Eating Animals

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2009

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Background

Genre Context: Critiques on the Food Industry

While Jonathan Safran Foer notes a long history of discussions on the ethics of meat consumption, Eating Animals is specifically a critique of existing standards and accepted realities of modern consumption. This places Eating Animals in a genre of works that expose or critique the food industry, which includes the modern American diet and the methods of agriculture and food acquisition. Documentaries like Supersize Me (2004), directed by Morgan Spurlock, analyze the effects of modern diet choices on the human body, while works dating back as far as Upton Sinclair’s 1906 work The Jungle critique the methods by which food arrives at the market. Contemporaries, such as Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and In Defense of Food (2008), mix the discussions of health, ethics, environmentalism, and animal rights. Still further works, such as J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), focus on the rights and treatment of animals.

The food criticism genre is known for making broader arguments about the ways people consume food and interact with food production systems. Critiques of fast food, such as McDonald’s and Burger King, for example, are usually aimed at convincing readers and viewers to abstain from excess consumption of fast food and other unhealthy food options. Much like Eating Animals, works like Food Inc., a 2008 documentary by Robert Kenner, focuses on exposing factory farming. The ultimate goal of both works is to convince viewers and readers to explore options outside of meat, especially meat that is factory farmed. In such works, it is important to keep in mind the goals of the writing, which, in Foer’s case, seem to be to urge the reader to become either a vegan, vegetarian, or selective omnivore, which he defines as a person who eats only meats that have been ethically raised and slaughtered and excludes meats that come from factory farming. Foer himself decides to become a vegetarian, but, maybe more notably, actress and animal rights activist Natalie Portman decided to become a vegan by abstaining from both meat and animal products after reading Eating Animals.

Authorial Context: Jonathan Safran Foer

Foer is a novelist and creative writing professor currently working at New York University. He earned acclaim with his novels Everything Is Illuminated in 2002 and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close in 2005. Foer attended Princeton University in the mid-1990s and received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Much of Foer’s work is influenced by his Jewish background, and he allows themes of remembrance through food, abstaining from certain food choices, and defending the rights of vulnerable people and animals to play a significant role in Eating Animals. Serving as a board member of Farm Forward, an organization that advocates for thoughtful food choices, Foer has been a vegetarian periodically since he was 10 years old and decides at the conclusion of Eating Animals to make vegetarianism a permanent lifestyle change. In Eating Animals, Foer warns of the possibility of a zoonotic pandemic, or a widespread disease transferred from animals to humans, and the COVID-19 pandemic led him to further advocate for a reduction in meat consumption on health and environmental grounds.

In reading Eating Animals, Foer’s history of vegetarianism and Jewish philosophy significantly impact the framing of his arguments. He begins with a discussion of his grandmother, a survivor of the Holocaust, a genocide perpetrated by Germany in the mid-19th century that targeted Jewish people. Foer frames his discussion as a balance between the memory and fellowship of meat consumption and the ethics behind raising his newborn son. While both Foer and his wife, Nicole, who have since divorced, were both tentative vegetarians throughout their lives, Foer looks on the birth of his son as a decisive moment in his relationship with food and eating animals. At the same time as Foer looks forward to forming his own family, he needs to reconcile the connections to his and his family’s past that revolve around consumption of meats, such as his grandmother’s signature chicken dish and turkey at Thanksgiving. As expected, considering Foer’s background in fiction writing, these key points in his personal life are used to weave a narrative structure into the work, framing the discussion of ethics and morality around “characters” and events.