Imserba Webstore - Eating Animals

	List Price: $25.99 Our Price: $15.20 Your Save: $ 10.79 ( 42% ) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company
Average Customer Rating:
Binding: Hardcover Dewey Decimal Number: 641.303 EAN: 9780316069908 Feature: ISBN13: 9780316069908 ISBN: 0316069906 Label: Little, Brown and Company Manufacturer: Little, Brown and Company Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 352 Publication Date: 2009-11-02 Publisher: Little, Brown and Company Studio: Little, Brown and Company
Features ISBN13: 9780316069908 Condition: NEW Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Related Items Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 The Conscious Cook: Delicious Meatless Recipes That Will Change the Way You Eat The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism
Editorial Reviews: 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. Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved, Eating Animals is a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told-and the stories we now need to tell.
Spotlight customer reviews: Customer Rating: Summary: Recommended Comment: This is tough stuff. It is by no means easy to read about the cruelty that is inflicted on animals within food factories. And as hard as it is to read about, it's important that this information be made public, and something is done about it. The book is presented in a somewhat unconventional structure, and the most compelling section is the story of going undercover into the factory. Strong research. The section on turkeys right before Thanksgiving was devastating. The part that hit me hardest was the sadism of some of the workers, particularly with pigs. On another note: Foer starts the book with the words "When I was young..." which was interesting, because, in many eyes, he's Still young. Not that that means anything in the case of the book-- it just seemed an interesting comment, especially from someone lambasted in the past for "being young." That aside: the book is recommended. Although there are some funny moments, some is really hard to 'look at'. but hopefully it will help to change people's behavior and buying habits with food (even if you don't go vegetarian, but can be aware of who and what you're supporting), and help change a most important and often overlooked avenue of industry, life, and suffering. Customer Rating: Summary: Eating Animals-- GREAT! Comment: This is an excellent read! It combines all the things I love about J.S. Foer with an issue I am very passionate about. I have read a lot of books about factory farming and animal rights, but this one brings a literary feel and a new perspective. I could pass this along to non-vegan friends and not see the eyes roll. Customer Rating: Summary: A Chicken is not only a chicken! Comment: This is an excellent book. I just read the review in the New York Times and was disappointed by the last paragraph which stated that readers wondered how Foer could expend so much energy and caring on the fate of pigs and chickens when he should be more concerned about the death of 1 million children caused by malaria, and atrocities in the Congo caused by conflicts. This argument implies that: 1. we should not be humane towards animals while malaria exists, 2. as soon as malaria is cured, then we can take care of animals. Yeh, right, like that ever happened after we eradicated any disease.... 3. And just when have we ever ended a war somewhere and then moved on to help the animals who suffered there? It's a cheap argument... and unfortunately, one which is commonly used. Isaac Bashevis Singer said that for animals, every day was an Auschwitz. The pain of animals is as real as the pain of people. So why does it drive some people mad when we compare the two? Why don't they use that anger to fight against all suffering... We have only one heart. It's the same heart which we use to help people, as well as animals. When will people stop repeating that we cannot do one until we have settled the other? And isn't that a catch 22? People hurt animals yet we should not help animals until we have helped every person..... Customer Rating: Summary: Enough! Comment: OK! I've been hit over the head with the sledgehammer of righteous, morality. I get it, Mr. Foer. If I choose to eat that sirloin burger, I will have to eat it while being burdened with a guilt of biblical proportions. At seventy years old I have tried to eat a fresh, wholesome and healthy diet, one that protects me from high blood pressure, and my husband from more cardiac problems. And I mean, a healthy diet - I make sure of it. I bought Mr. Foer's book because I feel strongly about food quality, and wanted more education on our food supply. After three blood-dripping chapters, I felt my very human-ness under attack because I had these taste-tingling urges for grilled salmon and roasted pork tenderloin. I am happy the author and his wife are adopting a vegetarian diet. But please, spare me the guilt-producing, twist-the-knife rhetoric. I will continue to fight against processed food, and fight for eating more fruits and vegetables. But I refuse to subject myself to the guts and gore you so very specifically articulate. I get it that you don't want to eat Lassie, your moral equivalent to eating animals. But please know, I just ate some cold, cooked shrimp. I followed it with a romaine salad, with blue cheese, walnuts, and apples. I didn't weep for shame. Customer Rating: Summary: Confused Comment: First, there was Michael Pollan, whose book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," a book I deeply admire, exposed the horrors (and yes, they are horrors) of what is now called "factory farming" and the devastating effects of agribusiness on the American diet. And there was Barbara Kingsolver, whose chatty family experiment in local eating ("Animal, Vegetable, Miracle") popularized the notion of growing your own or at least patronizing the local farmer's market. Now there is Jonathan Safran Foer, who deploys his considerable literary gifts against factory farming of every kind (pork, poultry, and fish, primarily, Pollan having already covered beef). Foer is a recent convert to vegetarianism and to philosophical ideas about animal rights. He proselytizes with a convert's zeal, beginning with a clever Swiftian analysis of why it might be as acceptable to eat dogs as it is to eat chicken. His depictions of giant crowded poultry houses, of sprawling hog farms and their lagoons of manure, of the tons of discarded "bycatch" of fishing trawlers are riveting and utterly appalling. This is also a deeply confused book. On the one hand, Foer is drawn to the absolutist position: it is never acceptable to eat animals. Farming, he feels, even humane family farming, must inevitably inflict pain, if only at slaughter, so one must always abstain. This position, however, is never explored deeply, only stated, again and again. Foer never clearly says whether he is a vegetarian or a vegan, although logic would require the latter. He briefly discusses egg layers (and their inevitable byproduct, male layer chickens) He does not discuss dairy farming (and its inevitable byproduct, male calves). What to do with those male chickens and calves? Does he eschew leather, a byproduct of cattle slaughter? He does not say. Furthermore, he includes sympathetic portraits of a number of small scale farmers whose treatment of animals seems admirable, although they always fail Foer's standard of "no pain should be inflicted, not ever." Occasionally, he retreats even from his measured admiration, as when he takes a gratuitous slap at Joel Salatin, the poultry farmer Pollan admires in "Omnivore." He cannot bring himself to say, as Pollan does, that eating as little meat as possible and seeking out humanely raised meat might be a good idea for some. Instead, he draws (offensive, I thought) parallels between the civil rights movement and the animal rights movement. The book held my attention until about the halfway point, when it ran out of gas and began to recycle its arguments. This is a book heavily dependent on book learning (copious notes), as opposed to the work of someone who had spent considerable time on a farm or around animals (undercover PETA expeditions excluded). It is, one could say, an urban book by an urban author for an urban audience that surely needs a good shake as it reaches for the package of cheap Tyson chicken thighs at the Fairway. (The ready availability of chicken parts-- packages that contain only breasts or thighs or wings--is a direct result of factory farming.) I'm all for any author who can get people to think about--and hopefully rebel against--the unhealthful and cruel practices of assembly line meat production. But if one can never inflict pain on an animal, what am I to do when hornworms devour my (organic) tomato crop or potato beetles defoliate the potatoes? Foer is eloquent when he discusses the nervous systems of fish in relation to their awareness of pain. He doesn't say anything about insects.