Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer, who wrote the novel EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, published in 2005, offers a smartly written nonfiction look at eating creatures that provide us with meat--from pork and beef to poultry and fish. Listeners may find the tone of his argument smug, even irritating, as he makes his well-researched, emotional plea for "ethical vegetarianism." Sometimes downright Swiftian in his suggestions, Foer says, "When we eat factory-farmed meat, we live, literally, on tortured flesh." Jonathan Ross narrates Foer's data, stories, and anecdotes intelligently. Ross neatly handles concerns about the environmental impact of meat-eating, including food-borne illnesses and the rivers of animal fecal matter contaminating our waterways, as well as augments his case with horrific descriptions of inhumane industrial slaughterhouses. Foer's chilling treatise will leave the carnivores among us chewing on this gastronomical dilemma. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 2, 2009
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.