When you flip through Eating Animals, written by the author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, you can almost see Jonathan Safran Foer's tears dried on the pages. This is an emotional account of Safran Foer's journey away from meat-eating, a decision that was spurred by becoming a husband and father. There are plenty of graphic descriptions and harrowing facts about factory farming, assembly-line slaughter, and high-tech fishing methods, but what's more intense is Safran Foer's empathy for animal suffering. It's like the book is bleeding. Faint-hearted readers will probably cry, and strong-willed meat eaters will probably call Safran Foer a wuss. I especially appreciate Safran Foer's description of his struggle to reconcile vegetarianism with his Jewish family's food traditions, from Thanksgiving turkey to brisket. Unless you were raised by hippies (and maybe you were), you probably have your own set of food traditions, and you'd have to fight to forgo meat at family functions. When your doting grandma says, "of course you can eat lamb--it's not meat, it's lamb!" it's hard to turn her down. 
 If you don't read this book, you are missing out. But at least read these most-important parts. 
 "To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (to eschew factory-farmed products) the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconveneience. We know at least that this decisoion will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution , save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural america, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history. What we dont know though may be just as important. How would making such a decision change US? What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundametal act of consumption?... Tolstoy famously argued that the existence of slaughterhouse and battlefields is linked... compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use and the regular exercise of choosing kindess over cruelty would change us." 
 "When Temple Grandin first began to quantify the scale of abuse in slaughterhouese, she reported witnesseing "deliberate acts of cruelty occuring on a reg basis" at 32% of the plants she surveyed during announced visits in the US. I had to reread that 3 times. 
 Deliberate acts 
 occuring on a 
 regular basis 
 witnessed by an 
 auditor 
 witnessed during 
 announced 
 audits that gave the slaughterhouse timem to clean up the worst problems. What about creuelties that werent witnesses?" 
 "We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We thave the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones whom it will be fairly asked, what did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?" 
 "This isnt animal experiementation where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the sufering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something, why is taste, the curdest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sesnse? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person have as strong a claim to raping animals as a hungry one does to killing and eating them? It's easy to dismiss that questioning but hard to respond to it. And how would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals." 
 "Senitimentality is widely considered out of touch, weak. Very often those who express concern about the conditioning in which farmed animals are raised are disregarded as sentimentalists. But its worth taking a step back to ask why is the sentimentalist and who is the realist. Is caring to know about the treatment of farmed animals and a confrontation with the facts about the animals and oursleves or an avoidance of them? Is arguing that a sentiment of compassion should be given greater value than a cheaper burger or having a burger at all an dexpression of emotion and implulse or an engagement with realicty and our moral intuitions? 2 friends are ordering lunch. One says "I'm in the mood for a burger" and orders it. The other says "I'm in the mood for a burger" but remembers that ther are things more important to him than what he is in the mood for at any given moment, and orders something else. Who is the sentimentalist?"