Eating Animals (2009) offers a comprehensive view of the modern meat industry and demonstrates how the entire production process has been so completely perverted that it is unrecognizable as farming anymore.
The book explains the moral and environmental costs incurred to achieve today‘s incredibly low meat prices.
Jonathan Safran Foer is a promising young novelist from New York who has written the international bestsellers Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
Contemplating the responsibilities of fatherhood lead the author to question what kind of diet he wished to provide his firstborn son. Eating Animals documents his findings and reflections on the topic.
Upgrade to Premium now and get unlimited access to the Blinkist library. Read or listen to key insights from the world’s best nonfiction.
Upgrade to PremiumThe Blinkist app gives you the key ideas from a bestselling nonfiction book in just 15 minutes. Available in bitesize text and audio, the app makes it easier than ever to find time to read.
Start free trialGet unlimited access to the most important ideas in business, investing, marketing, psychology, politics, and more. Stay ahead of the curve with recommended reading lists curated by experts.
Start free trialEating Animals (2009) offers a comprehensive view of the modern meat industry and demonstrates how the entire production process has been so completely perverted that it is unrecognizable as farming anymore.
The book explains the moral and environmental costs incurred to achieve today‘s incredibly low meat prices.
When most people think of a farm, they think of barns, pastures, red wooden houses and barnyard animals grazing peacefully.
This is history. 99% of all land-animals farmed in the US today come from so-called factory farms: industrialized, streamlined production facilities which bear zero resemblance to the “farms” in most consumers’ imaginations. A factory farm is more like an assembly line, where each animal is another unit to be processed as quickly and cheaply as possible.
The logic behind factory farms can be summed up with one word: efficiency.
Over the past century, farm animals have been bred to be so fast-growing that they are slaughtered as soon as they reach adolescence. This unnaturally rapid growth induces such severe hereditary health-problems that they are often unable to survive outside the factory farm.
Sick and injured animals are left to die where they fall. Any form of care, even mere rest and water, are considered inefficient and thus not provided.
Artificial lighting and ventilation ensure the animals’ internal clocks continually push them to grow. At the same time their feed is supplemented with vitamins and antibiotics to keep perpetually unhealthy creatures alive until slaughter.
Labor is minimized through automated herding, feeding and slaughter, but the few workers used are usually poorly paid and under constant stress, leading to mistakes and even deliberate sadism.
If you believe that the animals your chicken nuggets or pork chops are made from have ever seen the light of day or felt grass under their feet, you are living a fantasy of bygone times.
Today, animals are a nameless, faceless mass being processed.