Eating Animals

The short story: DO NOT read this book if you don't want to feel horrifically guilty about eating animals. DO read this book if you want to understand why a celebrity author death match between JSF and Michael Pollan would be epic in the way that would blow UFC title matches out of the water.

The longer story: The three stars are for the book itself (which I thought was good, but not remarkably well-written), not the book's effect on me (it's more of a five-star book in that regard). Anyway, ::obligatory and self-indulgent whining about how grad school really interferes with reading for fun::, so at some point, I put this book down when I felt like Safran Foer was being really preachy (although lord knows he can do no sin when writing novels!), and then didn't return to it for a month or two. I'm not sure whether to attribute my hiatus to needing something lighter to read, or to JSF needing to get to the goddamn point. Either way, once he got there, he convinced me not to eat chicken again, and to contemplate total vegetarianism as well. That's not the hugest leap for me, given that I stopped eating red meat & pork in the third or fourth grade, but it's a leap nonetheless. Every liberal-minded person I know knows that factory farming is an abomination, but very few people I know have actually changed their eating behaviors based on that knowledge, and I'm tired of not being one of the very few (although hopefully not “very few” forever, or even for very long). I guess it's kind of nice when reading inspires change. And props to my roommate for setting an excellent example in both the reading of this book and her switch to vegetarianism.

A favorite quote: “It shouldn't be the consumer's responsibility to figure out what's cruel and what's kind, what's environmentally destructive and what's sustainable. Cruel and destructive food products should be made illegal. We don't need the option of buying children's toys made with lead paint, or aerosols with chlorofluorocarbons, or medicines with unlabelled side effects. And we don't need the option of buying factory-farmed animals.”