Eating Animals

Every two months, some of my university girlfriends and I convene for an afternoon -turns to evening turns to night- of eating, drinking, catching up, and lots of laughing. You wouldn't guess it from my description, but this is actually a book club meeting. It's just that most of the time, we don't take the reading and discussing part so seriously, which is fine with everyone. Our latest meeting was Saturday, and I have to say, it was a little different this time. The book we had read (at least most of us had, and at least in part) was Johnathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.

It is a non-fiction piece about the meat industry, and Johnathan Safran Foer is the young dad who stops to think about why we eat meat, educates himself on how we treat the animals that become our meals, and is appalled at what he encounters. Frankly, anyone who reads the book will be appalled. 

The majority of my girlfriends are not vegetarians, nor did they become vegetarian after reading the book. However, for the first time since starting our book club a year and a half ago, we actually had a heated and animated discussion on the book we'd just read. And even the biggest meat lovers among us admitted that they gave the kind of meat they bought a little more thought. While I personally didn't like the tone of the book too much, and am not one of J.S. Foer's biggest fans, I think he deserves props for getting us to care about what we eat, and having a discussion about it to boot.