Eating Animals

If you want to find horror stories about the way human beings treat animals, you don’t have to look far. Industrialized fishing and production-line animal husbandry have made us monstrous in the way we sustain ourselves, with less and less regard for other living things, and a short-sighted disregard for our own future. If we are what we eat, then the way we harvest what we currently consume makes us an inexcusably cruel and heartless species. The 2008 documentary film Food Inc. provided powerful arguments for most anyone considering vegetarianism as a lifestyle choice, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s book will make it even harder not to make that choice. Foer is a vivid and engaging writer, bringing his skills as a novelist to the urgency of the nonfiction tale he tells here. Anyone who read Everything Is Illuminated is bound to have recognized his gifts, and those gifts are not wasted on a subject as important as the one he takes on in Eating Animals. The stories he tells here are not for the faint of heart. This is a Grand Guignol of human indifference to suffering, and a soul-withering account of how unnecessary such cruelty is. Read it and weep.