“If Nothing Matters, There’s Nothing to Save”

Gillian Lyons

This past weekend New York Times Magazine published an excerpt of novelist (writer of Everything Is Illuminated) Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals.  In the article, and by extension, in the book, the author talks about his lifetime of wavering vegetarianism, and why he has decided to raise his children vegetarian.

Reading the article, I was particularly struck by Foer’s realization that by excluding meat from his life, and from his children’s lives, he’d somehow managed to disconnect himself from his grandmother. I understood this, personally, because in a culture where so many of our memories are laced with food (think of all those 4^th of July barbecues!) it’s easy to see that the vegetarian is somewhat excluded.

But as Foer’s grandmother said- if nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.  For Foer, and for many of us reading this blog, what matters is rectifying our country’s morally unjustifiable treatment of animals.

The book has already garnered at least one angry response– but it promises to be a somewhat different view on America’s factory farm industry… I think it’s going to be worth the read.