The Ethics of Eating Animals
The Ethics of Eating Animals
How do contemporary Jewish traditions respond to the fraught activity of eating animals, especially in an ethical register? This chapter sketches a partial answer to this question by considering two stories: The first is told by contemporary Jewish novelist Jonathan Safran Foer in his 2009 nonfiction book critiquing the meat industry, Eating Animals. Moving from the contemporary to the canonical, the second story is the biblical narrative about eating animals found in Genesis 1 and 9. Taken together, these two stories straddle an immense territory from the oldest strata of Jewish texts ever to address the question of eating animals to among the most recent texts to do so, from the popular appeal of contemporary nonfiction to the authoritative density of the Bible. These stories provide the reader a feel for how Jews find distinct ways to explore ethical questions, in this case about eating animals, through sharing and interpreting stories.
Keywords: Jewish, biblical, meat, industry, Genesis, Bible, ethical, animals, Jonathan Safran Foer
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