Word: foer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Jonathan Safran Foer is fascinated by trauma. His first novel, the critically acclaimed “Everything is Illuminated,” chronicled his young facsimile’s eastern European journey to unpack the lives of his Holocaust-survivor relatives. “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” his second, was a deeply-felt emotional mosaic about the resonance between the 9/11 attacks and the Dresden firebombings. Foer’s first work of nonfiction, “Eating Animals,” has a different sort of trauma in mind: the suffering inflicted on livestock...
Despite these adjustments, however, Foer’s formidable intellect remains preoccupied with the nature of violence and how a thinking person should go about dealing with it in the world. A recent father, Foer undertook the research for “Eating Animals”—an examination of the various aspects of animal agriculture—in order to come to an informed decision about whether or not to feed meat to his newborn son. What follows is a harsh portrayal of the modern factory-farming industry and an unflinching investigation of the implications that...
...Foer devotes most of this book to providing a detailed condemnation of industrial animal agriculture—or factory farming—which provides more than 99% of the meat consumed in America today and which has exactly nothing to do with the pastoral image most people associate with the word “farm...
...Since I encountered the realities of factory farming, refusing to eat conventional meat has not been a hard decision,” Foer writes. “And it’s become hard to imagine who, besides those who profit from it, would defend factory farming.” In a way, this is an evasion; Foer blames the most egregious ethical problems on how meat is raised, but is reluctant to conclusively delineate whether it is wrong to eat animals raised more comfortably...
Although many people are vaguely aware that factory-farmed animals are kept in small, crowded enclosures and are subject to painful slaughter procedures, Foer exposes the suffering of these animals throughout their entire lives, focusing largely on the degree to which the animals’ natural behaviors are disrupted. Industrial pigs, chickens and seafood (and, to a lesser extent, cattle) are prevented from engaging in any of their instinctive behaviors; chickens are kept in tiny cages and often kill and cannibalize each other for lack of social hierarchy. Pigs and fish undergo similar experiences. “I simply cannot...