Context and Main: Eating Animals

Jonathan Saffran Foer’s son motivated him to write his book on food ethics and factory farming, Eating Animals. In his introduction “Storytelling,” he talks about the role that digestion plays in storytelling, and how family bonds and tradition travel through food. For him, food both nourishes our bodies and helps us remember important stories about ourselves. The sensations of eating trigger memories, and childhood seems to play an important role in forming those memories – perhaps that’s why his son is so important to him. If we turn to the text by Dr. David Kessler, The End of Overeating, we might begin to learn why this is the case. Foods that are concentrated in sugar, fat, and salt help the brain’s reward center to stimulate the production of “opioids.” These endorphins go in the bloodstream and give our bodies feelings of being relaxed, comfortable, and blissful. Perhaps we can imagine, then, that the “palatable” foods we eat when we’re young give us such warm feelings throughout our life. They act as the cues for us to associate our food with those we care for, and love the most.

Foer, however, might not want to make the story here about opioids and food dependencies. In the closing section of the book, he recounts the time his Grandma ran away from the Nazi Germans during World War II. She was starving and sick from eating whatever she could find, including garbage. When she was near death, she encountered a Russian farmer who went into his house and gave her some pork. She refused to eat it. She explained to Saffran Foer, who was mystified at the decision: “if nothing matters, there’s nothing to save” (Foer 17). For her, only having a life of integrity and values was worth living. She would rather die for her identity – and her food traditions – than live doing something that went against her beliefs. Her beliefs were identical with her. This lingering line at the end of the introduction tells us something: that Saffran Foer wants to communicate the same thing. He wants to tell his son, something matters. Something is worth living for.

In the first chapter of Eating Animals Foer discusses his relationship with his dog, George. He elaborates on how odd it is to communicate with her. It is a task for him to openly communicate with his dog as an “other” being (Foer 23). For him, an “other” is a non-human “someone” (Foer 23). It is a life-form that can communicate, but not verbally. Like humans, the human-dog relationship involves vocal and physical communication; dogs, like people, have needs, emotions, and feelings. They have a kind of intelligence. Yet there remains a gap in consciousness. Foer describes the way that much of what is important between him and George remains hidden, like a secret. He and George can only be “photographs” to each other – images that obscure, at best, feelings that they can only guess at (Foer 24).