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Eating Animals Paperback – September 1, 2010
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Bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his life oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. For years he was content to live with uncertainty about his own dietary choices but once he started a family, the moral dimensions of food became increasingly important.
Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill.
Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer "at the table with our greatest philosophers" -and a must-read for anyone who cares about building a more humane and healthy world.
- Print length368 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBack Bay Books
- Publication dateSeptember 1, 2010
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100316069884
- ISBN-13978-0316069885
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"Eating Animals isn't just an anti-meat screed, or an impassioned case for vegetarianism. Instead, Foer tells a story that is part memoir and part investigative report....It's a book that takes America's meat-dominated diet to task."―NPR, All Things Considered
"Eating Animals carefully, deliberately, takes you through every relevant dimension of factory farming....One sees it from the inside, the outside, the moral high ground, the dithering consumer level, through Foer's family stories, from slaughterhouse workers, animal behaviorists, even from defenders of the system....Foer's aim is not to make your choice, but to inform it. He has done us all a great service, and we, and the animals, owe him our thanks."―Andrew Weil, MD
"Foer's case for ethical vegetarianism is wholly compelling....A blend of solid--and discomforting--reportage with fierce advocacy that will make committed carnivores squeal."―Kirkus Reviews
"A work of moral philosophy....The fact that Foer makes me wonder whether I'm being, at best, a hypocrite every time I eat a piece of beef suggests he's completely successful in at least one ambition." ―Geoff Nicholson, San Francisco Chronicle
"Extraordinarily thoughtful and intelligent." ―Holly Silva, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Foer's book raises critical ethical questions we all need to face....We shouldn't be polluting the planet to satisfy our appetites."―Huffington Post
"Eating Animals stands as a pop-cultural landmark, destined to be the starting point for a lot of overdue conversations." ―Philadelphia Daily News
"For a hot young writer to train his sights on a subject as unpalatable as meat production and consumption takes raw nerve. What makes Eating Animals so unusual is vegetarian Foer's empathy for human meat eaters, his willingness to let both factory farmers and food reform activists speak for themselves, and his talent for using humor to sweeten a sour argument."―O, The Oprah Magazine
"A postmodern version of Peter Singer's 1975 manifesto Animal Liberation.... Foer is the latest in a long line of distinguished literary vegetarians."―Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times Book 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... 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...moral question; call it, perhaps, An Omnivore's Dilemma."―Publishers Weekly
"The everyday horrors of factory farming are evoked so vividly, and the case against the people who run the system presented so convincingly, that anyone who, after reading Foer's book, continues to consume the industry's products must be without a heart, or impervious to reason, or both."―J.M. Coetzee
"Some of our finest journalists (Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser) and animal rights activists (Peter Singer, Temple Grandin)--not to mention Gandhi, Jesus, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke and Immanuel Kant (and so many others)--have hurled themselves against the question of eating meat and the moral issues inherent in killing animals for food. Foer, 32, in this, his first work of nonfiction, intrepidly joins their ranks....It is the kind of wisdom that, in all its humanity and clarity, deserves a place at the table with our greatest philosophers."―Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"Should be compulsory reading...A genuine masterwork."―TimeOut
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Back Bay Books; 0 edition (September 1, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0316069884
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316069885
- Item Weight : 11.5 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #91,224 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in Animal Rights (Books)
- #59 in Sustainable Agriculture (Books)
- #96 in Food Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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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.
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Having said that, my opinion is that if everyone in the U.S. read this book, the world be a better place.
As Amazon customers, we search endlessly for those rare gems, the books that are entertaining, engrossing, and yet life-changing at the same time. Books you can't stop thinking about. Those books only appear once in a great while.
This is one of those books. It's loaded with facts, but it's not preachy. It's not JUST that eating meat is cruel. We already know that. So why put yourself through the tedious facts yet again?
Well, that's not what this book is about. You could say that it's about a father's love for his son. Or his grandmother's odd food habits learned in the Depression and the Holocaust. About his father's culinary experiments. And yes, about his dog.
It's also about the people who inhabit the "food chain", the people between the animal and the meat on your plate. Those who wanted to speak on the record were presented in their own voice.
These are the characters that inhabit the book. It's a book about food. But since many of us eat meat at every meal... well, we need to confront what it means to eat animals.
Even if you choose to ignore every fact in this book, it's reasonable to ask ourselves what it means to eat meat. One argument that sticks with me is, why do we eat pigs and not dogs? Pigs are just as intelligent (if not more so) than dogs. Millions of stray dogs are euthanized every year, so why not use them as meat instead of tossing them into the trash? Why try to control the dog population instead of allowing them to breed freely and "harvesting" the strays? Cheap meat! Free range, too. Since they are already near human population centers, transporting them would also be cheaper and have less of an impact on the environment ("eat local").
By the end of this argument, I was thinking, "yeah, that makes sense, I could eat dogs". And then you go "eww"... and then when you substitute "pigs" for "dogs"... the whole book is like this. You have no choice but to engage with this book. If you're going to eat meat, fine (I had some chicken yesterday, as a matter of fact, because I'm weak), but are you going to fully consider and confront what it means to do that, or are you going to repress it and let it fester in your subconscious, ricocheting and feeding off the other repressed, uncomfortable ideas you've got locked up in there?
(By the way, did you notice the near absence of facts in that argument?)
Isn't this why we read books in the first place? To discover more about ourselves and possibly question our relationship to the world? (another disclaimer: like Mr. Foer, I also majored in philosophy)
Is it a happy, comforting book? No. But neither is Stephen King, and he sells a lot of books, right? But that's fake horror. You can laugh that off because none of it's real. Let's see how you deal with true horror and evil.
My wife and I already buy humane meat (and no, free range and cage free and all that nonsense is NOT HUMANE). We buy directly from the couple that raises the chickens, the chickens are out pecking in the yard every day, and they are slaughtered at a kosher facility. We also buy the highest humane ratings we can find at Whole Foods.
These are still only rationalizations. There's still the damage to the environment to consider. Ask yourself, are you the kind of environmentalist that sends $25 to WWF once in a while, or are you willing to put your mouth where your money is?
Do we love our meat enough to eat, well, not OUR OWN dog (our beloved Fluffy!), but ANOTHER ANONYMOUS dog if it's humanely raised and slaughtered? If the only meat you could eat were dogs, would you eat meat then? If not, what's the difference between a dog and a pig? Or a cow?
Now think about this. What if that dog was not humanely "harvested"? What if, instead of a quick painless death, you were to slam a meat hook into that dog's face and drag it into the pen until it stops struggling (as we do with large fish)? Or, what if you were to flatten it in a cage so that it couldn't stand up and cut off its paws (without painkillers) so that it couldn't scratch the other dogs, and yank out its teeth so that it couldn't bite the other dogs? Or what if, when a dog is too "damaged" to "harvest" (they are called "downers" in the industry), they left them out to die of exposure and starvation, because they don't want to spend the money on a mercy killing? Would you eat dogs then?
What if there were dogs mixed in with the cows and pigs, and we randomly shoot into the pens, killing a few dogs in the process? Or, what if we end up killing more dogs than cows? Or we merely wound the dogs, but left them out there to die on their own? Oh well, we call that "bycatch". A lamentable but necessary consequence, given our method of "harvest". Are other methods of "harvest" available? Yeah, but not as cheap. (For 1 pound of shrimp caught, 26 pounds of "bycatch" gets tossed back. If the bycatch is not dead yet, it will die soon. Is the bycatch death a painless one? No.)
Why do we put people in jail for organizing dogfighting, when every day far worse goes on within the slaughterhouses? Animals getting "processed" while they're still alive. Sadistic workers torturing animals for fun, because there's no oversight at the slaughterhouses. Even the USDA doesn't monitor what goes on when the animals are killed. We don't put these people in jail because when it's done for a corporation, that's OK.
OK, one more tidbit. Chickens are separated into "broilers" and "layers". They are genetically different, and you can't use one for the other. OK, now, if you're a "layer"... well, we know that only females lay eggs, right? What happens to the males? Before reading the book, I always thought they got slaughtered for food, but why be reasonable when you can be CRUEL. If you want to know, search Google for "huff post chickens", and view the first video (the title gives a small hint of the subject matter: "Chicks being ground up alive: Video").
It's difficult to imagine designing a more insanely cruel system. I won't further belabor the details. Stephen King is a master of horror, but his worst characters rate favorably to Mother Teresa compared to the food industry. What's a few murders compared to billions of painful agonizing deaths every year? Actually death is a relief when it comes, it's their life that's agony.
For the food industry spokesfolks out there, I say, let us tour some of your facilities, of our own choosing. No? 'Nuff said. Go away.
And after all this, I still eat meat? Yeah, I do. I'm a hypocrite. A big one. I am an end customer and I feed money into this system, allowing it to happen. I need to change. This book will help.
Please don't let my ranting review stop you from reading the book. Mr. Foer is a far more skilled writer than I am. Unlike my clumsy attempts in this review at arguing against the food industry, his book is not full of bullet points about why the food industry sucks.
Instead, it's about something more important, about who we say we are (as human beings), the stories we tell ourselves, and how hard it is to live up to those stories. And who we want to be.
AND, the book is enjoyable, well-written, funny at times, and reads at times like an action or horror novel. Buy it, read it, and enjoy.
UPDATE: I am giving up all meat for Lent (even though I'm an atheist). We'll see how that goes.
The book has quite a lot to offer: a good overview of the different ways meat is produced in the US, and numerous interviews with people from all sides of the story - from a factory farm operator, defending the necessity of such methods, up to a PETA member making a case for veganism. Such variety of views, together with the wide range of aspects of meat production that Foer tried to cover, make the subject difficult to handle from the point of view of book structure. Foer does this pretty well overall, but I'm still not a fan of the topic organization. Some chapters were better than others, but there were a bit too many cases of jumping around for my liking. I found myself wondering what's the main message of the book. Early on, Foer points out that this book isn't here to argue for vegetarianism. And that's true. The main message is a case against factory farming. However, while I completely agree with its conclusion, it's not a particularly strong case. In the end, for me, the vegan in me is happy with all the opposition to the idea of factory farming, but the scientist in me is rather unhappy about the way the argument is structured...
Foer's argument oscillates between an evidence-based evaluation of the environmental impact and a moral argument against raising animals who can't reproduce and whose bones can't support them. He describes the environmental damage done by these factory farms, and the very high concentration of animals kept there. To me, it would make sense to then assess the environmental impact per weight of the meat produced, which could then be compared against "traditional" animal farms, while somehow trying to account for the externalities such as the sharp increase in incidence of drug-resistant strains of various diseases, and the simpler effects on the neighborhood of these farms (such as strong smells). But that's not what Foer does. Instead, he switches completely to an ethical case, talking about how wrong it feels to do all these things to animals and that they deserve our respect. Yet he still isn't opposed to the idea of eating meat, which makes the ethical argument a bit shaky. So we have a responsibility to treat these animals relatively well, except that we still get to kill them at a young age? Where do we draw the line? Foer for example feels very bad at what is done in the factory farms, but finds killing a teen (in human age terms) cow for steak acceptable. I think that the choice to draw the line at this particular point is non-obvious, and would require a lot more justification and discussion, which alas cannot be found in this book. Don't get me wrong, I'm not dismissing his argument, but rather suggesting that it needs work to be developed.
I was disappointed that the book failed to discuss the difference between vegetarians and vegans, and the importance of those differences. Surely exploitation of animals in factory farms is just as bad when it isn't the meat that's the final product. But given that Foer is a vegetarian and not a vegan, I'm guessing this is a part of his journey that's still ahead of him personally.
I very much enjoyed the topic of the social role of sharing meals, and how this is affected when one stops eating meat. This is something I've been though, so I was curious to find out more. Unfortunately, this topic is also not sufficiently developed, in the end being not much more than a few ideas the author had when briefly contemplating some family relationships. I must say I wish he (or anyone else, really) wrote a book about this topic.
Overall, this book is a good conversation starter, a good choice for a first book on this topic, a fairly-detailed first look into the world of animal agriculture. If you haven't spent much time thinking about where your meat comes from, this is a very good place to start. If this is a topic that you've been regularly researching and are relatively knowledgeable about, then I'd say move on, there isn't much to see her. Unless you want to buy it for your omnivorous friends, of course :-)
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¡Excelente compra!