Word: foer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Good News: Hopefully, with the help of energy-saving light bulbs and vegetarian followers of Jonathon Safran-Foer, we can hold it off until we’ve invented cute robots like Wall-E who will eventually help us repopulate our destitute planet...
Perhaps it’s counterproductive to belabor animal suffering in the way that Foer does; those who eat meat often argue that it is irrelevant to apply the same morality we do to human suffering. Foer makes an excellent argument that for himself and much of his audience meat is nutritionally unnecessary and ecologically harmful, but using a moral argument to evince a change in people’s daily lives may be ineffective. Foer’s facts are visceral and damning for those who sympathize, but they may not be enough...
Nonbelievers may find Foer’s arguments about factory-farming’s human impact more convincing. He enumerates issues of water pollution, abuse of the work force, cutthroat competition with local businesses and near-intolerably low health standards. Foer could have written a book just about these aspects of industrial farming, and it may well have provided a more compelling rationale for choosing vegetarianism. But it would have been less affecting. However, like his novels, “Eating Animals” often uses graphics, such as a small box the size of an industrial chicken cage...
...power, though, is neither its scope nor its journalistic merit. Rather, the importance of “Eating Animals” lies in the depth and nuance of Foer’s argument and in the portrait he sketches of animal agriculture as it stands today. Foer is occasionally shrill in his denunciation of factory farms, but his examination of animal welfare representatives—a vegan activist, several “ethical farmers” and a small slaughterhouse owner—is both more in-depth and more critically engaged, if for no other reason than...
...conception of himself as a concerned citizen rather than a journalist is silly and pedantic, it is a necessary one in the context that he provides. The decision to eat meat is central, though perhaps more banal, in a way that other moral dilemmas are not. As Foer notes, culture is expressed in eating practices, and to change what we eat is to fundamentally change our identity. But change can also mean progress, and although diehard carnivores looking for reasons not to give up meat will find holes in Foer’s argument, it is more compelling and accessible...