Eating Animals - Was I to Starve or Was I to Eat Animals?

Landon Kieffer

Eng. 112

Foer

Eating Animals

        Was I to starve or was I to eat animals? Growing up Foer thought his grandmother was the best cook, but he began to think that a cook should have more than one recipe (Chicken and carrots). We don’t hurt animals is what Foer’s father told him when he once kicked a dog and once again Foer told his dad that we don’t hurt animals when his dad killed his goldfish. Foer believed that he couldn’t hurt animals because that’s what he was told. He believed that animals were essentially his family members. Foer stated that “My vegetarianism, so bombastic and unyielding in the beginning, lasted a few years, sputtered, and quietly died”. He like to believe that vegetarianism was such an easy thing to do on and off and which he did all the time. He still believed that it was wrong to hurt animals and that they were “friends”. It was more of an identity thing for him when he claimed himself as a vegetarian. When he went to college, he didn’t really know anyone, so no one knew of his past, so he didn’t feel the need to refrain from eating meat. Then all of a sudden, he gets married (His wife is also a vegetarian). Then he has a child a baby boy, and he gets to thinking that he gets to start his story all over again and be able to alter the story his way. Foer said, “I saw the rings of my tree: my parents watching me eat, my grandmother watching my mother eat, my great-grandparents watching my grandmother”. It was like having a kid gave him a whole new meaning to “eating animals”. Everything his kid did was eat anytime of the day, these stories make what their family is. Foer had interesting ways of looking at the things he did, but he thought so hard about everything that he believed he was always doing the right things. Even if it meant sometimes cheating a little bit and eating some meat. Overall, animals were friends not enemies they were like family that we sometimes had to eat to stay alive.