Copies of Eating Animals on display at the book signing.
The New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Safran Foer visited Boston College’s Vanderslice Cabaret Room to read from, discuss and sign his newest book, Eating Animals, that was released just this year.
Having won tremendous praise for his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which recounts a man’s effort to acquaint himself with his ancestry, and for his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which describes a young boy’s quest to understand his father’s death in the World Trade Center attack, Foer has certainly made a name for himself in the literary world.
His newest endeavor, entitled Eating Animals, is a written documentary on the horrors of factory farms and the ways in which people can improve the treatment of animals. Sprinkled generously with Foer’s own ideas and opinions about vegetarianism and the harsh, unfair treatment of animals, the book delves into tricky territory and threatens to offend those who become defensive on the topic of meat eating.
However, Foer’s book introduces the necessary conversation about how we can better our world and the things we do to it. At the start of his speech, Foer explained his book’s discussion of the “practical questions” rather than the all-encompassing “philosophical questions” that pertain to our relationship with animals and our improvement upon it.
In order to give the audience a sense of the writing and premise of his book he began by reading a couple pages of the book’s beginning. Thrusting the reader immediately into his research for the work, the opening describes Foer’s “night visit” to a factory farm that enabled him to actually view the immoral treatment of pre-slaughtered animals that farms so strictly hide from the public. Joining him on this illegal field trip is an animal activist who becomes three-dimensional through his vivid, hilarious descriptions.
After giving a preview of his work, Foer spoke of his personal experience with vegetarianism. As a young boy, he asked his parents about why people eat animals, and upon receiving an unsatisfactory answer, he decided to become a vegetarian.
However, he found this to be much easier said than done. Until his wife’s pregnancy, he oscillated between vegetarianism and meat eating. Determined to abandon this “swinging pendulum” cycle to set a strong, consistent example for his children, Foer became a strict vegetarian.
Although he supports and exemplifies the use of vegetarianism to boycott the immoral treatment and slaughtering of animals, Foer – never asked anyone to eat differently – encouraged the audience that we can all “find ways of saying no” to factory farms as long as we all disagree with their actions. For example, a person can easily give up one serving of meat per week. As it is, we eat more meat per week than we ever have, meaning we all could “eat a little less” and undoubtedly benefit our health. Foer noted that the food industry does make it difficult to make choices that benefit animals and the environment. With the now abundant use of terms like “organic” and “free-range,” food companies have packaged their pricier products so that they appear to be the better choices over cheaper, “in-organic” brands. Yet, many of these terms have no one formal definition, meaning that they could be plastered to the side of a package that contains the same product as the term-less package next to it. Additionally, he acknowledged much of the population’s reluctance to change their eating habits in fear of altering or destroying familial traditions. Though he admitted it isn’t nice to say to your grandmother “I don’t eat what you’re making,” he maintained that her “gesture” of preparing a meal holds more importance than the actual food on the plate.
Moreover, he proposed that the turkey is not integral to Thanksgiving and that people never talk about the turkey, they simply eat it. In fact, he suggested the absence of the turkey could promote an interesting conversation along the lines of the topic discussed in Eating Animals.
Foer cited examples from recent scientific studies that suggest that conventional animal products, those that come from factory farms, have unnatural effects on the human bodies that consume them. Specifically, women who drink conventional milk are twice as likely to have twins than those who don’t. Also, adolescent girls are today going through puberty significantly earlier than they have ever before. These studies corroborate Foer’s argument against factory farm-produced animal products.
Before signing the excited audience’s copies of his books, Foer concluded his talk by defining his goal as the complete ab- stinence of the population from factory farmed meat. Deeming it “a lot to ask,” Foer declared that we need to eventually completely pull away from factory farms in order to have the best effect on the animals’ lives. For now, though, the addition of the “small steps” will bring us closer to a better environment and happier, healthier animals. Copies of Eating Animals on display at the book signing.
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