Eating Animals is Foer’s first nonfiction book. He earned wide acclaim for his novels Everything is Illuminated (2002) and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), which is the One Book Charleston County selection for 2012 (see below). Foer graduated from Princeton University in 1999 with a degree in philosophy and has written an opera and edited anthologies in addition to his novels. He has been an occasional vegetarian since age 10. He is currently a professor in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. His fourth novel, Escape from Children’s Hospital, is due for publication in 2014.

Eating Animals employs philosophy, literature, science, countless interviews, and undercover investigations of factory farms to wrestle with the complexity of food choices, especially those that involve eating animals. Why do we eat animals? Would we eat them if we knew how they were treated? To what extent does that matter? Rather than telling you what to eat, Foer challenges you to know what you are eating and how it got on your fork and then to think carefully about the ethical, environmental, legal, and communal and decide how you feel about the choices you make.