Book Review: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Eating Animals 
Jonathan Safran Foer

About Eating Animals- from the official website

Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent 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. This quest 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.
This book is what he found. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits—folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.
Marked by Foer’s moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the humor and style that made his previous books, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Foer’s latest tour de force informs and delights, challenging us to explore what is too often conveniently brushed aside. A celebration and a reckoning, Eating Animals is a story about the stories we’ve told—and the stories we now need to tell.

My Thoughts

This was one of the hardest books for me to read. Not because of the difficulty level but because I didn't want to be confronted by the truth I had been ignoring for years. Jonathan Safran Foer did not write this book to try to convince the world to become vegetarian. Instead it's purpose is to shine a light on the practices and problems of factory farming.

I have never been an animal person, I'm so highly allergic to most animals I tend to avoid them as much as possible.  I don't hate them or anything, I just can't be around them.  However, just like the author I have flirted with vegetarianism for years.  I first became vegetarian in high school after reading The Jungle. After a while I was able to convince myself that nothing like that happens now, the government wouldn't let it.  I would then go back and forth with being vegetarian.  When I would eat meat I would usually stick to chicken and turkey because I thought that was better, little did I know. I don't want to turn you off from the book, in fact just the opposite. Every parent should read this book so you can at least make informed decisions about what you are feeding your family.

I truly thank God for the opportunity to read this book. I have been telling everyone who will listen about it. If I could I would give a copy to every one of my friends and family.