Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

While the summer isn't over yet, this is the most powerful book I've read so far.  Author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer has established himself as a master story teller.  In his first two books, you get the sense that he's drawing on real life experiences and family histories to create his fiction, and in Eating Animals, you get to see the source of his material.  Eating Animals is Foer's work of non-fiction.  Weaving a tapestry of stories of his family history with stories of the farmers, activists, animals, and virtually everyone he meets along the way,  he exposes the cruelty of animal agriculture in a way that no one has before.  When his son was born, he wanted to be a good father, so he decided to investigate how to feed him in a way that was truly nourishing and healthy. His book, the story of that investigation, combines impeccable research (with 17 pages of footnotes),  devastating data and brilliant storytelling.  It is his storytelling, however, that keeps the reader interested and engaged, even in places where the cruelty is difficult to bear. Throughout the book, he intertwines stories of his doting Jewish grandmother's complex relationship to food.  A holocaust survivor who came very close to starving before the end of WW II (and a quirky, compelling character who is recognizable throughout his fiction) she has experienced a trauma that she transmits to succeeding generations of her family.  Although he never makes a direct comparison, the reader cannot help but compare, through his juxtapostion of stories, the cruelty of the Jewish holocaust to the slaughter of animals he describes so unflinchingly.  Foer makes a case for the argument that our capacity for disconnection and denial is at the center of all human cruelty.  Our relationship to food is central to our identities and our relationship with others, yet we feed ourselves without knowing (and often willfully denying) where our nourishment comes from.  Indeed, the conscious denial of not only the slaughter methods, but the conditions in which most farm animals are breed and raised, is necessary for us to continue to support the industry with our money and our appetites.  Foer's book is not judgemental, just sensible and compassionate.  Like all serious writers, he does not back away from emotional truth.  Characteristically, where most writers stop, Foer dares to contintue writing, always taking his topics a little deeper than the reader is prepared to go.

This book seriously challenged the way I eat.  Like Foer, I had vascillated between vegetarianism and meat eating for a number of years.  While watching Food, Inc. had a temporary effect, reading Eating Animals was far more powerful.  Why is this?  I believe it's because of Foer's brilliant writing: his compelling characterizations of people and animals goes beyond the mere facts of the matter (which only appeals to our intellects) to the emotional truth where a deeper connection within ourselves makes permanent change possible.  Foer makes us realize that eating is central to who we are.  We are what we eat and eating compassionately changes our bodies as well as our souls.