Eating Animals

Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood-facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child's behalf-his casual questioning took on an urgency  His quest for answers ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir and his own detective work,Eating Animalsexplores the many fictions we use to justify our eating habits-from folklore to pop culture to family traditions and national myth-and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting. Marked by Foer's profound moral ferocity and unvarying generosity, as well as the vibrant style and creativity that made his previous books,Everything is IlluminatedandExtremely Loud and Incredibly Close, widely loved,Eating Animalsis a celebration and a reckoning, a story about the stories we've told-and the stories we now need to tell. 

Jonathan Safran Foer is a graduate of PrincetonUniversity, where he was awarded the Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize. His work has appeared in Paris Review, the New York Times, and TheNew Yorker. His first novel, Everything is Illuminated, garnered him a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award and was made into a film by Liev Schreiber. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, novelist Nicole Krauss, and their son.