Beginning the week of October 26, 2009, we ran a series of reviews on HuffPost Books on Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals. It was a surprise in many ways--Safran Foer is known as a novelist, so to have a strong piece of non-fiction as his next book caught many unaware.
Even more intriguing has been the intensity of reaction to his heartfelt exploration of cruelty to animals and the pollution from animal farming. The blogs excerpted below were among the most viewed and most e-mailed of the entire Huffington Post site for the week.
Overwhelmingly, readers have been asking for more--a plan for how to make change, so stay tuned for a new series, and let us know what you'd like to hear more of.
Eating Animals is part personal journey, part modern muckraking and a surprisingly candid and empathetic book on food. Foer doesn't preach but instead invites us to have a conversation with family farmers and factory farmers, animal activists and slaughterhouse workers. His book is important not because he has all the answers (he often acknowledges his own uncertainty), but because he asks the right questions and makes it impossible for us not to ask them too. Read More
Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist. Read More
Foer makes it clear that factory farming is the exceptional human activity that debases and destroys everything it touches: land, people, communities, and most of all, the innocents at the nexus, animals. Read More
There is no essential difference between the animals we eat -- birds, cows, pigs -- and those we would not eat -- horses, perhaps, and dogs. No difference, that is, except that we form bonds with the latter and don't allow ourselves to form bonds with the former. But would you condemn your dog to a life of agony and then kill it for dinner? Read More
In the end, the book is about much more than food. It is not only a book about eating animals, but about how we shape our world by what we eat. It is a book about who we are and who we could become. As one of Foer's friends wrote to him upon his son Sasha's birth, "Everything is possible again." The world is never fixed and neither are we. When we think seriously about the food we eat, we all have another chance at being more true to ourselves. We have another chance to be better. Read More