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A review by classyklassen
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
challenging
dark
informative
sad
tense
fast-paced
5.0
oh my... it's hard to put into words how much I FELT this book. i always thought that I would go vegetarian somewhere in the vague future with the sort of excuse of "once my (abysmal) iron levels get better" I'll fr go vego like 100%. i also always thought that if I went vegetarian I would do it purely because of environmental reasons and not one of animal rights/welfare. like I knew that a lot of animals were treated poorly and believed that that should change but not enough to fully stop eating meat. but😅😅 um😅😅 this book tells you that YOU the reader already generally know how bad the meat industry is, we all do. most people (myself included) don't WANT to know how terrible we treat animals every single day but wow.
it was actually really difficult for me to get through this book at certain parts which I wasn't expecting. i thought i fully understood what I was in for but it was so much worse than that. i have been making excuses for myself for a really long time but I'm going to start phasing out meat eating NOW. what I love about this book is that it does not demonize meat eaters and does not advocate for everyone in the entire world to stop eating meat. it advocates for YOU to care about animal welfare and encourages you to question how far you are willing to go to ignore what injustices that you know are happening in favour of you eating a yummy meal. factory farming is the issue at hand but there's almost no way in our society to ethically eat meat.
it actually made me think about the tv the good place quite a lot actually, if you've seen the show you'll know that it talks about how people are inherently good however it's literally impossible to be a good person in modern society because of the ripple on effects of your actions and how (i know that this phrase is overused but it's true "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism". in a hypothetical world (or 100 years ago...) where there was no factory farming, ethical debates about whether it is okay for humans to farm and then slaughter & eat them could be had, however, it is now impossible to have these discussions outside of the context of factory farms unless you're out there tending to your own animals, breeding them, raising them, feeding them, caring for them when they're sick and then ultimately slaughtering and eating them.
I found myself being really disgusted by the scent of meat while I was reading this, that's how much of a visceral reaction this book had on me. while I can't say that I will never ever eat meat again, I don't think I will be able to do so without thinking of this book and without a heavy amount of guilt. I know a lot of my friends are vegetarian so if you have any tips for me please let me know! it's going to be difficult to juggle with coeliac disease but I'm going to try.
two quotes really stuck with me:
"Not responding is a response-we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle".
&
"We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, what did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals"
these quotes can be applied to almost every single injustice that we continue to perpetuate by our inaction - climate change, the fast fashion industry, the mistreatment of uyghur muslims in china, the current attack on trans rights in the states and around the world. even if we're not the CEOs expanding our near monopolies or the government officials turning a blind eye to human rights issues, we are still contributing (in some ways more than others) to the injustices of the world with our ignorance or with our compliance ans lack of questioning (or the intentional evasion of the truth). while I obviously mainly took in the ideas about eating animals, this book also made me take a really introspective look about myself and think about what I'm actually doing for the issues that I actually care about. Everyone should read this book and if you don't want to only because you don't want to know and you're afraid of what you'll have to give up after you know, you're not only part of the problem and you're perpetuating it.
it was actually really difficult for me to get through this book at certain parts which I wasn't expecting. i thought i fully understood what I was in for but it was so much worse than that. i have been making excuses for myself for a really long time but I'm going to start phasing out meat eating NOW. what I love about this book is that it does not demonize meat eaters and does not advocate for everyone in the entire world to stop eating meat. it advocates for YOU to care about animal welfare and encourages you to question how far you are willing to go to ignore what injustices that you know are happening in favour of you eating a yummy meal. factory farming is the issue at hand but there's almost no way in our society to ethically eat meat.
it actually made me think about the tv the good place quite a lot actually, if you've seen the show you'll know that it talks about how people are inherently good however it's literally impossible to be a good person in modern society because of the ripple on effects of your actions and how (i know that this phrase is overused but it's true "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism". in a hypothetical world (or 100 years ago...) where there was no factory farming, ethical debates about whether it is okay for humans to farm and then slaughter & eat them could be had, however, it is now impossible to have these discussions outside of the context of factory farms unless you're out there tending to your own animals, breeding them, raising them, feeding them, caring for them when they're sick and then ultimately slaughtering and eating them.
I found myself being really disgusted by the scent of meat while I was reading this, that's how much of a visceral reaction this book had on me. while I can't say that I will never ever eat meat again, I don't think I will be able to do so without thinking of this book and without a heavy amount of guilt. I know a lot of my friends are vegetarian so if you have any tips for me please let me know! it's going to be difficult to juggle with coeliac disease but I'm going to try.
two quotes really stuck with me:
"Not responding is a response-we are equally responsible for what we don't do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle".
&
"We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, what did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals"
these quotes can be applied to almost every single injustice that we continue to perpetuate by our inaction - climate change, the fast fashion industry, the mistreatment of uyghur muslims in china, the current attack on trans rights in the states and around the world. even if we're not the CEOs expanding our near monopolies or the government officials turning a blind eye to human rights issues, we are still contributing (in some ways more than others) to the injustices of the world with our ignorance or with our compliance ans lack of questioning (or the intentional evasion of the truth). while I obviously mainly took in the ideas about eating animals, this book also made me take a really introspective look about myself and think about what I'm actually doing for the issues that I actually care about. Everyone should read this book and if you don't want to only because you don't want to know and you're afraid of what you'll have to give up after you know, you're not only part of the problem and you're perpetuating it.