Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

[cyberbob]

This is an edited version of a review I wrote on Amazon on a book about the treatment of animals bred as livestock on factory farms:

This book isn't for those who want to learn more about factory farming from an unbiased, knowledgeable source. There is a good amount of information about factory farming but the author is a dilettante in most of the subjects he talks about and it makes the book come across as a bloated persuasive essay written by a high school English student. By that I mean that all the factual contributions are clearly just research-based and what he contributes are pointless stories about his grandmother (who's a motif in the book) that come across as an attempt to add some literary quality, which is fine since he is a professional writer, except that he does a poor job of tying it in with the informative sections of the book.

I don't even understand why the title of the book is "Eating Animals" if the author's supposed purpose is to spread awareness about the conditions in factory farms and not to advocate vegetarianism. The most probable reason is because the targeted audience IS vegetarians and their sympathizers (I consider myself one) which is why the book is more concerned with appealing to emotion than with concisely giving information on factory farming. It's irritating having to waddle through pages of the author begging us to imagine ourselves as if we were chickens or telling us how pigs supposedly enjoy playing video games (Which isn't relevant. If an animal feels pain or anxiety then it is already unethical to place them in factory farms. Since, for example, crocodiles and rabbits can't play video games or do other things that make them seem "more human" is it ok to treat them inhumanely?)

It's mainly that excessive sentimentality that make Eating Animals hard to read, even for those who are already on his side. The Author is not a scientist or an expert on any of the subjects he writes about in this book so it's all second-hand information which could've been presented by a better writer whose main objective would be to present information and not to guilt them into vegetarianism (might as well grab a PETA pamphlet and waste less time and no money).

[Madame X]

Half-agreed. The grandma anecdotes, although charming, needn’t have been so ‘integrally’ woven throughout the text. Not that he was entirely off there, however; eating is important, people like to do it, dinner-table traditions are almost sacrosanct (etcetc), hence, one would most likely, and understandably, need some darn good incentive to want to have any inclination towards ‘disrupting’ the cosiness of convention (for those who celebrate: no turkey on thanksgiving! tsk tsk).

The style, or as you put it, his dilettantism (admittedly, he does a bit of point-recycling here and there), I can forgive if not even enjoy; after having read an umpteenth amount of highfalutin philosophical works on the subject, having a guy come right out and, articulately, yet without a single syllogism, say – hey, I like the taste of meat, eaten plenty of it in my day but after having seen the industry’s practises and finding it sad on many levels, I’m not gonna do it anymore and here’s why – is rather refreshing. After all, I don’t really see the choice not to eat meat as an overwhelmingly intellectual one (I can guarantee that your average vegetarian is in no way smarter than your average omnivore :D), but rather, simply put, a matter of what feels right to you…call it a matter of sentiment, if you will. :wink5: Having said that, none of the (US-centric) data in this book was really news to me, but it would be adequately informative to a newcomer...I can also say that I don’t see any manipulation or misrepresentation of facts for pity-points going on here; if said facts manage to tug at the heartstrings I’d see it as less an indication of cheap sentimentality (or self-righteous bullying as is often the case with PETA) than it is confirmation that something is seriously amiss in this business. But you’re right in that this book, as so many others of its kind, probably won’t generate much interest beyond the already ‘converted’. Ho-hum.