Jonathan Safran Foer is a novelist — he wrote Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close — but here he turns his hand to nonfiction. Eating Animals is, essentially, a philosophical argument for vegetarianism, conducted in the form of a personal narrative and a journalistic investigation. As a young man, Foer flirted with vegetarianism, but after his two children were born, he decided to make a serious inquiry into the ethics of eating meat. This book is the result.