User:Jasper van Loenen/RWRM/annotation

Eating Animals

Eating animals is non-fiction book by Jonathan Safran Foer and was published in 2009 by Little, Brown and Company. In the book, Foer describes different types of factory farming and how little the average consumer knows about their existence, let alone what happens inside. I first heard about the book through an interview with Foer which I saw on-line and I liked his attitude towards people still eating meat: he doesn't get mad at them, but tries to to explain how the meat industry works so they can make an educated choice. I thought it would make for an interesting read.

Foer himself is the narrator of the book. By switching between stories about his family and their positive relation with food, and stories about the horrors of factory farming, he tries to show both sides of the discussion: the nice memories of all the things his grandmother used to make, and the cruel and unhygienic way animals are slaughtered. And that is where I think he comes up short: he basically sums up a list of positive and negative food-related anecdotes. Being a (fairly new) vegetarian myself and not being an American – most, if not all, of the mass scale meat factories he talks about are located in the United States – I might not be part of his intended audience, but still I find it hard to believe he manages to keep a whole lot of his readers 'entertained' until the very end of the book. To be honest, I didn't make it there.