eating animals reads like a novel
TRANSCRIPT
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Eating Animalsreads like a novel. Its author, Jonathan Safran Foer, was formerly
best known for Everything is Illuminatedand Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close, two works of fiction that landed him a great deal of praise for his smart,
wry voice. It is with this same voice that he elicits both cringing (and in some,
queasiness) and occasionally laughter as he tackles the United States meatindustry in Eating Animals.
One example: Foer makes a case for adding dog meat to the American dinner
table. Infused with humor (and a recipe for Stewed Dog, Wedding Style), Foer
deftly uses Americas favorite pet to help us see the invisible quality of eating
animals. That is, he posits that looking at the logistics of eating dogs can help us
see more clearly the death involved in eating everyday meats like cows, pigs and
chickens.
His most effective chapter is Words/Meaning. It is part dictionary and part
journal entry as he compares factory farm with family farm, free-range with
fresh, and CAFO with CFE. CAFOs, for example, are concentrated animal
feeding operations (factory farms) that rely on law-bending animal cruelty and
CFEs are the common farming exemptions that protect the farmers that use
overcrowding and other neglectful practices inherent in CAFO farming. It is this
clever juxtaposition of terms through which Foer effectively illuminates the deeply
entrenched hypocrisies of the meat industry.
As for the queasiness, be forewarned that Foers simple prose paints a harrowing
picture of animal slaughter. Largely told through the words of slaughter facility
workers, the mechanized process of killing and dismembering a cow reads like a
horror novel. Some might argue that humans are natural omnivores and killing
animals is practically a part of our DNA. They might regard anyone concerned
about the conditions of animal life and death a sentimentalist. Foer defines
sentimentality in the Words/Meaning chapter as valuing emotions over reality,
and he wonders:
who is the sentimentalist and who is the realist? Is caring to know about
the treatment of farmed animals a confrontation with the facts about the
animals and ourselves or an avoidance of them?
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Foer clearly believes there is power in knowledge and that we are anything but
sentimental for wanting to know.
True to his novelist leanings, Foer opens and closes the book with the idea of
storytelling. He acknowledges that it is our relationship with the foods we eat thattells all of the stories we have to tell about ourselves. How, why, what, when and
how much we eat are all infused with information about who, why and what we
are. He ultimately believes if each of us really listened to our own food stories,
which are usually laden with pitiful excuses (e.g. I eat the Butterball turkey at
Thanksgiving with my family largely because I want to break bread with them
peacefully and not raise a ruckus), and if we had access to the truth of what
happens to factory-farmed animals (e.g. A fourth of all factory-farmed poultry
have painful stress fractures) we would be less likely to fall prey to the willful
forgetting that is necessary to eat other animals.