Elizabeth Kolbert, “Flesh Of Your Flesh: Should You Eat Meat?,” The New Yorker, November 9, 2009

“How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner?,” asks Elizabeth Kolbert in this review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest nonfiction work, Eating Animals.

According to Kolbert, Foer attempts to tackle this inconsistency through a series of vignettes exploring the human relationship to food animal production and criticizing the impact of so-called factory farms on “inter-species alliances.” The novelist also takes issue with food writer and activist Michael Pollan’s support for non-industrial livestock practices, describing the argument in favor of responsible meat consumption as “unpersuasive.” Foer maintains that an emphasis on organic or humane animal husbandry serves only to obfuscate the moral issues at stake. “Although he never specifically equates ‘concentrated animal feeding operations’ with the Final Solution, the German model of at once seeing and not seeing clearly informs Foer’s thinking,” notes Kolbert. “The book is framed by tales of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor whose culinary repertoire consists of a single dish: roast chicken with carrots.”

While Kolbert ultimately lauds the strength of Foer’s conviction, she also finds that when taken to its logical conclusion, his argument becomes untenable in practice. “But is even veganism enough?,” she wonders. “The cost that consumer society imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in them all.”