Whether or not the ethical implications concerned with the consumption of animals outweigh the supposed health benefits of doing so has been the subject of debate for decades. Prompted by the birth of his first child, writer Jonathan Safran Foer explores this question in depth. After three years of research, Foer takes a strong stance on the matter and is able to put forth a cogent case against the meat industry and its products in his 2009 book Eating Animals. Via the use of personal anecdotes, blunt diction and a clamant tone Foer efficaciously brings forth the ills of factory farming whilst eliciting outrage from his audience, moving them to take action.

Foer recounts his numerous personal experiences with meat production, shining a bright light on the considerably arcane industry. After contacting one of the last independent slaughterhouses in the northwest (the rest have been bought by corporations), owner Mario Fantasma of Paradise Locker Meats gave Foer a tour of the building. Foer shares his firsthand glimpse of the egregious and unsanitary conditions, “It is not because I am a city boy that I find this repulsive. Mario and his workers have admitted to having difficulty with some of the more gory aspects of slaughter, and I heard that sentiment echoed wherever I could have frank conversations with slaughterhouse workers”(Foer 156).

Foer also participated in multiple clandestine midnight visits to factory farms with a former farm worker, “C”. In one visit he saw a myriad of suffering creatures in their artificial nightmarish habitat, “the closer I look the more I see... Because there are so many animals it takes me several minutes before I take in how many dead ones there are”(Foer 87). Foer’s personal experiences are more powerful than secondhand knowledge gained by research, the reader is confronted with incontrovertible and unavoidable truths that force them to open their eyes and take strong issue with the matter.

Foer recognizes that fighting against widely entrenched values leaves little time for politeness. He employs acerbic and blunt diction for shock value, helping further his case. In the aforementioned visit to a factory farm, C comes across an emaciated chick covered in sores and ends its suffering, “she slices its neck, rescuing it”(Foer 89). He makes the point that she does not just end the animals suffering, she rescues it from the monstrosity that is the factory farm. Foer makes it clear that this is the domain in which many have witnessed the “butchering of an animal” and have heard the “the infant like screech of a pig being castrated and slaughtered”. Foer concludes that the the factory farm has “succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat”(Foer 237). Words such as “divorcing”, “eliminating” and “ruling” paint a picture of a tyrannical business wreaking havoc on human beings and the animals which they consume. The audience swayed into the conviction that this tyranny must be stopped by all means necessary.

His rhetorical strategies and claims allow Foer to create an urgent tone. After analyzing the recent and exponential growth of this pernicious industry, he questions where and when will the destruction end, “if the world followed America’s lead, it would consume over 165 billion chickens annually (even if the world population didn’t increase). And then what? Two hundred billion? Five hundred? Will the cages stack higher or grow smaller or both? On what date will we accept the loss of antibiotics as a tool to prevent human suffering? How many days of the week will our grandchildren be ill? When does it end?” (Foer 148). Regarding the suffering of animals, Foer reasons that “no reader would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face”(Foer 31). However, he then goes on to reveal that things like this and worse happen to animals in factory farms consistently, and this is absolutely unacceptable. Foer knows that any person with an inkling of humanity in their heart will agree with his sentiment. To drive his message home, he makes the point that bystanding is equivalent to committing the crime, “no response is a response- we are equally responsible for what we do and dont do. In the case of animal slaughter, to throw your hands in the air is to wrap your fingers around a knife handle”(Foer 226).

Foer’s purpose in writing Eating Animals is clear: to share the repercussions that factory farming has in multiple spheres of life and to dictate a clarion call for action. His skillful use of passionate yet informative language and claims leads the reader to question their previous assumptions about meat. After reading his book, it is crystal clear to the reader that when it comes to the wellbeing of the environment, animals, and the reader him/herself, the way we currently produce our food is unsustainable and change is inevitable.

Survival of the Sickest by Sharon Moalem had actually been on my ‘Books I am Meaning to Read’ list for quite some time.

I learned a great deal reading this book. I had never heard of transposons or “jumping genes” before reading Survival of the Sickest. When I took biology for the first time, my favorite part of the curriculum was the chapters about DNA. I have gone a while thinking that this critical part of each and every one of our cells was stable entity. It was news to me that a large portion of our “junk DNA” that do not code for proteins are made up of jumping genes. I was shocked to learn that our genes have the ability to cut/copy and paste themselves into different parts of the human genome, changing the makeup of who we are whilst we go completely unaware of their actions. Moalem took only a few pages to prove that the Lamarckian concept of the inheritance of acquired traits, and idea that I believed biological blasphemy, has not completely been negated.

The quirky facts the book gave about our behavior were great. I for one used to wonder why I would sneeze when I entered a light area after being in the dark for a period of time, and now I know it is because my ancestors likely lived in caves, and they developed a natural reflex to sneeze upon leaving them in order to clear any dust or debris from their sinuses. I made sure to warn my friends about wearing sunglasses while tanning, as Moalem explained how sunlight needs to hit the optic nerve in order for the pituitary gland to get the signal to produce melanin. These little nuggets of wisdom were some of my favorite parts of the book.

This is not the first time I have read a book like this. My favorite genre of books is non-fiction, and earlier this summer I read the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Harari. I loved the book, Harari was able to conflate the knowledge we have of history and science into an incredible story that explains who we are as a species, where we came from, and where we are headed. The book started off discussing our ape ancestors who wandered in the african heat, neanderthals whom we vied for supremacy with, and finally the ‘cognitive revolution’, a complete change in our ability to interact and cooperate with one another that truly made us “sapiens”. The book in its later chapters discussed the mapping of the human genome, making it apparent that in just a few years any person can have their genome mapped quickly and cheaply. This will undoubtedly lead to much more effective personalized medicine, potentially increasing the human lifespan by decades. Harari also made sure to highlight some possible negatives of our newfound biological knowledge and power, like the hypothetical future of artificial selection and the creation of “designer babies”. The book sent a clear message to me: we are in the early stages of biological manipulation, and the potential to change our species completely, for better or for worse, is right around the corner.

The idea that natural selection has retained traits in us that are beneficial today but can be harmful in the long run was one that was entirely new to me. I never considered the possible reasons why our many genetic disorders had not been taken care of through thousands of years of evolution, and how Moalem explained it made the whole principle of survival of the fittest make much more sense to me. Why are humans still burdened by hemochromatosis? Because the extra iron allowed them to fend of the bubonic plague. Why does diabetes still worsen the health of millions? Because thousands of years ago, the excess sugar in the bloodstream was able to act like anti-freeze in the extreme cold, exactly what humans needed to survive in the Younger Dryas. Evolution is a give and take process, not entirely beneficial to the organism it modifies, “Just about every adaptation is a compromise of sorts, and improvement in some circumstances, a liability in others”(Moalem 46).The concept of evolution as a whole is clearer to me and just makes a whole lot more sense after reading this book. In the subject of biology, knowledge of evolution is indispensable.