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Eating Animals opens with a description of Jonathan Safran Foer’s grandmother’s relationship to food, shaped by the starvation she experienced as a young person, and his description immediately resonated with me. Even though I’m not Jewish, I recognized my grandmother, also a Holocaust survivor, in his words — and I was hooked. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ This isn’t a book to enter into lightly — it’s full of difficult truths to confront — but it’s an important one. I love nonfiction, but I’ve successfully avoided reading about factory farming. I love television, but have avoided all documentaries about where the food I eat every day comes from. Foer argues that this is because we know, on some level, that we don’t want to know the truth. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Eating Animals doesn’t come across as preachy: Foer genuinely wants readers to understand what he has come to understand and to made decisions accordingly. His work is based in research and statistics, while also acknowledging the importance of food as social activity, tradition, and religion. It explores questions I’ve never considered (why is it socially acceptable to eat cows, but not dogs?) as well as questions I’ve asked myself (can one individual’s dietary choices make a difference?). He speaks about the effect of eating animals on so many aspects of our world, from the toll on the environment to the spread of disease to the increase in antibiotic resistance to the exploitation of workers. Eating animals, I was surprised to discover, isn’t just about animal cruelty — although there is a horrific amount of it. There is so much more to the conversation than I ever expected, and this book proved to be a great introduction to it. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ TW: this book contains sometimes graphic depictions of animal death, animal cruelty/violence against animals, human death, and starvation ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ID: I’m holding a paperback copy of Eating Animals. There is a tree with yellow leaves visible in the background. #fallintononfiction #nonfictionnovember via Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CW8O_KyLIkT/