What's Eating Jonathan Safran Foer

1430 Words6 Pages
The birth of a child is a celebratory and momentous occasion for anyone and every one no matter your race, religion or creed. Each culture deals with the birth of a child in a vastly different nature from the next; some prepare religious ceremonies, some throw parties and if you are Jonathan Safran Foer (author of the award winning novels Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) you begin a three year journey to explore the moral dimensions of eating, where exactly food comes from and the importance of language, empathy and understanding in our daily dietary lives. Early on in his latest non-fiction work Eating Animals, Foer states how the birth of his son inspired him to discover the powers at play that affects our eating habits. “I simply wanted to know- for myself and my family- what meat is? […] What are the economic, social and environmental effects of eating animals?” (Foer, pg 12) Before even giving the book a chance I anticipated it would be just another pro-vegetarian polemic that would use each of its 300 pages to shame my eating habits. However, Foer with literary aplomb explains that Eating Animals is not that book. Instead of trying to convert the non-believers, he uses his personal relationships and stories surrounding food as a framework for his research into the agricultural farming industry. I believe he does so quite successfully. Foer begins by challenging the reader to an interesting thought experiment. What if we ate man's best friend? That's right, what if cute little Fido was food? What are the societal and personal implications that the Western world sees certain animals like dogs as friends and others, like chickens and pigs, as food? And he has the numbers to back up his proposed canine cuisines. “Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanizedannually. This amounts to millions of pounds of
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