A Review of 'Eating Animals' by Jonathan Safran Foer

"Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of 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.  His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.  Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-- from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-- and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.  Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told-- and the stories we now need to tell."

I'll admit, this book took a while for me to sift through, but I sincerely believe that this is a book that needs to be digested at a pace you're comfortable with (pun intended, I guess).

Vegetarianism is something I have considered for years, but it's something I've recently taken more concrete steps to act on.  I would not consider myself vegetarian now, but there are a couple of months where I have had a vegetarian diet just to see if I was capable of it.  I was hung up on foods that I would miss eating and other things that made me uncomfortable about the thought of going completely vegetarian.  After interviewing some individuals and now after reading this book, I realized you have to adopt a different mindset about eating only vegetarian.

This book goes into the health benefits of being vegetarian, but a big chunk of the book delves into the humanitarian reasons we should adopt a vegetarian diet.  That was both hard to read and also very enlightening.  I think some of the most worthy causes to work towards are the most difficult for us to accomplish in some ways.

I'll keep this review short.  It's so worth the read even if it takes you a while to sift through the whole things.  It's valuable to identify why you do the things you do even if you don't end up changing your ways.  This is a great book because it's very fact-based and yet Jonathan Safran Foer poses just the right philosophical questions to make you consider and reconsider your dietary choices.

I give 'Eating Animals':

Thanks for Reading!