“We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory – disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly that tortured flesh becomes our own”.
Just a heads up! If you dislike vegetarians or vegans in any way, shape or form, I strongly suggest you stop reading now and continue being ignorant and naive elsewhere.
Alternatively, you could put your opinions aside, read this review and learn some pretty important shiz.
I’ve been a vegetarian for about 2 months now. I went cold turkey (excuse the pun) and devoured one of Mum’s delicious tuna rolls one Friday arvo and that was it. No more meat. Goodbye. Ciao. Toodaloo! Step away from the sausage.
My motivations are as follows. 1) I thought I couldn’t do it. 2) I wanted to stop eating the animals I found so cute. 3) I didn’t want to support industries that I considered to have no value for animal life.
Sometimes I think, ‘surely it wouldn’t hurt if I ate two tuna sushi rolls for lunch’ (tuna is my thing, can you tell?) then I remember, no, I’ve come so far. Now I realise there is a reason why I have exercised my willpower more in the last few months then I have my (*cough* inexistent) abs.
I’m not going to preach my vegetarianism to you. I just hope either this book, or this review will encourage you to actively seek free-range products and meat from smaller, local family farms.
There is no way around this. Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals is heavy. One might assume he’s a hardcore activist working on behalf of PETA, but the reason he has written this book and conducted such thorough investigations, is because he wants to be a good father.
He wants to be educated. He wants to feed his young son the best possible food. He wants to be ethical and sustainable. He wants his son to be educated, ethical and sustainable.
Good on him. You go Glen Coco!
Eating Animals presents the horrific and astonishing facts of factory farming in the most addictive prose. If you choose to believe the information Foer presents, you will often feel nauseated.
For example – did you know on average Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime. Crazy, right?
I’ll be honest. You’ll only enjoy this book if you are open-minded, want to be educated about animal agriculture OR are considering changing your eating habits.
Eating Animals is eye opening and hectic. And whilst Foer doesn’t slander the omnivores among us, he does present a quite convincing case on how our grazing habits ultimately affect the Earth and praises the family farms still in operation.
Although I’ve chosen the ‘veggie life’ I still cook meat for my partner. One thing Eating Animals has done is edged me to consider buying more expensive cuts from butchers who support small, local farms. Trust me it’s worth every damn cent to support the small number of farmers working against the grain towards better animal welfare. Startingly, less than 1% of animals killed for meat in America come from family farms.
For those who think vegetarians have arms that will snap like stale breadsticks due to a lack of protein, you really need to get educated! There’s plenty of products and fresh produce on the market to fulfil the nutritional requirements of us herbivores.
Rest assured, I’m perfectly fine. Plus, the Thai-style tofu from Woolies is the bomb diggity.
I can’t say that hen in the 67 square inch cage is perfectly fine though.
Rating: 4/5 worms
Image: Farm Foward
