I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s piece about eating meat in the NYTimes Magazine’s Food Issue and didn’t quite get it. The title was clear, “Why Jonathan Safran Foer Chose to Give Up Meat”, but that didn’t seem to be what the column was about. Admittedly, I skimmed the whole thing, but my sense was that Foer had given up meat several times (every other paragraph, it seemed) and that he had settled on eating it once in a while, but not serving it to his kids. Frankly, the column seemed jumbled and stupid [POT! KETTLE!], an attempt to get a famous writer to talk about their personal psychic struggle with eating meat. So I giggled a little at Bookslut’s take on Foer’s latest book, Eating Animals:

I am trying so hard to be nice to Jonathan Safran Foer, by which I mean I am trying to forget he exists on this planet. His book Eating Animals, however, is making this goal very, very difficult. It was bad enough when he was writing shitty novels, but now he’s indulging in my least favorite form of nonfiction: the “I have never thought about this thing before until now, and despite the fact that other people have thought about this for years and wrestle daily with the implications, I think my brand new thoughts should be shared with the world.” Whatever the topic — religion, marriage, gender, food politics — the books are always shallow, yet for some reason a lot of people take them seriously.

Via my blogbuddy, who got it from Prettier Than Napoleon who said accurately:

The proper place for deep thoughts on issues that you just started examining but which have already been exhaustively discussed by more informed people is a blog. GYOFB, Jonathan Safran Foer.