Brutal and brutalising

In this book, Jonathan Safran Foer, the American novelist, tries to make us think about eating meat. He ate meat, then became a vegetarian, then ate meat again, then got a dog, then started to worry about eating animals, and didn’t stop worrying. This book is the result of what happens if you start to worry about eating animals, which is what most of us do, but then carry on worrying, which is what most of us don’t do. It’s horrifying.

He starts off by thinking about why we don’t eat dogs. Well, we’d hate to do that, wouldn’t we? They’re dogs, for God’s sake. They are ‘companion animals’. We love them, in the same way that the Indians love their cows. But the Indians eat dogs, don’t they? And Koreans eat dogs. And the French eat horses. And we eat pigs, which are just as intelligent as dogs.

By now, he’s demonstrated something important: that a lot of what we do, when we eat meat, depends on creating a sort of mental block about what we’re doing.