Eating animals
“Eating Animals” is a non-fictional book published in 2009, by the American author Jonathan Safran Foer. In the following analysis, there will be focused on an excerpt from the book, which is the two chapters: “The Fruits of Family Trees” and “Possible again”. The chapters respectively focus on his grandmother’s atypical relationship with food, and how it influenced Foer, and his past constantly changing relationship with animals as food.
In the first chapter the reader is introduced to Foer’s grandmother, who has an unconventional relationship with food because during the war, she had to scavenge for food and invariably live in starvation. This influenced her relationship with food and caused her ideas about food to be abnormal.…show more content… Foer then continues to tell that he in high school became a vegetarian countless times. But here he introduces another part of vegetarianism; identity. “Most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly.” (S.7, LL.13-15). Vegetarianism was no longer only about not hurting animals, but about creating an identity, such as when he tells that he only completely refrained from eating meat in public. When he started in college, he dropped vegetarianism, but took it up again in his sophomore year when he became a philosophy major. “The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape.” (P.8, LL.3-5). He again became a vegetarian because of the life and identity, he would like to have. This off and on relationship with eating meat continues until he gets married, and he and his wife are vegetarians whom occasionally ate meat. “We were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.”(P.8, LL.30-32). This is the ethically balanced compromise, he lives with until he and his wife decide to have a child. When he is faced with the…show more content… He tells how he changed into a vegetarian, and how it isn’t perfect or even easy to be a vegetarian, which makes him seem more honest. By doing this he accumulates ethos. He also uses ethos when he is critical of himself; “You can imagine how annoying this made me.” (P.8, L.6). Foer constantly looks at his past as he is depicting it and analyses it. This makes the reader more relaxed, and makes the reader more open to his message about vegetarianism. These two chapters do not depict how perfect it is to be a vegetarian, but how eating in general, such as seen in the first chapter, or eating animals is a big and important part of