Eating Animals
“While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”
Starting from a neutral standpoint on the matter, Safran Foer answers the question of whether he and his family should eat meat. Approaching the subject as a journalist, he includes interviews with family-run farms, activists and slaughterhouse workers. He includes different perspectives and arguments (which is great!) but ultimately exposes an underground network which is shocking.
Environmental reasoning is one case this book discusses at length. Ethics and compassion are another. Ethically speaking, killing is morally wrong. We live in a world where there are so many viable alternatives to animal products. If we can avoid causing suffering through our food choices, then we should at every opportunity. Then there is the entire health side of the debate.
Lest passionate meat-eaters think Eating Animals is a stringent pro-vegetarian, “meat is murder” book, Foer is sure to approach the topic from another angle; he points out factory farming’s effects on human beings. One of the most compelling and frightening sections concerns the connection between factory farming and the rise in aggressive flus that jump from animals to people, such as the avian flu. Information about the serious health ailments suffered as a result of living near factory hog farms will have readers looking at Smithfield with new eyes. Slaughterhouse work has an almost 100% turnover rate; workers cannot handle the psychological toll.
Is Eating Animals life-changing? It most definitely is. It’s arresting, thoughtfully researched, and intensely interesting, and what’s quite notable is that Foer is never militant or holier-than-thou in his vegetarian views; in fact, the book is well balanced by italicized sections that are first-hand accounts from farmers, an animal activist, and even a vegan who builds slaughterhouses. These are interesting and offer a welcome reprieve from the shock and statistics of the rest.
