"To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before . . . I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book . . . the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it." (Montaigne, Book II, Essay 10 (publ. 1580))

Monday, December 03, 2018

Eating Animals (Jonathan Safran Foer, 2009)

(267 pages)

Book club selection (via Rose; session held 2 December 2018).

Interesting writing about the modern ag/food industry - so much has changed!  Food incredibly cheap and plentiful.  But animal cruelty questions; hormones and antibiotics; climate effects. 

Regulatory capture as in any major industry.

The club discussion was interesting.  How far to go with empathy for the animals - who are headed to slaughter no matter what - effect on low-income folks if practices are changed?  How to quantify climate effect - supremely efficient food chain - is there a better alternative?

Author did a good job but occasionally strays into childish demonization of "profit."

Quite a bit of overlap with some of the themes from this book about Storm Lake, Iowa.  Confinement set-ups certainly have changed rural Iowa even in my lifetime.  And I beheaded a few chickens here and there without thinking twice about it.

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