Eating Animals
Jonathan Safran Foer reading from his new book, Eating Animals
We spent Saturday at the National Book Festival which is held on the Mall every fall. We bicycled down to the festival and arrived just in time to see Jonathan Safran Foer read from his new book, Eating Animals. I bought it, sat down while we were waiting in the author’s signing line, and began to read.
In the first five minutes of reading the book, I knew I was going to love it. In the second section the author writes about why we eat some animals and not others, and he describes his experience with dogs. I’ve never read so apt a description of the way I used to feel about dogs and animals in general:
“I thought of them as bothersome, dirty, unapproachably foreign, frighteningly unpredictable, and plain old unnecessary. I had a particular lack of enthusiasm for dogs … As a child I would agree to go over to friends’ houses only if they confined their dogs in some other room. If a dog approached me in the park, I’d become hysterical until my father hoisted me onto his shoulders. I didn’t like watching television shows that featured dogs. It’s possible that I even developed a subtle prejudice against the blind.
And then one day I became a person who loved dogs.”
For about a year I’ve been working on cutting down the amount of meat I consume, and picking up this book has inspired me to try to cut it out altogether. It’s not particularly challenging in my day-to-day life – all the places I eat offer vegetarian options. But, like Safran Foer writes, it’s the family rituals that will be the most challenging: the Thanksgiving turkey, the Christmas ham.
Well, we’ll see how it goes.
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