'I simply wanted to know - for myself and my family - what meat is. Where does it come from? How is it produced? What are the economic, social and environmental effects? Are there animals that it is straightforwardly right to eat? Are there situations in which not eating animals is wrong? If this began as a personal quest, it didn't stay that way for long'. Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals" is the most original book on the subject of food written this century. It will change the way you think, and change the way you eat, for good.

Reviews

Starred Review. The latest from novelist Foer is a surprising but characteristically brilliant memoir-investigation, boasting an exhaustively-argued account of one man-child's decade-long struggle with vegetarianism. On the eve of becoming a father, Foer takes all the arguments for and against vegetarianism a neurotic step beyond and, to decide how to feed his coming baby, investigates everything from the intelligence level of our most popular meat providers-cattle, pigs, and poultry-to the specious self-justifications (his own included) for eating some meat products and not others. Foer offers a lighthearted counterpoint to his investigation in doting portraits of his loving grandmother, and her meat-and-potatoes comfort food, leaving him to wrestle with the comparative weight of food's socio-cultural significance and its economic-moral-political meaning. 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. Publishers Weekly

Foer's aim is not to make your choice, but to inform it. He has done us all a great service, and we, and the animals, owe him our thanks." (Andrew Weil, MD )

"Foer's case for ethical vegetarianism is wholly compelling....Eating Animals is a blend of solid-and discomforting-reportage with fierce advocacy that will make committed carnivores squeal." (Kirkus Reviews )

Author Biography

Jonathan Safran Foer was born in 1977. He is the author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything Is Illuminated, which won the National Jewish Book Award and the Guardian First Book Award. He is also the editor of A Convergence of Birds. He lives in New York.