Eating Animals

While Jonathan Safran Foer notes a long history of discussions on the ethics of meat consumption, Eating Animals is specifically a critique of existing standards and accepted realities of modern consumption. This places Eating Animals in a genre of works that expose or critique the food industry, which includes the modern American diet and the methods of agriculture and food acquisition. Documentaries like Supersize Me (2004), directed by Morgan Spurlock, analyze the effects of modern diet choices on the human body, while works dating back as far as Upton Sinclair’s 1906 work The Jungle critique the methods by which food arrives at the market. Contemporaries, such as Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) and In Defense of Food (2008), mix the discussions of health, ethics, environmentalism, and animal rights. Still further works, such as J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), focus on the rights and treatment of animals.

The food criticism genre is known for making broader arguments about the ways people consume food and interact with food production systems. Critiques of fast food, such as McDonald’s and Burger King, for example, are usually aimed at convincing readers and viewers to abstain from excess consumption of fast food and other unhealthy food options.