It’s tempting to dismiss Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals as the product of a cocky, self-involved writer who woke up one day and discovered factory farming. Haven’t Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser et al. been here before? More than 20 years after 60 Minutes visited a chicken-processing plant, do we need another dive into the “fecal soup” that Diane Sawyer described?

Perhaps not. But Foer’s particular brand of modernist prose, as made famous in his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, does serve to bring another round of scrutiny—and a new demographic of reader—to the kinds of farms that, as he puts it, “treat living animals like dead ones.”

The catalyst for Foer’s three years of research into what became his first nonfiction book was the impending birth of his son. When presented with the challenge of deciding the diet of his offspring, he wanted answers about meat: “Where does it come from? How is it produced? How are animals treated, and to what extent does that matter?” ... (Read the full review)

I won’t lie to you. Right out of the chute, as you might say—ere I even cracked the covers—I was predisposed to like Eating Animals.

Now, having read Jonathan Safran Foer’s book (twice), I am relieved to report I like it even better. Here’s a young, hot-shot American novelist taking on a tough non-fiction topic like factory farming, devoting three years of his life to researching and interviewing slaughterhouse workers, small-scale ranchers (including a vegetarian) and various animal activists.

How terrific that he has emerged with an accessible, snappily written work destined for mainstream media focus and a wide readership, even among the thinking classes who have done their level darnedest—with some success—not to think about who’s on the end of their fork and how he or she got there. ... (Read the full review)

Looking forward to your turkey dinner? Think twice. It’s time, argues Jonathan Safran Foer, to stop lying to ourselves. With all the studies on animal agriculture, pollution, toxic chemicals in factory-farmed animals and exposés of the appalling cruelty to animals in that industry, he writes in Eating Animals, “We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, ‘What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?’ ”

Some of our finest journalists (Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser) and animal rights activists (Peter Singer, Temple Grandin)—not to mention Gandhi, Jesus, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, John Locke and Immanuel Kant (and so many others)—have hurled themselves against the question of eating meat and the moral issues inherent in killing animals for food. Foer, 32, in this, his first work of nonfiction, intrepidly joins their ranks, inspired by fatherhood, the memory of his grandmother (who survived the Holocaust by scavenging her way to freedom) and something else. ... (Read the full review)

This is not a straightforward case for vegetarianism. What is this book making a case for?

It’s an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it’s a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we’re so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force—historically, it’s unprecedented how destructive our farm system is—has taken over America and is starting to take over the world. And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn't require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices. I think there are a lot of different choices people can make that will lead to dismantling the system. It’s not like everybody has to go vegetarian. There are plenty of people who feel like, for whatever reason, they just can’t stop eating meat, but if they bought meat at the green market, from farmers they know by name, that's as effective a rebuttal.

What if you live in a city and you don’t live near a farm? I’m sure there are tons of people like that in New York. What’s your suggestion for them?

Well, in New York everybody is near a green market. Everybody is near a source of family-farmed meat. In fact, cities are frankly the best place to be in terms of that. ... (Read the full interview)