Eating Animals

You can agree wholeheartedly with huge chunks of novelist Jonathan Safran Foer's sprawling and stirring new pro-vegetarian polemic, Eating Animals, and at the same time find it pompous and annoying. A few years ago, humbled by the birth of his first child (this alone causes a twinge of readerly alarm), Foer began an exhaustive investigation into the morality of eating meat. He interviewed cattle ranchers and PETA activists, visited an industrial poultry plant, and then poured the results of his research into this compelling, earnest, overly cerebral, and endlessly debatable opus. First, the compelling: Foer is outraged by industrial farming practices that produce 99 percent of the meat in the United States...read more