Eating Animals

Much as it is jarring to read Sarfran Froer, known for his twists of words and mind-bendingly high concept fiction, be a straight documentarian, it's comforting to know that underneath the flamboyant writing is a principled and earnest man. Eating Animals takes the Fast Food Nation/Waste premise of exploring where our food comes from and beats you over the head with it. You may emerge from this vegan.

Eating Animals, starting with the catalyst of Sarfran Froer about to become a father, deciding whether his children should eat meat, becomes a gut-wrenching exposé about the price paid by the environment, the government, the Third World and the animals themselves in order to put meat on our tables quickly and conveniently.

Juxtaposed with the documentation of food processes in America is Sarfran Froer's own internal intellectual debate and rationalisation of what he discovers, monologues imbued with self-deprecation and morality. This isn't a preaching to the converted book for vegetarians; it's more- it's about each of us taking responsibility for how we source what we put into our stomachs; a worthy sentiment indeed.