Finally Someone with a Brave Analogy

Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Eating Animals, is not refreshing, inspiring or even original. These adjectives might describe his fiction but in his first foray into non-fiction Foer attacks the issue of factory-farming and the sustainability of eating meat - and in doing so he opens your heart to the issue like no one has before.

The movement against the meat industry, as it is currently structured, began some time ago and is lead, at least as far as scholarly publishing is concerned, by a man named Michael Pollan. If you want a concise and even-minded understanding of the history and rise of the factory farm then Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma is a good book to pick up. What Jonathan Safran Foer lends to the movement is a humanistic perspective that appeals to the unenthused more than the unconvinced.

Whether Foer is discussing the way food connects his own family or how it impacts the lives of other real-life characters you come away with a more profound understanding of the responsibility we must all assume when we sit down for a meal.

If you still cling to the notion that you are a meaningless cog in the food industry this is a great book to pick up. But I warn you that you will be forced to consider your own morality with a frequency (three times a day) and difficulty (akin to the pangs of hunger) that is infrequently asked of a reader and Foer acknowledges the difficulty of the subject with multiple points of view.

Being a fan of powerful (if not always entirely accurate) analogies Foer's comparison of eating meat and committing rape rang true with me. To paraphrase, he compares the indulgence of your taste buds by eating animals that are raised inhumanely (99% of all animals according to Foer) with the indulgence of your sexual desires regardless of who suffers to sate your need. He calls this an easy argument to sweep under the table but a hard one to respond to. The point should be well-taken - we have reached an age where we can no longer claim ignorance as to the practices that bring protein to our plates and, armed with the knowledge of how this industry harms the environment, the animal and the human, we have to now accept responsibility and decide if we want to continue to indulge ourselves at the cost of much more widespread suffering.

Pick up the book and let me know what you think.