchingly moral tone, Foer voices the inconvenient but inescapable truth that his two predecessors have sketched but never quite articulated: The process by which meat comes to our tables is immoral and insane, and the only honest response for a concerned individual is to opt out. It’s wrong to treat animals as we do, and it’s wrong to do such damage to the environment and run such public-health risks just to keep meat cheap and agribusiness flush. Thanks in part to Schlosser and Pollan, it’s a truth we all know but aren’t necessarily willing to face. “We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference,” Foer argues. “Those alive today are the generations that came to know better.”

And it’s true, we do know better. The broad strokes are nothing new: big business run amok, pursuing profit at everyone else’s expense. But the specific facts of factory farming are just as undeniable as they are easy to ignore, a paradox that Foer himself, previously an enthusiastic omnivore, understands personally. His investigation uncovers details that we all have an obligation to face. A sampling: The bird you’ll enjoy for Thanksgiving was all but certainly dipped, along with its compatriots of varying infection, in something called a “fecal soup,” a practice that, among other benefits, adds water (or should we say “water”) weight to the meat that the producer can then charge you for. It’s this and similar practices, Foer claims, that probably got you your last “24-hour flu,” which likely wasn’t the flu at all, but food poisoning incubated by the stifling bacterial hothouse sheds in which we store our food when it’s still alive. But hey, factory farming will give you the actual flu, too. The spread of swine flu—and the potential spread of a whole bunch of other potentially pandemic species-jumping strains of influenza—has been hastened and made more dangerous by the bottom-line calculus. An alarming percentage of livestock suffers from debilitating disease while their neighbors—living on top of the sick and each other—consume antibiotics prophylactically, something doctors consider too much of a public-health risk to allow in humans. Then there’s the environmental impact of factory farming, which produces 40 percent more greenhouse gases worldwide than transportation. And that’s to say nothing of slaughter, the step in the process so plainly awful that the industry will do just about anything to keep you from learning about it, but about which Foer was able to learn quite a bit. But you’ve been kind enough to read this far.

Grammatically speaking, you can take the “animals” of the title as either subject or object—the animals that are eating or being eaten—and in part it’s Foer’s gently literary take on the issue that makes this book different from the mainstream food journalism that has preceded it. More than a litany of rhetoric and distasteful facts, this book is about the stories we tell about ourselves and our food; it was only the birth of the author’s son that fully committed him to vegetarianism. It might be this intimate purpose that gives the book its peculiar moral force. Eating Animals has the potential to make the world a better place. Your job—at least for starters—is to read it.

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