Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Feast your Eyes on "Eating Animals": A Tasty Treat-ise from Jonathan Safran Foer

Where: R-train
Who was reading: An ash-blonde clutching a Kenneth Cole bag full of red yarn. The ghosts of expressions kept jerking her face one direction or another but never settling into any clear shape. She remained impassive even when a bunch of hooligans without pants boarded at Union Square.
Luckily they weren’t deviants, they were just celebrating Annual No Pants Day. How cruel that it falls in January.
From the book’s website: “Synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify our eating habits—folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions—and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.”
Fascinating stuff, but... I don’t know if I can bring myself to read it. Foer ranks pretty high on my Enemies List (which happens to coincide exactly with The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 talented-fiction-authors-to-be-jealous-of list). Maybe if he gets really unpopular I'll read it to be "different."
Until then, best to eat as much MEAT as possible! This March, for example, I've resolved to eat only animals I've never consumed before (eg. snail, guinea pig, dodo?). Anyone care to join?

2 comments:

  1. I have held to the belief that the cuter the animal, the better it tastes (lamb, duck, veal). This makes me a terrible person, but the theory seems to hold true.

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  2. Odd that your "Enemies List" should be a list of authors to be jealous of. Let me quote just two lines from an author many should be jealous of:

    "...flyaway in the sense that a turkey “flies away”: There’s a great deal of noise and plenty of ruffled feathers but very little actual flying."

    "The ghosts of expressions kept jerking her face one direction or another but never settling into any clear shape."

    (Ok, there's a tiny parallelism issue in the second, but you would have fixed that in rewrite.)

    And if God didn't want me to eat animals, He shouldn't have made them out of meat. :)

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