We all have food memories. We recall helping a parent or grandparent in the kitchen, meeting a good friend for dinner, giving thanks over a big meal. We typically look back on these events as moments created in time among people and not as a series of actions leading to food being presented on the table. In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer attempts to tell the story of how animals make their way to our plates, thus acknowledging the importance of food in our lives and memories.

Foer, who wrote Everything is Illuminated in 2002 and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in 2005, does an admirable job of remaining (mostly) objective while investigating the details of factory farming in the U.S. The reality is that to explore raising animals as food in the U.S. is to study factory farming because they are nearly one in the same. “99 percent of all animals eaten in [the United States] come from ‘factory farms,’” states Foer.

According to a 2010 article in Science Magazine, people in the U.S. currently consume about 15% of the meat eaten despite making up only about 5% of the world’s population. To keep up with the growing demand, farming methods have had to undergo dramatic shifts over the last 100 years. While these changes can primarily be seen in the U.S., they are now making their way to Europe and Asia. These advancements take us away from the family farming most of us associate with livestock production where animals are raised on rolling green fields. Now, animals are bred to create more, tastier meat and to do so quicker.

Every industry must periodically take a look at their methodologies to increase efficiency. As consumers, we often don’t know what those changes are. A lot of information about meat production is public, but Foer proposes that consumers make a choice not to learn too much because sometimes it’s easier just not to know. After all, eating meat pumped full of antibiotics can be discomfiting.  Facts even harder to swallow are around the how animals are treated. Many breeds of animals have been bred to a point that they can no longer naturally reproduce. When they do reproduce, that process is sped up and animals are weaned weeks and months before would happen in nature. Animals are fattened up for slaughter in a rapid cycle that doesn’t allow them to fuller develop. Slaughterhouses operate for speed and have little regard for the pain of the animal or humane methods of slaughtering.

Foer cites that in the U.S. 63% of households have at least one pet and that $34 million is spent annually on those animals. If Americans knew how the animals they were eating were raised and slaughtered, it could be hard to reconcile the differences in animals for eating and animals for keeping as pets.

In Eating Animals, Foer accomplished a wonderful feat by rarely going into gory details. There are plenty of videos that exist showing animals being mistreated and the visuals are horrific. Foer nearly always sticks to the facts. The facts are not good, but by not straying into the graphic details, he lets the readers’ minds fill in the blanks. And it is incredibly effective.

At the end of the novel, Foer ends essentially with the argument that if people must eat meat that a better choice would be to eat meat from family farms who practice human slaughter methods.

Eating Animals gives people the opportunity to know what it is they are putting in their mouth. After conducting his research for this book, Foer felt he knew enough about the food on his table to decide to be a vegetarian.

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