Eating Animals is a book by the American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2009. Farm Forward, a nonprofit organization focused on reducing animal suffering and advanced sustainable agriculture is a collaborator for this great book.

Foer highlights how he decided if his newborn child should eat meat. He conveys how the generations entering a world of industrialized farming have to make a decision whether to eat meat such decision has many more implications than taste – these being not just for the animals involved, but also for the environment and ourselves He highlights that the animals suffer, the environment is damaged, and our health is impaired. Foer concludes that the disadvantages arising from factory farms outweigh the benefits of taste so he decides to raise his son a vegetarian.

Foer narrates many interesting stories relating to food. Foer says "stories about food are stories about us, our history and our values" and makes storytelling an important underlying thread in the book. The storytelling has a profound impact in reducing the complexity of the subject. The stories portray the relationship with the world, the process in food making in factories and what kind of food reaches us. One may also feel a bit of religious explaining the meat eating.

As the title suggests, the particular phenomenon Foer focuses on is the consumption of meat. He discusses what eating meat has meant in the past, and what it means today. In doing so, he does not, as one might expect, make the claim that eating meat is intrinsically bad. Rather, he claims that eating meat is circumstantially bad for example, it is bad when it entails the suffering of animals, environmental destruction, and/or a risk for human health. Today, according to the book and a number of its cited sources, eating meat overwhelmingly entails these problems, while in the past, it has not. The conclusion Foer reaches is that eating animals that come from industrial methods such as factory farming, industrial fishing, and the like is bad.

Many people recognize there is something bad about eating animals. Foer states, "what we forget about animals, we begin to forget about ourselves."  This leads to sense of shame when we remember that we have willingly forgotten the ability to feel or be relieved of pain on the part of animals. Foer states this is the animality of humans. For this, he laments the lack of transparency in the meat industry. Farms are usually closed to the public to maintain confidentiality of harmful practices. Foer brings to light some of the labels and certifications that are assigned to animal products are misleading.

When we support factory farming, we are expressing immoral behavior to animals and in turn, to humans as well because we are ignoring the suffering and the ability of the animal and the human to bear the suffering. 

Though I have been a vegetarian throughout, I found this book very interesting to read and learn more insights into vegetarian and non vegetarian food habits and learn the environmental issues behind such decision.