Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer is the author and, for most of the work, narrator of Eating Animals. Foer graduated from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, and he is most known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Eating Animals is Foer’s first work of nonfiction, told from his own perspective before and after the birth of his son. His impending fatherhood is the impetus for a reexamination of his relationship with meat and animals, and he serves as the protagonist of this work, as he is predominantly discussing his own decision to become a vegetarian.

Foer is characterized early on, along with his wife, as “honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily” (9), reflecting on their position as occasional vegetarians. As such, Foer admits to wavering on his perspective on eating meat, and the book serves as his explorations into that indecision. For Foer, the issue of vegetarianism and factory farming is a personal one, and the growth of his character over the course of the book is shown in the final chapter. Concluding that he should become a permanent vegetarian, Foer resolves that “the factory farm feels inhuman” (267), and to be himself, he needs to reject factory farming for himself and for his son.