Author of the week: Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer is asking his fellow Americans to stop eating meat, said Adam Sternbergh in New York. Not all meat, neces­sarily, and maybe not forever. But the young author of Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close recently took a break from writing novels to produce a book-length meditation on the ethics of eating other living creatures. Thoughtful people, he’s concluded, should renounce virtually all the meat they encounter at supermarkets and restaurants. “I’m not against meat philosophically,” he insists. “I don’t know if I think it’s wrong.” What concerns him is the ecological damage currently caused by Big Agriculture and the cruelties visited upon livestock.

Foer’s new book, Eating Animals, advocates a veritable boycott of

factory-farmed animals. “This is far and away the No. 1 cause of global warming,” he says. For­merly fallow land is now used to raise livestock and tons of fuel are burned in the process. Every factory-farmed animal, he adds, is “treated in ways that would be illegal if it were

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a cat or a dog.” Though now a vegetarian, he admits that he prefers a carnivorous diet. “I love roast chicken. I love a good steak,” he writes. “But I don’t love them without limit.” Sure, they all taste good. But

it’s simply wrong, he says, that for some reason, the “crudest” of human senses—taste—“has been exempted from the ethical rules” governing all other human desires.