It started out promisingly enough, Safran Foer has that wonderful combination of wry humor and uber-introspection that made Woody Allen famous, and certainly contributed to a love life few would have bet the farm on.  I chuckled delightedly on the airplane to read Safran Foer’s disclaimer about animal empathy, which somewhat echoes my coyote-wearing own.

I spent the first twenty-six years of my life disliking animals.  I thought of them as bothersome, dirty, unapproachably foreign, frighteningly unpredictable, and plain old unnecessary.  I had a particular lack of enthusiasm for dogs……  As a child I would agree to go to friends’ houses only if they confined their dogs in some other room.  If a dog approached in the park, I’d become hysterical until my father hoisted me onto his shoulders.  I didn’t like watching television shows that featured dogs.  I didn’t understand- I disliked - people who got excited about dogs.  It’s possible that I even developed a subtle prejudice against the blind.

He had me going for a minute, and then he said all that changed and he became a dog person.  Men.  What grabbed me next, and what I even shared with snoopy row-mates on the plane, was his quite original and sweeping analysis of the fish “industry,”  whose practices, if committed on land, would make the worst factory farm look like a petting zoo.  An entire page of type is committed to a series of the species of fish slaughtered as “bycatch,” for the noble cause of obtaining a humble can of 99-cent tuna, but the horrendous loss of marine life from such fishing was quickly overshadowed by the appalling filth and inhumanity of “acquaculture,” which is merely a waterlogged version of the antibiotic-saturated torture of an industrial chicken farm.  I found out a lot about those from the book, including the fact that such MBA-concocted atrocities are such a recent, but now universal, development in all animal “farming.”  Safran Foer describes this in typically stark and arresting terms, comparing chicken’s newly reduced and artificial lives to those of humans, were they to be treated the same way, “To gain a sense of the radicalness of this change, imagine human children growing to be 300 pounds in ten years, eating only granola bars and Flintstones vitamins.”  Would even Jeffrey Dahmer find such children tasty?

Unfortunately, money quotes like these all occur in the first half of the book, and the second half is dedicated largely to enlightening but rather futile discussions with decent and relatively humane animal farmers, and the overly personal quest concerning meat-eating Safran Foer has embarked upon as a new father.  He’s seeking a truth many have already found, and he makes a lot of important points along the way, but in the end we are back where we started.  The animals we eat are, with few exceptions, brought to us in a way that both shocks the conscience and turns the stomach, and eating them is not just dubiously safe and declasse, but dreadfully harmful to the planet and our future.  Point taken.

But I was waiting for the second punch:  as humans, as stewards of the earth, and merely as people, we all need to do something, and to be honest, Safran Foer’s principled eschewing of eating animals is a start, but doesn’t go far enough.  The grotesque exploitation of animals and the unfathomable damage that exploitation creates boils down to, in the end, a rather conservative prescription to protect one’s own as Safran Foer is doing with his new son.  He ends up vaguely supportive of more humane farming, and deeply hostile toward the current industrial system, but curiously devoid of a broader call to political action beyond choices made at the checkout counter.  I mean, we’re talking about epidemics, extinction, and the most revolting of biological experiments, and all we’re supposed to worry about is what we feed Junior?

Even as he vows to protect his new family from this scourge, he leaves the rest of us wondering if that’s all we can do, and, of course, when are the next funny parts?  Safran Foer is definitely onto something, but it would have taken more than 270 pages to get there.