Eating Animals

In well-structured arguments, some care is given to the defining of terms, and Foer uses this chapter to lay out some of the terms he feels are needed to understand the claims that he has made and will make in the work. Many of the terms include claims of their own beyond the factual definitions, which is another tool that Foer employs in combining his methods of rhetoric. Rather than simply provide dictionary definitions for each of his terms, Foer elaborates, relating the definitions into the narrative structure or broadening the scope of individual terms to encompass a wider ethical or moral argument. In Foer’s discussion of broiler chickens, for example, he also discusses how the opposite of broiler chickens, layers, are raised specifically for eggs. As such, the male layer chickens are destroyed as chicks in a variety of ways, and these methods are presented in this definition to expand the discussion beyond just the genetics of different animals. The simple idea of raising some chickens to have larger breasts is not particularly shocking or persuasive, but when Foer opens the discussion to include the different aspects of dividing and modifying different chicken populations in this way, he is able to relate details in a way he hopes the reader will find shocking.

Foer also uses contradicting definitions to make claims about existing arguments and ideas. One such pair of definitions is “comfort food” and “discomfort food,” in which Foer expands on the narrative of his own family and the value of social eating. Recalling a time when his infant son was sick, Foer notes how family and friends brought him and his wife food in the hospital, noting the comfort that food brought their family in a difficult situation. Once their son had recovered, Foer’s family ate at a restaurant, but Foer cannot recall what he ordered or how it tasted. Despite this gap in memory, he still claims it was the best meal of his life, and this title is the result of the circumstances of the meal, not the meal itself. Even though “discomfort food” would be assumed to be the opposite of “comfort food,” Foer uses his definition of “discomfort food” to add to the idea proposed in the previous definition. Critiquing Michael Pollan, an author known for his works about food and health, Foer notes that Pollan thinks of vegetarians as an impediment to “table fellowship,” the camaraderie that comes from eating socially. As with the meal Foer ate after his son’s recovery, he notes that Pollan has neglected to focus on the real source of table fellowship, which is the connections between people, as opposed to the specific food eaten. In this way, Foer establishes that any food can be comforting, noting that it is more difficult to find comfort in foods that require the suffering of other beings, calling The Ethics of Suffering and Eating into question.

The definition of “intelligence” layers on other definitions, like “species barrier,” in identifying the distance that people place between themselves and animals. A large part of the reasoning behind factory farming and other animal abuses has to do with a socially ingrained view of animals as less intelligent and less valuable than humans. Phrases like “bird-brained,” meaning stupid, expose an underlying perception of animals as unintelligent, despite research showing that birds and other animals function intellectually in a similar way to humans. Immediately after describing birds’ intellectual capacity, Foer includes the 2004 revelation that one of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s industrial suppliers was violently abusing chickens in their facility. Foer structures his argument to evoke an emotional response. He intends for the reader to first realize the value and experience of these chickens, and then see the atrocities that chickens face in the name of fast food. Immediately following the KFC definition is a definition of “Kosher?” in which Foer details how animal processing, even that which is meant to be held to a religious standard of ethics and cleanliness, can fail. The structure of these definitions in relation to one another shows first that animals have valuable experiences, then that humans do not sufficiently value those experiences, and finally that even religious practices, generally regarded as sacred in terms of morality, cannot prevent such abuses.