Book Reviews September 2010:  EATING ANIMALS by Jonathan Safran Foer

Having children, especially your first, impacts tremendously on one’s thinking, doing, and being. For author Jonathan Safran Foer, the birth of his first child led him to investigate (over a three-year period) the ethical, philosophical, environmental, and health issues related to eating meat, because, as he says, “I simply wanted to know – for myself and my family – what meat is.” His personal quest didn’t remain one for long. The result is the brilliant, hard-hitting, and thought-provoking Eating Animals.

Although Foer clearly believes it is the only moral choice, this book is not about converting the reader to vegetarianism. Rather, it is about the horrifying impact of factory farming, currently representing 99% of all food animal agriculture. Through a series of stories, interviews, and scientific reporting, Foer speaks compellingly about the abject cruelty, the damage to water supplies, climate change, and the threat to human health – all attributable to factory farming.

Even a small sampling of Foer’s revelations into the cruelty perpetrated at factory farms is enough to make one feel sick and ashamed: “Broiler chickens typically spend their lives in windowless sheds. At slaughtering time, they are shackled by their feet, hung from a conveyor belt, and dipped into an electrified bath known as ‘the stunner.’…. Shortly after birth, piglets have their tails chopped off; before being butchered, hogs are typically incapacitated with a tong-like instrument designed to induce cardiac arrest…. And you never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.”

Eating Animals also confronts the harsh toll that the factory farms of today are taking on human health: “Any talk of pandemic influenza today ….has everything to do with the health of the world’s farmed animals.” Foer explains that scientists have been able to trace six of the eight genetic segments of the currently most feared virus (H5N1) in the world to U.S. factory farms.  Read Reviews

By Susannah Kent