Eating Animals and Why I Don’t

I was on vacation when I finished Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I am always reading a book. My feelings on books usually range from love to eh, with the very occasional book I can’t even finish. Eating Animals was not love, but it achieved something even better for me – I’d qualify it as life changing.

I know that’s a big statement. I also know that Beard, who lent me the book, is reading this and doing fist pumps. (Okay, I’ve never seen him do fist pumps, but I imagine it nonetheless.)

I have been a vegetarian for more than four years. I became a vegetarian for one very simple reason. Every week I volunteer with animals to ensure they lead healthy, full lives and get adopted into loving homes. Why is it okay for me to save some animals and eat others? I couldn’t come up with any reasonable answer, so I stopped eating animals.

There are plenty of other reasons to opt to become a vegetarian. I’ve heard most of them and while I understand them, they never swayed me too much. Beard has been a long time light meat eater, by which I mean he enjoyed many a vegetarian meal and avoided several types of meat but still enjoyed the occasional carnivorous meal. Eating Animals was recommended to him and he adopted a wholly vegetarian diet and then passed the book on to me.

I have a whole review of Eating Animals online at BookGeeks and I encourage you to check it out for a slightly more objective summary of the book.

My more subjective commentary is this:

The way animals are raised in our country is horrible. I find it hard to believe that if people knew the details of how animals were raised and killed before making it onto dinner plates, that they could possibly eat them. (I also think that if people knew about a baby coming out of their hoo-ha that they’d avoid that, and yet…) Foer works really hard to be objective and factual throughout his book. He does a pretty good job most of the time. He doesn’t often resort to gross out descriptions. While he used his research for Eating Animals to come to the very informed decision to become a vegetarian, he also works to highlight people who are doing a good job of raising animals humanely and slaughtering animals in a way that makes sense and is as kind as possible. But those good farmers and slaughterhouses make up only 1 percent of all of the meat produced in the United States.

I would love to talk to a dedicated carnivore who’s read this book. Does it change your meat purchasing practices? Does it change how much meat you consume? What types of meat you consume?

Here is what has changed for me. I have started drinking organic milk. This is slightly ironic since Foer also explains some of the absolutely idiotic rules behind what makes up “organic” as it applies to meat and dairy. I am in the process of seeking out a place that sells eggs produced from chickens living in what I would truly define as free-range and on a vegetarian diet. These changes are relatively superficial. Not life changing.

What is life changing is that I now have an expanded set of reasons for why I don’t eat meat. My old reason still applies. I can’t save some animals and eat others. But I also have no interest in eating things that are pumped so full of hormones and antibiotics and then rushed through the birthing and growing process to make it to storefronts quicker. I can’t support some of the slaughtering methods being used in our country, which is what you’re doing by buying factory-farmed meat. I just can’t.

This post originally appeared on Kate’s Point of View. © Kate. All rights reserved.