Jonathan Safran Foer Against Meat Summary

Against Meat Or Not?

In the article “Against Meat” written by Jonathan Safran Foer, the author attempts to state why he becomes a vegetarian. Foer begins by telling an emotional story of his grandmother’s relationship to food. Then he presents his own muddled relationship with vegetarianism up through parenthood. Finally, he presents another story from his grandmother to persuade his audience to understand his thought process. Although Foer presents interesting stories, he has a distracting tone of confusion throughout the article, he uses mainly emotional appeal to make his argument, his statistical evidence is incomplete, and he commits the logical fallacy moral equivalence. Therefore, his argument is rendered unpersuasive.

First of

Foer draws the reader in with emotional stories of his grandmother, continues with his struggle to become vegetarian, and concludes with another story about his grandmother. He starts his article with his grandmother and he ends it with his grandmother. At the end, Foer is telling a story about how his grandmother was running away from the Germans because she was a Jew. His grandmother was so hungry one day and there was a person who gave her meat to eat and she did not eat it. Foer asks why. She replies, “It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork” (460). He asks, “What, because it wasn’t kosher?” She replies, “Of course.” Foer asks her, “But not even to save your life?” His grandmother responds, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save” (461). He seems to appeal to the readers feelings of compassion for his grandmother’s story to get the audience to agree with him. Even though it is not his only mode of argumentation he relies primarily on his emotional appeals to make his point. Next, his statistical evidence was incomplete. For example, “Eating factory-farmed animals--which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants--is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans can do to the environment” (457). Then he also says, “Free range,” “cage free,” “natural” and “organic” are nearly meaningless when it comes to animal welfare” (457). Thus, his statistical facts