"Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer

I am a carnivore. So, the irony wasn't lost on me when I was asked to review Jonathan Safran Foer's new book “Eating Animals,” a non-fiction account of his exploration into the horrors of factory farming in the United States. 

I had fully expected to be shocked by Safran Foer's descriptions of how chickens, turkeys, pigs and cows are treated inhumanely in our heartland's conglomerate-owned plants, where not only is there no care given to animals' well-being while alive, but absolutley no care given to their slaughter. The book didn't disappoint on this front. In fact, it exceeded expectations.

At its best, Eating Animals provides incredibly descriptive, barbaric reports on the savagery found in America's meat mills – including “jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room,” where the end result is nothing less than a disaster that somehow ends up on our plates. According to the book, more that 95 percent of chickens become infected with E. coli and 70 to 90 percent are also infected with a deadly pathogen called campylobacter, due the chemical baths used to remove the birds' slime, odor and bacteria. 

The atrocities don't stop there. Next, comes the slaughter and processing. Another gruesome affair.

Then we get to the pig farms.

In other words, Safran Foer presents a world in which almost every piece of meat we consume comes from a tortured animal that was given a sickening and unspeakable death.

It has the effect that the author intended. It most certainly makes one think twice – or three times – before downing chicken wings or a burger. And, if really hitting the mark, it may turn some to vegetarianism or veganism

However, beyond this “effect” - not to negate its importance - Eating Animals has little to offer. No journey. No experience beyond fits and starts of storytelling and in-depth commentary on factory farm brutality. 

Safran Foer does visit some family farms, even interviewing some caring farmers who believe in a humane and sustainable method of raising animals and bringing their meat to market. Still, these stopovers are simply crammed in between vivid descriptions of animal barbarism, ultimately muddled into the larger, incoherent mess.

It is as though the author completely forgot about the concept of a narrative through-line. His only attempt at a framework comes in the use of over-precious hipster graphics to loosely create chapter headings. All the same, the graphic dividers are too juvenile and trite to come off as anything but prententious nonsense.

Case in point: Five pages repeating “Influence/Speechlessness” in tiny print may have been meant to illustrate the fact that Americans eat the same number of animals in their lifetime as letters on those pages (21,000 to be exact), but it just ended up as self-important, second-rate poster art – and a distraction from the matter at hand.

That said, there were a few flashes that offered an all too brief glimpse into what Eating Animals could have been, if it had only been given a narrative arc.

At a couple of junctures, Safran Foer opens the dialogue to a cast of characters which range from an animal activist to a factory farmer to a conflicted family farmer.   Each tells their tale in compelling first person account. These distinct voices provided the faintest traces of a larger human story that could have gotten to the core of the inhumane treatment of the animals that Safran Foer describes with such zeal. It could have turned this disturbing collection of reports about animal cruelty into a book worth reading, rather than a book worth excerpting.

And, for the record, Eating Animals did convince me to seek out family farm raised animal meat whenever possible. So, those excerpts are definitely worth a read.