The Case Against "Eating Animals"

Jonathan Foer’s book Eating Animals is the result of the author’s extensive research into the subject of where the meat Americans eat comes from – “99% of all the animals eaten in this country comes from factory farms.” It also describes in graphic detail how animals are treated, i.e. raised and killed, for meat, and what the effects of this process are not only on animals but also on the humans involved in the killing process. The book is not, he states, “a straightforward case for vegetarianism,” but, after reading the facts in many of the chapters, based on the author’s first-hand observations, he could not have made a stronger case for never eating beef, poultry, or pork again. It is impossible to include even a representative sample of the details of raising and killing cows, chickens, turkeys, and pigs on so-called factory farms because there are so many sentences with gruesome, disgusting details.  Even if you do not like or care much about these or other animals - regarding them simply as parts of the food chain - this book should have some effect on you. People who eat meat daily might not believe everything they read in this book, if they choose to read any of it at all. I could not read every page of the book, but I read enough of it to lose my taste for the relatively little meat in my diet in recent years.

Factory farming is “a system of industrialized and intensive agriculture in which animals – often housed by the tens or even hundreds of thousands – are genetically engineered, restricted in mobility, and fed unnatural diets (which almost always include various drugs).” Although industrial fishing is not exactly factory farming, the author says, it belongs in the same category and thus he spends a chapter on it, including its harmful effects. Foer concludes that “factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all my reading and conversations, I have yet to find a credible defense of it. The debacle of the factory farm is not just a problem about ignorance, a problem that arose because people don’t know the facts. That is only one cause. To accept the factory farm feels inhuman.”

There is more to Eating Animals than this summary, including several stories about the author’s own childhood and his role now as a parent, and I recommend reading at least parts of it to educate yourself about an issue and situation which affects all of our lives. As Foer writes, “The question of eating animals is ultimately driven by our intuitions about what it means to reach an ideal we have named, perhaps incorrectly, ‘being human.’”