Foer is not actually shilling for the dairy industry, but should he be doing more to chase people away from it? (Original photo by David Shankbone.)
Writer Jonathan Safran Foer's been getting a lot of media attention lately for the just published
Eating Animals, his first book-length piece of nonfiction, which is very much against the eponymous activity. I haven't read it, and I don't expect that I (or most SuperVegan readers) will learn much from it that we don't already know about what's wrong with eating animals. This is not a book written for vegans. But it's a book that vegans ought to have some understanding of.
For better or worse, an established literary novelist like Foer can get people to pay attention to what's wrong with factory farming in a way that more academic or of-the-movement authors such as
Peter Singer or
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson cannot. And Foer is relatively folksy and accessible (if not artless) compared to
someone like J.M. Coetzee, whose arguments in defense of animals are unapologetically over most people's heads, and who isn't about to do a bunch of press interviews.
Foer finds lots of problems with industrial animal agriculture, and with eating meat in a general ethical sense, but he does not come down against non-meat or non-food animal products. This is a book about meat. That's got a lot of vegans understandably perturbed--an influential guy sets up a strong argument for many tenets of veganism, yet
fails to go there. Mainstream media may not care, but it's important for us vegans to understand why Foer isn't vegan, and how he feels about veganism.
Josh Hooten of
Herbivore attended a talk by Foer last night at Powell's Books in Portland, OR. Hooten is the right kind of vegan, and he wrote a great report/defense on the talk (which he
posted on Facebook, and graciously allowed me to republish here.) Here's the first and last sentences, and you can
read the whole thing below.
Foer isn't an animal rights person, he is coming from outside our community and perhaps that is why he is getting the attention he's getting for his new book Eating Animals.
...
As a messenger getting people to think about this stuff for the first time, I think he's amazing.
