Entry tags:

books, books:!2010, books:!non-fiction, books:foer jonathan safran

Title: Eating Animals
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Number of Pages: 341 pages
Book Number/Goal: 38/40 for 2010
My Rating: 5/5

Jacket Summary: Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent 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. So Foer set out to find answers for himself. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, amd probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective wokrd, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits--folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions--and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.

Review: This is a really good read. I picked it up because it sounded interesting and I liked his writing in Everything Is Illuminated. I did not expect it to change my mind about what I eat, but it did. Even more than the treatment of animals (which is horrible, but on its own, probably not enough to make me want to give up tasty animals), the stuff that's in them and the environmental effects of the "farms" are what did it. I don't want all that stuff in my body.

I'm not going to go totally vegan or even totally vegetarian, but I am going to limit my meat-eating to an occasional thing. I don't think it will be hard, and I was already planning to limit meat just for financial reasons (plus already limiting dairy and eggs and red meat).