Eating Animals [Hardcover]

Jonathan Safran Foer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The latest from novelist Foer is a surprising but characteristically brilliant memoir-investigation, boasting an exhaustively-argued account of one man-child's decade-long struggle with vegetarianism. On the eve of becoming a father, Foer takes all the arguments for and against vegetarianism a neurotic step beyond and, to decide how to feed his coming baby, investigates everything from the intelligence level of our most popular meat providers-cattle, pigs, and poultry-to the specious self-justifications (his own included) for eating some meat products and not others. Foer offers a lighthearted counterpoint to his investigation in doting portraits of his loving grandmother, and her meat-and-potatoes comfort food, leaving him to wrestle with the comparative weight of food's socio-cultural significance and its economic-moral-political meaning. Without pulling any punches-factory farming is given the full expose treatment-Foer combines an array of facts, astutely-written anecdotes, and his furious, inward-spinning energy to make a personal, highly entertaining take on an increasingly visible (and book-selling) moral question; call it, perhaps, An Omnivore's Dilemma.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* If this book were packaged like a loaf of bread, its Nutrition Facts box would list high percentages of graphic descriptions of factory farm methods of animal breeding, mass confinement, and assembly-line slaughter as well as the brutality and waste of high-tech fishing methods; fresh studies of animal (fish included) intelligence and their capacity for suffering; and undiluted facts about industrial animal agriculture’s major role in global warming. Sensitive to the centrality of food in culture and family life, Foer, author of the novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), frames his first nonfiction book within the story of his Holocaust survivor grandmother’s complex relationship with food and his response to fatherhood. He presents assiduously assembled facts (supported by70 pages of end notes) about the miserable lives and deaths of industrialized chickens, pigs, fish, and cattle and about agricultural pollution and how factory farming engenders species-leaping flu pandemics. He also asks philosophical questions, such as why we eat such smart and affectionate animals as pigs but not dogs. Foer brings extraordinary artistry, clarity, valor, and compassion to this staggering investigation into the ethics, horrors, and dangers of factory farming. An indelible book that should reach a diverse audience and deepen the conversation about how best to live on a rapidly changing planet. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (November 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316069906
• ISBN-13: 978-0316069908
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.2 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (309 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #19,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #4 in Books > Science & Math > Nature & Ecology > Animal Rights
  • #28 in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Gastronomy > Essays
  • #42 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Agricultural Sciences > Food Science

More About the Author

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of the bestseller Everything Is Illuminated, named Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times and the winner of numerous awards, including the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize. Foer was one of Rolling Stone's "People of the Year" and Esquire's "Best and Brightest." Foreign rights to his new novel have already been sold in ten countries. The film of Everything Is Illuminated, directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood, will be released in August 2005. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has been optioned for film by Scott Rudin Productions in conjunction with Warner Brothers and Paramount Pictures. Foer lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

279 of 295 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars changing my ways, October 19, 2009

By 

Glenn Gutterman "Glenn" (Westfield, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eating Animals (Hardcover)

I wholeheartedly recommend this book. I identified with Foer as a person who really tries to eat ethically, but whose weaknesses often get the best of him. I've had strong intuitions that there is something wrong with Meat today, but, like Foer reports of his own journey, those intuitions have not been strong enough for me to really change what I eat. The woman in my life, by contrast, has been a vegetarian for over a decade and never wavers. Of the many changes I've made to accommodate our relationship, giving up meat was never one of them. I've generally let the smell of bacon silence any discomfort I had with meat. That is, until reading Eating Animals. Foer's personal narrative spoke to me more than any of the many exposes on factory farming slyly sent my way. At the same time, Eating Animals left me far more informed than I was before ... It's the standard cliché, but I really couldn't put the book down. In place of the didactic or moralistic, Foer welcomes the reader into his life and his story. Foer is his own main character, and his own self-examination inspires the same. You won't be the same after reading it.

130 of 135 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A catalyst.., November 10, 2009

By 

A. Moon - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Eating Animals (Hardcover)

This book was a catalyst where I wasn't looking for one. After the first 35 pages a light bulb started lighting up...and I feared my life was about to change. I've never written a book review, but after reading what Jonathon learned in his 3 + years of researching factory farming, I had to tell others to read it. He provides serious, horrific and real information. I never knew about factory farming until I read his book and googled 'factory farming' on the web. It was all over from there. I started watching those videos on what we do to animals-the ones we don't want to see-and I could not stomach another bite of an animal again. I loved meat, ate it easily 3xday for all of my life, grew up near those green pastures in northern California where cows graze all day. Wow. Was I disconnected and fooled...

What I felt, was that he did not preach about not eating animals. He presented information that I could personally relate to and grasp. For me, Jonathon felt like a messenger...where many have failed to bring light to what humans are systematically doing to animals every moment of every day. He provided very important information about 99% of the animals I used to buy and eat for my family and friends. I had no idea that the US alone consumes 10 billion animals PER YEAR. I finally woke up. One chicken has 2 wings(that they never use)--how many chicken wings come in a basket at a restaurant-6? 12? 24? I used to throw meat away after getting full. I was throwing away a life-a wasted one who suffered in life and in death. What frightened me more about this book is why is an author bringing this info to me? Where are the ongoing news specials on this?

Jonathon's personal tone, statistical/historical data, research team, true accounts from the field, letters, etc., left me no choice than to agree with him. Of course, he is not a farm owner, hasn't worked on a farm, and can't come from a place of truly understanding 'farming'. And he doesn't shun farming, he actually helped me realize that the farming I thought ALL animals came from--humane ones--are actually a miniscule percentage of all farms. His writing is heartwarming, but gut-wrenching. His occasional wit about the insanity of factory farming made me laugh quietly, but kept me awake at night thinking & fretting.

Eating Animals forced me to realize the terrifying component of being lied to by these factory farms and the megacorporations that support them. I used to pay extra for organic milk & cage free eggs because I believed in Horizon Farms. I thought I was making a better choice for the animals. Ultimately, the author woke me up from a deep, deep sleep. As he eloquently presents about turkeys, how can we celebrate 'thanks' and 'family' or whatever tradition you have on Thanksgiving while the main course never saw the sun, felt the earth, a breath of fresh air, had his beak seared off with a hot blade and no pain killers, lived on top of thousands of other turkey's and their excrement, thrown into trucks for transport hundreds of miles without food or water, and never had one true moment of 'love.' If having a better understanding of what love means to you, read this book.

334 of 358 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Book on the Food Industry and Foer's Most Important, October 18, 2009

By 

ThinkAboutFood "FDG" (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eating Animals (Hardcover)

The buzz about this book was so incredible I had to get my hands on an advanced copy. The book is like nothing else ever written on the food industry. It reads like a novel, is funny, incredibly well documented, and lets factory farmers and animal activists speak in their own words. I've read a lot of books on the food industry and this is by far the best. It makes other writers, even Michael Pollan, look a bit timid. Foer never preaches. He shares his own beliefs and asks us to live by our own standards, not his. Foer reveals a lot of personal information here and, since this is his first nonfiction book, it its especially interesting for readers of his previous books to see some of the fact behind his fiction. The material about his grandmother and how she survived the holocaust is really powerful. The stuff about his dog George (Foer makes a mock case for eating dogs) is hilarious. His storytelling is so compelling that you hardly realize how much information he's conveying (there are 60 pages of notes documenting his sources, but the text itself is uncluttered by footnotes). Another unique thing about this book is that Foer actually sneaks into a factory farm in the middle of the night... Eating Animals is a serious book that could change the way you live. But what's most impressive about it is that it is also fun to read, which is exactly what we need on a hot button topic like the contemporary food industry.