Genetically engineered for maximum yield of flesh and profit, billions of pigs, chickens, and cows annually endure torture before their wretched lives are terminated, often painfully. The supervisor of a facility where fifty thousand birds share a single shed tells him: “High-yield farming has allowed everyone to eat.” Foer examines the price we pay-in environmental devastation, zoonotic pathogens, food-borne toxins, and complicity in atrocity-for cheap meat. He participates in a clandestine nighttime raid on an industrial turkey operation. “For the animals,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, another literary vegetarian, “it is an eternal Treblinka.”Īppalled that “upwards of 99 percent of all meat eaten in this country comes from 'factory farms,’” Foer sets out to comprehend what eating animals entails in the stages leading up to consumption. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, and Margaret Atwood, Foer extends his empathy to nonhuman beings.

Discomforting thoughts of a child gorging on flesh may have inspired Foer to make the nine-year-old narrator of his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), a vegan. When his son was born three years ago, he renounced meat entirely and began this book. Foer passed through vegetarian interludes throughout adolescence and consumed animal protein only occasionally after he married. An apologia pro diaeta sua, it begins in fond remembrance of his grandmother’s chicken and carrots. Absolutely no veal.’ 'What about sausage?’ 'No sausage either.’” The starving traveler is forced to feast on two potatoes.Įating Animals, Foer’s first book of nonfiction, answers Perchov’s “Why not?” with a more cogent explanation. No meat.’ 'Pork?’ 'No.’ 'Meat?’ 'No meat.’ 'Steak?’ 'Nope.’ 'Chickens?’ 'No.’ 'Do you eat veal?’ 'Oh, God. A dialogue of mutual incomprehension ensues: “'I don’t eat meat.’ 'Why not?’ 'I just don’t.’ 'How can you not eat meat?’.

'I’m a vegetarian,” the visiting American declares. In Everything Is Illuminated (2002), a character named Jonathan Safran Foer flabbergasts his Ukrainian guide, Alex Perchov.

Eating animals by jonathan foer