Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan Safran FoerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-11-02
ISBN: 0316069906
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of Eating Animals
Book Review: "If Nothing Matters, There's Nothing to Save."
Summary: 5 Stars
Early in Eating Meat, Foer shares an anecdote of his starving Jewish grandmother, fleeing the Nazis and offered pork by a kind peasant. She is dying of starvation but rejects the pork, explaining, "If nothing matters, there's nothing to save." While Foer loves his grandmother, the story-teller, the life-giver, and the lover of kosher beef and chicken, he uses her quote as a sort of epitaph throughout his book to pave the way for his conversion to vegetarianism, a conversion that separates him from a lot of his family traditions that define who he is. For him and many others, including myself, the relentless and unspeakable cruelty that animals suffer because they are treated like commodities to be savored for a few minutes is something that deeply matters and we should not willfully be ignorant or deny animal suffering.
Eating Animals is a deeply personal book, propelled, Foer explains, by the birth of his son. What kind of person does he want his son to be? For Foer, raising his son to empathize with animals and as a result not eat their slaughtered flesh is the kind of son he wants to raise and of course he must change as a parent to lead in this manner.
The book is very nuanced, never dogmatic, but keeps a crystal-eyed focus on animal suffering, including firsthand accounts of what happens in the slaughterhouses. For me, the book's most moving passage is when Foer asks the owner of a slaughterhouse if there was ever a time he had difficulty killing an animal. The slaughterhouse owner confessed there was a time a cow licked his face and leaned against him for twenty minutes in a display of affection to his killer that made the slaughterhouse owner pause. But sadly he killed the cow anyway. I shared this anecdote with my college composition students and asked them if they could kill the cow after being licked in the face and 95% of them said they could not. I hope Foer's book, enjoying lots of buzz, justifiably so, has such an influence on millions and millions of people.
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