A must listen to all those that care.

Powerful truths that most don't want to hear yet will change you views if you allow yourself to feel.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

5 people found this helpful

Just Read It!

Whether you are a meat eater or not, we all need to understand this industry. It will change the way you shop and eat and hopefully if enough of us read it we can change this industry for the better.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

How to approach Eating Animals with honesty

Published in the shadow of 2010 it is remarkable how well Eating Animals remains relevant, and while that's great for Jonathan Safran Foer it's a strong hint that our society hasn't ourselves the integrity to look where he has shown. If the title is too frightening for someone who engages in eating animals, well, QED.

Foer's writing style and story building methodology is, fortunately, quite approachable for anyone who is either shameless about their human exceptionalism or is sufficiently heroic, like every pro-organic farmers market patron who "wants to know where their food comes from," to question the unquestionable right to see animals as walking, swimming, or crawling calories.

I had felt that as a committed vegan I could sidestep Eating Animals for less squishy and self-forgiving commentary like Richard Oppenlander's "Comfortably Unaware: What We Choose to Eat is Killing Us and Our Planet" and his seminal text "Food Choices and Sustainability: Why Buying Local, Eating Less Meat, and Taking Baby Steps Won't Work." This syllabus guided me to Foer's more recent work, "We Are The Weather" which unpacks with gentle relentlessness food's role in the crisis of our age (or, while we spin our wheels seeking the necessary top-down solutions for climate change, how we need grassroots cultural change in our consumption). Rather than a forced march into cold truth, Foer anticipates our human failings and denial and guides us through our fallacies (more often than not industrially constructed than self-inflicted) in ways that are far more digestible (!) than if one were to read the last chapter first. (It's harder, but not impossible to skip ahead on an audiobook; if, like many vegans, you think Foer is too quick to forgive his cravings and cultural discomfort, it's an appropriate cheat.)

For an "update" on Foer's perspectives see his articles in the Washington Post including, "Meat is not essential. Why are we killing for it?" (and he's not referring animals for dinner, but human lives sacrificed FOR your dinner). Instead of quoting the Jonathan Safran Foer who wrote Eating Animals I'll share the closing line from that 2020 article to show the punchline of his personal character arc: "Your next meal is the moment to withdraw your support from the most cruel and destructive industry in America."

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!