After hearing much, both positive and negative, about Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent book, Eating Animals, I was delighted to finally get the opportunity to read this acclaimed book.  Foer is a gifted writer who grabs your attention and keeps you engaged. He uses several creative methods to illustrate his points, such as using five pages of printed letters to represent the number of animals used for food by the average American in their lifetime (21,000 animals) — would anyone want to be responsible for that many deaths? But Foer also goes on to document what he uncovered in years of investigation about the brutality of turning living, breathing, feeling beings into a macabre disassembly line of death. He uncovers the cruelty in the system, the sick and diseased animals that are forced to live bleak lives in their own filth. He clearly sees the depersonalization that must exist for humans to turn nonhumans into units of profit. He understands the rivers of blood that are let flow daily to assuage the global demand for flesh, a demand that is increasing.

Foer is a talented writer. He is creative and does an admirable job of gathering a large array of material. It is difficult not to be in awe of his writing, so artfully has he crafted this book. Honestly, I was riveted throughout the reading, even when I was disappointed in the attitude he espoused. As a writer, Jonathan Safran Foer is a unique talent. I admire that immensely.

Yet somehow, with all of that, there is much that Foer misses. He seems to romance the happy meat farms where men, still objectifying animals for profit, do so with less cruelty than factory farms. But in the end, there is still a major deception at work here, and some of it is self-deception as well.  This is evident within the words of turkey farmer Frank Reese, who relates that his birds look at him as if he is betraying them when he sends them off.  The birds are right; he is. He is doing it and trying to feel good about it because their brief childhoods were less toxic than they would have been in other facilities (but still fall far short of what their life could have been had they not been commodities). Of course, those other facilities are nothing short of institutionalized horror, plain and simple, so that isn’t much of a recommendation. He pretends to love his birds; he obviously enjoys their company. But in the end, he betrays them and sends them off to a horrible end, of which he spares himself the sight. He is still trafficking in death for profit, no matter how hard Foer tries to paint him with angelic imagery.

Here is what Foer’s books misses and questions he never asks:

Is it okay to use animals for human purposes as long as they are not abjectly cruelly used and killed? Does the animal himself have any right to exist? Is there any intrinsic value to the animal? Who determines if humans are the only beings of worth, and how can that be when we are the worst, cruelest, most selfish and destructive beings on the planet?

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