Book review: Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer

Published on Saturday 6 March 2010 12:51

EATING ANIMALS Jonathan Safran Foer Hamish Hamilton, £20

JONATHAN Safran Foer's novels – Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close – divided critics. Was he the poster-boy for affecting postmodernism or a pedlar of precocious affectation? His new, non-fiction book will make such debates seem tepid. Eating Animals is a curate's egg of polemic and reportage, written after Safran Foer, about to become a father and a long-time dallier with vegetarianism, decided to investigate what eating flesh actually involves.

His findings will hardly surprise readers acquainted with the work of Eric Schlosser, Felicity Lawrence or Michael Pollan, let alone TV programmes where Jamie Oliver rents his garments over a turkey twizzler.

Safran Foer appeals to readers' hearts, rather than their minds (let alone tongues). His descriptions of killing floors, routine worker sadism and cannibalistic, genetically mutated turkeys are, as they should be, shocking. They would be shocking without him resorting to emotive terms: "savageries", "torture", "repulsive". But this is not an argument, it's a plea. He toys with reasons – such as ecological catastrophe, health and ethical necessity – but what convinces him is his own "intuition".

Deciding to become vegetarian only removes some of his dilemmas: I'd recommend he look at Bee Wilson's Swindled and Peter Chapman's Jungle Capitalists to clarify the moral problems of all food purchase, not just the grotesquery of factory farmed chickens.

It is telling that the index has a reference to Singer; but it's to Isaac Bashevis, not Professor Peter, the controversial author of Animal Liberation.

There is nothing wrong with such a book being intrinsically personal, and Safran Foer's reminiscences of his grandmother, who escaped the Nazis, and her relationship to food, are by far the best parts of the book. The worst parts are the whimsical typographical illustrations of statistics, which seem like an attempt to keep the book part of the distinctive Safran Foer oeuvre. Those who were most vociferous in condemning his novels (which I admired) pointed to a vein of manipulative sentimentality. That same propensity, in a non-fiction book, can be off-putting. There are major questions to be dealt with – where, for example, does "suffering begin": the lobster? the oyster? plankton? No amount of marinating the heartstrings can replace that thinking.

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, March 7, 2010