This isn't as much of a review of Jonathan Safran Foer's latest book as it is a reaction to it--a reaction to the reactions of others, even. The title of this book garners a reaction from people who haven't read it and who may never read it. Just carry Eating Animals around for a few days and you'll understand. There's an assumption that a book about eating animals is going to tell you that it is in some way wrong to eat animals--whether for the welfare of animals or for your own welfare--and mo...

TO SERVE MANi can't review this book. can't even finish it. the page-count to tears-shed ratio is just too high. and my head's not in the right place for this shit. (and talk about preaching to the choir…) -- i haven't read jonathan safran foer's novels and fuckoff what he's ever written or what he ever will write: he's a great man for this book alone. he's a great man by default, perhaps, because most people are such evil and miserable cunts. but, no. set apart from a race of miserable cunts he...

EVERYONE should read this book. I don't think I've ever read something so important. Starting from a neutral standpoint on the matter, Safran Foer answers the question of whether he and his family should eat meat. Approaching the subject as a journalist, he includes interviews with family-run farms, activists and slaughterhouse workers. He includes different perspectives and arguments (which is great!) but ultimately exposes an underground network which is shocking. I knew the situation was bad,...

Enjoying a good meal sounds so much better than livelong torturing and killing when fat enough.Please note that parts of this review are unusually short, collected speech notes. Could be offending to some bigoted unknowing victims of cognitive bias too. Go look a pig, chicken, or cow in the eye while eating your freaking bacon, chicken nuggets, or steak. The adverse effects are not limited to martyred animals and sick consumers, because before that is the exploitation and destruction of vast are...

I am not a vegetarian. Honestly, I've never even tried to be a vegetarian at any point in my life. I love steak. I love bacon. I love sushi. I could go on, but you get the idea.With my son not being able to have any sort of gluten or artificial coloring in the food he eats, I've always thought I was doing good by stopping by the actual farmer's stand to get fresh eggs and some fruit & veggies (one benefit of living in a small, hick town) and then picking up my nicely-packaged and already butcher...

Should we stop eating animals? To my mind the answer to this question is very plain and very straightforward; it does not require much thought or calculation: the answer is, of course, yes. We should stop. We should have stopped a long time ago, but it is very difficult for an entire population to break a habit that is centuries in the making. A habit, though, is not justification enough for eating animals. There can be no justification. Truth is, the animal agriculture industry is the single la...

I was torn how to rate this book. It isn’t perfect (I noted many flaws in its comprehensiveness) but it’s amazing enough, so 5 stars it is.I’ve read so many books such as this but none for a while, and it’s because reading about how humans use animals is so devastating for me. It’s not just the books’ contents, it’s knowing that, at most, only 1% of Americans feel as I do, that my feelings and beliefs are shared by so few (The latest statistics I have are that 3% of Americans are truly vegetaria...

I realize I finished this book 10 days ago and have not rated it...and I also can't stop thinking about it. There's a lot I could say about this book and how much it made me think-it's completely riddled with highlighter-but honestly, most people I know wouldn't bother picking this up no matter what I say. We eat animals because we're too selfish and stubborn to change. We eat animals because we're too lazy to make the "inconvenient" choices. We eat animals because we've been told over and over

This is a difficult review to write, my reading experience of this book has been painful.The ethics of meat-eating is something I've struggled with for a long while and I personally chose vegetarianism over five years ago. However, I refrain from bringing it up in my conversations because, as the author points out in this book, food is a cultural icon. Our debates regarding food are discomfort inducing to say the least, and they often don't have any conclusions to offer.While most of our indiffe...

***NO SPOILERS***Update, 6/1/21: "A no-beef diet is great — but only if you don’t replace it with chicken" https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22...The title alone may scare off those who’d rather not know how their meat got from farm to table, but Eating Animals is one of those books that’s too important not to read. This is part memoir, part journalistic investigation, but the book is strongest when going inside slaughterhouses and educating, exposing the truth of something heinous beyond imagi...

i've long flirted with vegetarianism. for a few months in the early '00s, i even dated her. but i'd never truly wanted to spend all of my time with her, send her flowers, or introduce her to my parents (and everyone i've ever cared about) until i read this book.foer claims early on that he hasn't set out to write a book about why people should become vegetarians, an argument that holds zero ounces of water once you actually start reading his descriptions of factory farms. i found it impossible t...

In his book Heat, Bill Buford reflects (as he prepares to butcher a pig) that he has always respected vegetarians for being among the few who actually think about meat. In Eating Animals, JSF doesn't seem to respect much of anybody, other than his grandmother and Kafka. For all the promising ethical paths he walks down, from traditional animal husbandry to Bill Niman's sustainable beef to animal rights activism, he's so determined to shit on everyone else's ideas about eating meat that I'm not s...

Hear are my thoughts in order as I was reading this book....1. OMG.....OMFG!2. Crap...now I'm a vegatarian!3. I can never have my favorite Mongolian Chicken from Mings again (snif).Yes in that order. I have not eaten meat since half way through this book. Will it stick? I hope so.Not only the mind numbing crulety of the factory farms (which is plenty), and the enviormental damage they cause, but the shear crap they feed the animals did it for me. H1N1....factory farms. traced back to a hog farm

I don’t mean this dismissively, but I feel like I finally get what Charlton Heston meant when he cried out, “Soylent Green is people!! It’s peeeeople!” Just . . . I don’t know. That movie’s pretty silly, but I keep walking around the house feeling like all those years that I ate meat, I was really eating human souls. And I even knew almost all of this information before reading the book. I know I’m being dramatic, as per usual, but there really is something about food that brings out both the be...

Well, fresh fruits and vegetables are alive and responsive to light when you eat them, grain harvesters leave a wake of maimed and mutilated wildlife, and a songbird dies for every cup of coffee. I suspect that last is an imprecise ratio. So, Burroughs point that your food was alive is absolutely true. While North Americans aren’t the only people who overeat, it’s obvious that we do. Ninety dollars for a Thanksgiving turkey would certainly limit my household consumption.

Well done, Jonathan Safran Foer, well done.(your book, not steak)Look, I love meat. I really do. I hate myself for that, but I love meat. I also deplore seeing living creatures suffer. (I'm the jerk that lets spiders out of the house instead of squishing them.) I also know that if I had to kill the animal myself, I'd be a veggie for sure. I'm a total sucker for animals, but not enough of a sucker, I guess.In junior high, I became a "crazy animal rights/environmentalist tree worshiping bunny hugg...

“For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.”-Derrick JensenPeople cannot talk about their food choices without resorting to a narrative, and I’m no different. Food is so intensely personal; we relate to it on such an elemental level, that it’s easy to understand. The foods we eat are part of the mythos we use to delineate our identities. We eat

I’ve been a vegetarian for a few years now, and it was a long process that brought me here (literally too, I didn’t go cold turkey). I’m sometimes surprised by how little I thought about certain things throughout my life. And coming from someone who grew up with a face in a book, and his head in the clouds, I find this interesting. I over-thought and over-analyzed everything (or at least everything I thought about). I spent my days thinking about fantasy worlds and the future, about girls and re...

“If Nothing Matters, There's Nothing to Save” - Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals I'm going to have to chew on this book for a bit. I'm not sure a review the day after reading will fully vest what I plan on doing after reading this. I might be about ready to go veg, but there is something just annoying enough about JSF that almost wants to keep me eating meat just to piss him off. Nah, that really isn't true, but I wish it was. The book isn't as well-written as I would have liked. It gave me...

A non-intrusive and at times touching case for reconsidering our relationship with food. One of the fairest analyses of animal farming available to purchase -- it isn't unequivocally opposed to the use of animals for food, but that is not the point of the book.If you already don't consume animals, this won't do much for you besides providing arguments to strengthen your enthusiasm for veganism, and humanising those who haven't made the same life choice. If you still do eat animals, this will be