Literary Wed Nov 18 2009

Jonathan Safran Foer at Harold Washington Library

"Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist," Natalie Portman wrote for the Huffington Post. Tonight Foer spoke about his new book, Eating Animals, at Harold Washington Library in the packed Cindy Pritzker Auditorium.

Famous for his novels Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, this is Foer's first venture into non-fiction. Wavering back and forth as a vegetarian since he was nine, Foer felt with the birth of his son a sense of urgency about decisions: his own and the one's he would make for his son.

He read a short excerpt from his book about his grandma and used the bulk of the time to facilitate audience questions and discussion. He answered every question thoughtfully and respectfully making sure the audience understood he wasn't there to persuade anyone.

His strongest and most enlightening thought was the idea of a vegetarian spectrum. Foer dismissed the notion that one is either a vegetarian or they're not. He told a story many people are familiar with in which someone says they are vegetarian for so many years. Then one day they ate meat and that was the end of it. This binary ideal is detrimental because people feel they either need to do be a vegan activist or be completely careless. He counteracted with the point that if everyone replaced just one meal a week with a vegetarian one, it would be like taking 5 million cars off the road.

Listen for the talk on Chicago Amplified on Chicago Public Radio.

— Whitney Stoepel / Comments (1)