Eating Animals

Aptly named, this first chapter frames the book by presenting Foer’s background in relation to food and meat, as well as his motivations for writing Eating Animals. A narrative is constructed between Foer’s grandmother’s experience in the Holocaust and his son’s future experiences during childhood and beyond. As such, Foer is placing himself, and the reader, in the present moment as a node connecting the past to the future and placing specific importance on the choices that people make. Foer’s family is balanced between unwise or unreasonable decisions and an overarching sense of togetherness and love. His grandmother believes in a specific food hierarchy, in which all foods are good for one’s health, but large animals are the best and sweets and plants are not quite as good. This error in judgment combines with her signature dish, just chicken and carrots, to form an impression that the title of “Greatest Chef Who Ever Lived” (15) is an ironic one, fueled more by belief and love than reality. However, her achievements are undeniable, having survived genocide and raised a full and successful family, her role within that family is critical to Foer’s perception of her cooking and excessive attitude toward food.

Foer also presents his own wavering attitude toward vegetarianism, noting the onset of the diet in his childhood, followed by periods of eating meat and rejecting meat, all with different motivations. One such motivation is meeting women in activist circles, but the primary reason to return to eating meat seems to be forgetting the ethics and experiences that convinced him to become vegetarian previously. Foer argues that this forgetting is common in the meat-eating experience, as most people are currently aware of the atrocities of factory farming and decide to ignore those factors when purchasing and consuming meat. Fatherhood, for Foer, is the transition that creates a sense of urgency in his decision-making, as he needs to choose whether his son will ever participate in the factory farming system. The decision is made more complex by the question of whether his son will ever get to eat his great-grandmother’s chicken and carrots. These perspectives rely on two factors in choosing to eat meat: tradition and convention. Eating meat plays a significant role in Foer’s family structure, hence his grandmother’s title, and the question becomes whether or not the family can continue to function without that tradition. Outside of the narrative structure of this chapter, Foer acknowledges that the other reason, convention, is perhaps even more powerful, as many people are inclined to eat meat, himself included, simply because most people already do eat meat. Diverging from the status quo within a given structure, like family or friends, is difficult alone, but diverging from the norms of society is even more challenging, even when the divergence is the ethical or moral choice.

The purpose of Foer’s opening chapter, in the greater context of the book, is to prepare the reader for the tactics he intends to use, as well as the framing he will employ in presenting his arguments. Foer notes that he “used the most conservative statistics available” (14), usually from the government or peer-reviewed sources, but he devalues this tactic, which is a strategy known in rhetoric as logos. Logos is the use of logic, reason, and fact to persuade an audience, and Foer seems to insist that logos is not the foundation of this book, despite the myriad of facts and statistics he will use later on. Instead, he wants to frame the discussion around storytelling because, for Foer, stories are the framework through which facts take on meaning. The other two components of broad rhetorical tactics are pathos and ethos, with pathos including emotional persuasion and ethos relying on credibility or established conventions and figures. Both tactics play a role in the remainder of the book, and for this opening chapter Foer uses each tactic in his discussions of his grandmother, concluding the chapter with a story of his grandmother’s time in Europe during the Holocaust. When his grandmother notes eating out of garbage cans but refusing to eat pork, Foer is using his grandmother as an authority on eating under stress, which is ethos, by accessing the emotional response of the reader by presenting a strenuous and life-threatening situation. These tactics combine to show that Foer is planning on making a well-rounded argument with all three rhetorical tactics over the course of the book to persuade the reader that the issue of eating animals is multi-faceted and requires earnest thought and consideration.