Eating Animals |  | Author: Jonathan Safran Foer
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
List Price: $25.99
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Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 78
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0316069906
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.303
EAN: 9780316069908
ASIN: 0316069906
Publication Date: November 2, 2009 (New: Last 30 Days)
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Product Description
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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
 Enough! November 21, 2009
Judith Sayland (hatboro, pa.)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
OK! I've been hit over the head with the sledgehammer of righteous, morality. I get it, Mr. Foer. If I choose to eat that sirloin burger, I will have to eat it while being burdened with a guilt of biblical proportions. At seventy years old I have tried to eat a fresh, wholesome and healthy diet, one that protects me from high blood pressure, and my husband from more cardiac problems. And I mean, a healthy diet - I make sure of it. I bought Mr. Foer's book because I feel strongly about food quality, and wanted more education on our food supply. After three blood-dripping chapters, I felt my very human-ness under attack because I had these taste-tingling urges for grilled salmon and roasted pork tenderloin. I am happy the author and his wife are adopting a vegetarian diet. But please, spare me the guilt-producing, twist-the-knife rhetoric. I will continue to fight against processed food, and fight for eating more fruits and vegetables. But I refuse to subject myself to the guts and gore you so very specifically articulate. I get it that you don't want to eat Lassie, your moral equivalent to eating animals. But please know, I just ate some cold, cooked shrimp. I followed it with a romaine salad, with blue cheese, walnuts, and apples. I didn't weep for shame.
 Confused November 21, 2009
M. Feldman (Bowdoin, Maine, USA)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
First, there was Michael Pollan, whose book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," a book I deeply admire, exposed the horrors (and yes, they are horrors) of what is now called "factory farming" and the devastating effects of agribusiness on the American diet. And there was Barbara Kingsolver, whose chatty family experiment in local eating ("Animal, Vegetable, Miracle") popularized the notion of growing your own or at least patronizing the local farmer's market. Now there is Jonathan Safran Foer, who deploys his considerable literary gifts against factory farming of every kind (pork, poultry, and fish, primarily, Pollan having already covered beef). Foer is a recent convert to vegetarianism and to philosophical ideas about animal rights. He proselytizes with a convert's zeal, beginning with a clever Swiftian analysis of why it might be as acceptable to eat dogs as it is to eat chicken. His depictions of giant crowded poultry houses, of sprawling hog farms and their lagoons of manure, of the tons of discarded "bycatch" of fishing trawlers are riveting and utterly appalling.
This is also a deeply confused book. On the one hand, Foer is drawn to the absolutist position: it is never acceptable to eat animals. Farming, he feels, even humane family farming, must inevitably inflict pain, if only at slaughter, so one must always abstain. This position, however, is never explored deeply, only stated, again and again. Foer never clearly says whether he is a vegetarian or a vegan, although logic would require the latter. He briefly discusses egg layers (and their inevitable byproduct, male layer chickens) He does not discuss dairy farming (and its inevitable byproduct, male calves). What to do with those male chickens and calves? Does he eschew leather, a byproduct of cattle slaughter? He does not say. Furthermore, he includes sympathetic portraits of a number of small scale farmers whose treatment of animals seems admirable, although they always fail Foer's standard of "no pain should be inflicted, not ever." Occasionally, he retreats even from his measured admiration, as when he takes a gratuitous slap at Joel Salatin, the poultry farmer Pollan admires in "Omnivore." He cannot bring himself to say, as Pollan does, that eating as little meat as possible and seeking out humanely raised meat might be a good idea for some. Instead, he draws (offensive, I thought) parallels between the civil rights movement and the animal rights movement.
The book held my attention until about the halfway point, when it ran out of gas and began to recycle its arguments. This is a book heavily dependent on book learning (copious notes), as opposed to the work of someone who had spent considerable time on a farm or around animals (undercover PETA expeditions excluded). It is, one could say, an urban book by an urban author for an urban audience that surely needs a good shake as it reaches for the package of cheap Tyson chicken thighs at the Fairway. I'm all for any author who can get people to think about--and hopefully rebel against--the unhealthful and cruel practices of factory farms. But if one can never inflict pain on an animal, what am I to do when hornworms devour my (organic) tomato crop or potato beetles defoliate the potatoes? Foer is eloquent when he discusses the nervous systems of fish. He doesn't say anything about insects.
Some people need meat despite the issues surround it. November 21, 2009
S. Beisheim (Beacon NY)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
First off, I didn't read the book but I've read a lot about it. I tried to give it a neutral review. I whole heartedly think factory farming is awful and wish I could avoid it all costs. However vegetarianism/veganism didn't help my health at all and I found that meat/animal protein profoundly helped me recover from various health issues.
Again, I know that factory farming is nasty and local farms are the way to go etc... I wish I could be a vegan, but when it comes to my health and well being vs the treatment of animals I choose MY health over a cow's any day.
 Not as juicy as an inch thick sirloin burger November 19, 2009
Dmitri Ulinov (California, USA)
2 out of 28 found this review helpful
I initially bought this book thinking it was a cookbook.
Whoa! Was I wrong!!
The Ulinovs are ardent vegans, mind you, but we do like to grill a few steaks, burgers or hot dogs every other day. Otherwise, it is strictly chicken, fish or elk. So we do empathize with Foer's vegetarian sympathies.
Then again, have you ever heard a carrot scream? No?! Well, perhaps our limited human ears are not attuned to their emotional outcries! Have some sympathy. We force those little tubers into the ground and often cage them in to prevent them from being cannibalized by bunny rabbits or being stalked by celery.
One of the things that Foer doesn't address is why animals want to eat us and what we can do to stop that. I had a goat start licking my hand the other day and although I initially thought it was a sign of affection, I quickly realized that she was basting me after I got a quick nip on the fingers. Ouch! Good thing that we have the opposable digits on our hands!! And I will give up eating animals when crocodiles stop eating babies. Deal? I'm pretty sure that if I dropped dead at home, my dogs would come over and comfort me but the cat will think of me as nothing more than a big mouse and start the feast.
(By the way, I recently found out that hot dogs do not actually come from dogs. I'm not sure where they come from, but my neighbor down the highway assured me that it is not dogs after asking if I could sausage-ize his Old Yeller.)
Complex emotions of chickens?? November 19, 2009
Edward Keefe
2 out of 24 found this review helpful
I purchased this book for my wife, but she is still reading her last book, so I thought I would try reading this in order to open my mind to other ideas. I couldn't get past page 50....
See, the author says "This is not an argument against eating meat" when it clearly is.
The example that threw me over the edge is when he tried to have the reader try to imagine what it's like for an egg laying chicken in an exceedingly small enclosure. This was a not so subtle attempt by the author of trying to project human emotion on to an animal that does not experience that feeling. Does anyone truly think a Chicken feels lonely or claustrophobic? How about a fish... think a fish gets lonely? Now I know from my own personal experience that some animals to have these complex emotions. Coming home to my dog I know in my heart he missed me. THAT DOES NOT MEAN A CHICKEN FEELS THOSE EMOTIONS AS WELL!
Also has anyone seen what it is like for a water buffalo in Africa when a group of lions take one out? I would imagine that being eaten alive must be an unpleasant experience. If we were to use the authors logic then we should stop all predatory animals from trying to commit genocide on there prey, but hat would be ludicrous wouldn't it? We are predators, not prey, if we should be empathizing with other animals then it should be with other predators.
So considering I did not read the whole book I suppose my opinion is not as important as someone who read the whole book. It's just the act of projecting complex human emotions on some animals I found so illogical... it's like it broke my mind. I could not continue reading something from someone who held such beliefs.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 41
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