Eating Animals reads like a novel.

Its author, Jonathan Safran Foer, was formerly best known for Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, two works of fiction that landed him a great deal of praise for his smart, wry voice. It is with this same voice that he elicits both cringing (and in some, queasiness) and occasionally laughter as he tackles the United States meat industry in Eating Animals. One example: Foer makes a case for adding dog meat to the American dinner table. Infused with humor (and a recipe for Stewed Dog, Wedding Style), Foer deftly uses Americas favorite pet to help us see the invisible quality of eating animals. That is, he posits that looking at the logistics of eating dogs can help us see more clearly the death involved in eating everyday meats like cows, pigs and chickens. His most effective chapter is Words/Meaning. It is part dictionary and part journal entry as he compares factory farm with family farm, free-range with fresh, and CAFO with CFE. CAFOs, for example, are concentrated animal feeding operations (factory farms) that rely on law-bending animal cruelty and CFEs are the common farming exemptions that protect the farmers that use overcrowding and other neglectful practices inherent in CAFO farming. It is this clever juxtaposition of terms through which Foer effectively illuminates the deeply entrenched hypocrisies of the meat industry. As for the queasiness, be forewarned that Foers simple prose paints a harrowing picture of animal slaughter. Largely told through the words of slaughter facility workers, the mechanized process of killing and dismembering a cow reads like a horror novel. Some might argue that humans are natural omnivores and killing animals is practically a part of our DNA. They might regard anyone concerned about the conditions of animal life and death a sentimentalist. Foer defines sentimentality in the Words/Meaning chapter as valuing emotions over reality, and he wonders: who is the sentimentalist and who is the realist? Is caring to know about the treatment of farmed animals a confrontation with the facts about the animals and ourselves or an avoidance of them?

Foer clearly believes there is power in knowledge and that we are anything but sentimental for wanting to know. True to his novelist leanings, Foer opens and closes the book with the idea of storytelling. He acknowledges that it is our relationship with the foods we eat that tells all of the stories we have to tell about ourselves. How, why, what, when and how much we eat are all infused with information about who, why and what we are. He ultimately believes if each of us really listened to our own food stories, which are usually laden with pitiful excuses (e.g. I eat the Butterball turkey at Thanksgiving with my family largely because I want to break bread with them peacefully and not raise a ruckus), and if we had access to the truth of what happens to factory-farmed animals (e.g. A fourth of all factory-farmed poultry have painful stress fractures) we would be less likely to fall prey to the willful forgetting that is necessary to eat other animals.