Books › Eating animals
Eating animals
368 pages
An urgent, deeply personal reckoning with the stories we tell ourselves about the food on our plates.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like embarking on an urgent, midnight investigation into the moral fabric of our daily lives. Driven by the profound anxiety of impending parenthood, the narrative weaves together deeply personal memoir, philosophical inquiry, and boots-on-the-ground detective work. The mood is both unsettling and deeply reflective, asking the reader to confront the brutal realities of factory farming alongside the comforting, nostalgic myths of family dinners. The prose is vibrant and generous, yet marked by a fierce moral clarity that refuses to look away. It is a steady, introspective journey that moves from casual questioning to a profound reckoning. This is a perfect read for those who want to examine the ethics of their everyday choices and the cultural stories that shape them.
- Mood
- reflective
- unsettling
- introspective
- probing
- Tone
- urgent
- earnest
- philosophical
- generous
- ferocious
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- moral responsibility · the ethics of food · family traditions · cultural storytelling · parental anxiety
- The writing
- Vibrant and creative, seamlessly synthesizing deeply personal memoir with sharp philosophical inquiry and investigative journalism.
- The arc
- Moves from casual, anxious questioning about parenthood into a profound, urgent reckoning with personal and cultural morality.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave intellectually rigorous but deeply personal explorations of everyday morality, food politics, and the stories we tell ourselves.
Content notes
- factory farming
- animal welfare
- moral distress
About the book
Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood - facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf - his casual questioning took on an urgency. His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong.
Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting. Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told-and the stories we now need to tell.
Description from Open Library.
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