EATING ANIMALS by Jonathan Safran Foer

An incredibly powerful and uncomfortable depiction of the moral and environmental impact of eating animals.

It’s definitely one to provoke and I’m glad it does because it’s time we stop eating in our default mode.

I believe this book’s narrative pins down the heart of the problem. It makes us think why we eat the animals we eat and why not others for example?

The stories, the cultures and traditions are built around the food we eat, and very often that means animal meat. It is so ingrained in us to eat animal meat for Christmas, Easter or Thanksgiving that we are willingly not thinking about what it actually is and where it’s coming from.

“While it is always possible to wake a person who's sleeping, no amount of noise will wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.”

Even by putting the moral element aside, the mass meat production of today has huge consequences on both our health and environment.

Today, given the ridiculously high amount of meat that we expect to consume as a society (very fast, too), there is no time to raise animals organically. Instead, we’re literally “producing” them in factories.

It seems that all that matters is to grow animals as fast and cheaply as possible, to fulfil our never-ending greediness. The chapters on what is happening to those animals, in factories around the world, that end up becoming the cheap meat we buy, is something out of a horror movie, or worse.

However, if the animal cruelty in itself doesn’t phase you, the impact on your own health might.

Again, the drive for efficiency in these factory farms causes them to treat the livestock, literally with all kinds of shit:

The chicken meat, after it is disemboweled and sliced, is immersed in “fecal soup,” to absorb 20% additional weight. This kind of “broth” consists of dead chickens that contains feces and all sorts of pathogens from individual birds.

The statistics are staggering: 83% of all chicken meat is infected with bacteria at the time of purchase and a typical hog factory farm produces 7.2 million tons of untreated manure annually.

Also, antibiotics are being widely overused in livestock and there are, therefore, likely to be more and more antibiotic-resistant pathogens emerging from those farms.

To add to this, farming in its current form is simply unsustainable.

The author says that animal excrements are 160 times more toxic than raw municipal sewage. When such a polluting material, in large quantities, enters seas and rivers, all the sea life is affected but also people living near repositories of animal waste suffer, too.

I’ve stopped eating animal meat myself for a year now and honestly, at first, it was simply to improve my own health and test the “animal meat free” theories for myself and indeed, it worked wonders for me.

I also think, even if you might never give up meat completely, to consume less and better quality meat in general, from small organic farms, will make a huge difference for you personally but also for this planet that we all call home.