A review by dean_issov
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

challenging dark emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

What greater irony is there other than me typing this review while I eat spam? I'm no vegetarian or vegan but I do respect their moral decision to not buy anything that has anything to do with the exploitation of an animal. Having reading this book, however, has left me with the same feeling that Animal Liberation left me: disgust and shock. This book does have a lighter tone than Animal Liberation but it does not back away from any of the violent and inhumane proccesses that all the factory farmed animals have to go through. Not only are the proccesses inhumane, but it is also completely unhealthy for us. How would you feel knowing that most, if not all, factory farmed animals that you buy in your local market has been artificially bred, ate all kinds of drugs and unhealthy food before it inevitably goes to the slaughterhouse where it gets shot, skinned, chopped, all while being conscious and without any pain relievers? No wonder meat causes numerous illnesses and heart problems, we don't even know what's in them! 

This book is also more personal which I quite enjoyed, I don't think we realize how personal eating animals are until we really get to sit down and think about it. For certain, there are moral and environmental decisions we make when choosing vegetarianism/veganism instead of the default meat eating, but deep down it is more than that; it is culture, family, friendship, social constructs, and many more that leads up to why most human beings involuntarily eat meat on a daily basis since they were born. In order to change ones way of eating, one must ignore all the emotional aspects of eating animals and focus on what is just; who is the one suffering from the decisions that we make on a daily basis? Because it surely isn't us. 

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