Book Review: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Non-fiction books can usually best be described as factual, to the point and informative – kind of what you expect from them. Something that you read out of an interest in the topic, and once you feel that you know enough, you put the book aside and move on to the next one.

But there are exceptions to this rule, and one of the most remarkable is Eating Animals. Yes, it is factual, to the point and informative – but it is also funny, sad and written with so much energy, you just can’t put it aside. The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, has so far made his mark as a critically acclaimed novelist with his debut Everything is Illuminated, which won several literary prizes including the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and his second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Foer started to write Eating Animals when his wife, writer Nicole Krauss, was pregnant with their first son. For years, he had been hovering between being a vegetarian and eating meat, and with the upcoming responsibility of nourishing not only himself but also his child, he started to wonder where the cheap meat in the supermarket comes from and what eating meat actually means for your health.

Eating Animals is the result of three years of research, in which Foer discovered things that made meat production seem more like a perverted Frankenstein show. Let’s take turkeys for example – did you know that the turkeys cultured today to feed our growing desire for cheap meat are no longer able to reproduce sexually? And that pigs sometimes grow so fast their legs break under the weight of their paunch?

But the book does not only collect information about how our daily steak is produced, but also the effects on our health. One fact that I found most shocking is that women who drink the milk of American cows – which are fed with eight times the amount of antibiotics we give ill humans – are three times more likely to give birth to twins, which is exactly the same for the cows themselves. If you ever needed evidence that medicine given to animals affects us when we eat their meat, here it is.

And Foer brings up another big reason why you might think about reducing your meat consumption. As he outlines in his book, the industrial production of meat – and in western societies, between 95 and 99 per cent of the meat consumed is produced in that way – is one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases, and therefore directly linked with climate change. In fact, as Foer points out, if the American people all ate vegetarian for just one main meal a week, this would be equivalent to taking 5 million cars of the road – hard to imagine, but a true, and maybe even sad, fact.

These are all strong arguments for turning vegetarian at once, but as Foer said in a talk he gave at the London School of Economics in January (you can find the podcast of the event by clicking here), that is not his initial aim: “I was not trying to move the reader into vegetarianism in a straightforward way.” What he did intend with his book was to get people think about eating animals, and start to reflect on their eating habits: “I think positive role models are more effective than arguments.”

Foer was also keen to point out that you should not see being a vegetarian versus being a carnivore as a black and white choice . If people can’t see themselves abstaining from meat altogether, they often do not even try to reduce their meat consumption. But if you move away from the extreme and merely think of reducing your meat consumption, it is much easier to find a start.

If you have read one of Foer’s books before, you will very quickly find an overlying theme that bridges his work of non-fiction with his two novels: at heart, Eating Animals is very much a family story. Foer wrote it because of his son, it starts and ends with him talking about his grandmother, and it illustrates the aftermath of our daily food choices and the responsibility that arises from this: “If we continue to eat these kinds of foods we are not going to be able to use antibiotics in the future when we are ill.” Or when our children are ill.

Picture from David Shankbone via WikiMedia Commons.