Making food choices

Although pigs are known to be great companions, and dog meat is – by all counts – delicious, most of us still eat pork while our Labrador sighs happily under the dining room table. This contradiction in our feelings toward the meat we eat is the central tenet of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, “Eating Animals”.

“Worth a read?” is not your ordinary book review; it is a meta-review. In other words, it provides an overview of the opinions contained in a variety of book reviews published in the media at large.

This week’s meta-review is of “Eating Animals”, written by Jonathan Safran Foer and released in South Africa in October 2009.

What is it all about?

On the brink of fatherhood, Foer – who had toyed with vegetarianism for most of his life – faced the reality of making dietary choices on his child’s behalf. This prompted him to spend three years researching and interviewing slaughterhouse workers, small-scale farmers and various animal activists, as well as visiting factory farms in the middle of the night and dissecting his own emotional relationship with food.

The result is a synthesis of philosophy, literature, science, memoir and personal investigation, presented in Foer’s characteristic post-modernist style that incorporates distinct voices and genres, typography and graphic art.

Foer’s book pays particular attention to the everyday horrors of factory farming. In addition to describing in acute detail the pain and suffering that these animals endure, he also elaborates on the environmental effect of our dietary choices. Foer links factory farming to global warming, environmental pollution and the birth of resistant strains of germs such as swine flu.

Foer is no hardline vegetarian. “Eating Animals” is fraught with the author’s own contradictory feelings toward eating meat, and the book is very much a discussion about the evils of big agribusiness and its ecological impact. But be warned: most reviewers have not been able to enjoy a roast after reading this book.

Who is the author?

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author of two fiction books, “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” – the former having been adapted for film in 2005. Hailed as a "certified wunderkind" by "Time", Foer has won numerous writing awards and praise for his first two novels. “Eating Animals” is his first nonfiction book.

What do others say?

“Eating Animals” has received wide praise from sources as diverse as “The Oprah Magazine”, activist groups and popular newspapers. Although the cruelty of factory farming has been discussed before, Foer adds his particular brand of modernist prose to add a new twist and perspective to an established topic of debate.

He has received particular praise for his exploration of the many justifications we have for what we eat – folklore, popular culture, family traditions and national myth – and how such tales lull us into forgetting. According to Foer, “Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity. For some, that irrationality leads to a kind of resignation.”

However, some critics maintain that Foer has favoured the topic of factory farming to the exclusion of other, similarly cruel, animal-related activities. For example, his book makes no mention of animal testing, and as such, his account is said to be incomplete.

And although some critics have criticised his sometimes-sanctimonious attitude and over-the-top writing, by and large, most readers are in the ‘love-him’ rather than ‘hate-him’ camp.

"The Huffington Post": “Eating Animals” is part personal journey, part modern muckraking and a surprisingly candid and empathetic book on food. Foer doesn’t preach, but instead invites us to have a conversation with family farmers and factory farmers, animal activists and slaughterhouse workers. His book is important not because he has all the answers (he often acknowledges his own uncertainty), but because he asks the right questions and makes it impossible for us not to ask them too… Foer’s rare accomplishment is that he flinches from neither the complexities of meat’s attraction nor the realities about what, in the era of factory farming, the chickens on our plate do to the world in which we live.”

"The Globe and Mail": “How terrific that he has emerged with an accessible, snappily written work destined for mainstream media focus and a wide readership, even among the thinking classes who have done their level darnedest – with some success – not to think about who’s on the end of their fork and how he or she got there.”

"Publishers Weekly": "Without pulling any punches – factory farming is given the full expose treatment – Foer combines an array of facts, astutely written anecdotes, and his furious, inward-spinning energy to make a personal, highly entertaining take on an increasingly visible (and book-selling) moral question; call it, perhaps, 'An Omnivore’s Dilemma'.”

How do I get hold of it?

“Eating Animals” is published in South Africa by Penguin Books. It is available at Exclusive Books at a price of approximately R224.00.