005. The Animals Have Been Eaten

   The novel has been read, the responses have been noted and analyzed, and the conclusion has been well-digested. Why then, does it still feel like I'm waiting for more from Jonathan Safran Foer's novel, Eating Animals? I've given him countless hours of my life, ones that I will undoubtedly never get back, and yet I'm still adding bacon to whatever dish it is that I'm having today. I'm not even thinking twice about where that bacon came from, or why it ended up on my plate. Eating Animals, although keeping you entertained for the entire ride, is a novel that sells itself short with too high of a bias and lack of focus and ends up on the end of your bookshelf for onlookers to judge.

    It's not easy to digest or analyze Eating Animals, but if you do it subjectively, you can be pretty successful at recognizing the great writing and form by Safran Foer. Once you start to get to the content of the book is when you start to run into some problems. All throughout my reading, I found myself questioning the writer's delivery and bias. Knowing a vegan and plenty of vegetarians in my personal life, I started to hear the all-too-familiar vegan/vegetarian excuses and "propaganda-esque" claims and arguments. It's almost as if they, along with Safran Foer, are put on this Earth to argue in favor of vegetarianism, even if nobody's asking. I don't see any carnivores advertising or arguing their viewpoint - in fact, most vegans love to argue or debate with carnivores because the average carnivore isn't up to arguing and will just let it go, giving a vegetarian the sensation of maybe getting their point across. Yet its this holier-than-thou attitude, that Safran Foer displays throughout the novel, that is frustrating and comical at best.

    The Guardian, a UK publication, published a book review by Jay Rayner about a year ago in February 2010, and it is no less relevant today than it was a year ago. Many of Safran Foer's head scratching-inducing points come up and get yanked into clear view by Rayner. Focusing on Safran Foer's arguments and whiny anecdotes, Rayner rips apart and critically shows you that the book isn't all it's cracked up to be. That isn't to say, however, that Rayner isn't a fan of Safran Foer's writing. He gives credit where credit is due, particularly when saying that "Safran Foer is at his best when he is presenting the facts of the matter: not just the gruesome manner in which poultry, pigs and cattle are raised in what has become the most grotesquely efficient food production system the world has ever seen, creating animal protein that is cheaper than at any time in human history, but also in his detailed account of the ways in which a billion-dollar industry has influenced animal welfare legislation in the US. Here he marshals his material with skill and precision". In so many words, Rayner was able to capture my feelings on the book entirely. There are parts of Eating Animals where Safran Foer is off the charts fantastic, and really showing you what he can be capable of. The rest of the novel, as Rayner stated, falls short of being truly good, due to Safran Foer's consistent unworldly bias and elitist attitude.

    I truly enjoyed reading Eating Animals at the end of the day. It's a great read, although not without its many flaws and shortcomings. If anything, I was happy to read it and get my vegan friends off my back for crying that I wasn't open-minded enough. This is interesting, however, because the vegetarian/vegan community doesn't see Eating Animals as their Bible, or end all literary reference. Why? It's a great personal account of a father raising his child in a world that he does not fully agree with and comprehend. It doesn't get much better than that if you're trying to recruit new Dads to raise their family meat-free, especially if you show them where the meat comes from. I guess the vegetarian/vegan community is waiting for something more universally accepted and understood to come along and grab the title of "Vegan Bible", if even such a term exists. 

    Like many of my other fellow students, this novel has not changed my eating habits - but has induced more thoughts about where the meat comes from. With that being said, I truly believe most of those thoughts are residual cognitive thoughts left over from an intense Food, Inc. viewing last year. Safran Foer's text on paper is not as stimulating as the sometimes difficult-to-watch Food, Inc. was. The new father anecdotes were difficult to relate to, seeing as how I'm not currently a father, not that I know of at least. Safran Foer is a great writer, there's no debate about that, but Eating Animals unfortunately falls short of being a great book.