12/06 – Short Synopsis Sunday #2 – EATING ANIMALS
Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer
From the Publisher:
Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.
About the Author:
Jonathan Safran Foer is one of the most acclaimed young writers of his generation, a “certified wunderkind” (Time) whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. He has earned a National Jewish Book Award, a Guardian First Book Award, and remarkable praise for his first two novels, Everything Is Illuminated (adapted for film in 2005) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. EATING ANIMALS is his first work of nonfiction.
My Review:
352 pages.
I was interested in this book because I’m a carnivore – big time!
I have friends that are vegans and vegetarians.
I wanted to learn more about eating a non-meat diet.
Interesting facts from the book:
On average, Americans eat the equivalent of
21,00 entire animals, in a lifetime.
(Okay – this is overwhelming. *)
In a typical cage for egg-laying hens, each bird has about
67 square inches of space.
(I now only buy cage free eggs. *)
Dogs are eaten in the Phillippines to overcome bad luck.
Dogs are eaten as medicine in China and Korea.
Dogs are eaten for enhanced libido in Nigeria.
(I can’t begin to wrap my head around the above,
and I’m loving on my pug as I type! *)
Eating Animals is filled with page after page
of startling facts and insight,
most of which made me want to gag…but that doesn’t mean
that I’m becoming a vegetarian or a vegan…at least not yet.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thanks to Anna and the folks at Hachette for
giving me the opportunity to read and review this book.
*
DISCLAIMER
I received a copy of this book, at no charge to me,
in exchange for my HONEST review.
No items that I receive “in kind”
are ever sold…they are kept by me,
<
span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">given to family or friends,
or donated to The Polk Education Foundation,
my local library, or given away on
contests on this blog.
*
Wow! Interesting.. Not going to become a vegetarian – but I will have to check out this book!
Sorry to hear this book didn't help you make the jump. I'm a vegan, and for that I have been extremely interested in reading this book.