After the worldwide success of two novels as Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Jonathan Safran Foer, 33 year-old star of American literature, back in Italian bookstores with If nothing matters (Guanda ), an essay that answers, even with very harsh tone, the question of why we eat animals. "We have waged a war - Safran Foer writes - or rather we have allowed it to undertake a war against all the animals we eat . This war is new and has a name: factory farming. " Vegetarian hiccup for many years, as told by himself, the writer has set seriously address the problem of eating meat after the birth of his children and, as explained in Kilgore during a meeting in Milan, focused " the difference between things that tell us about food and the reality . What is striking, in the book by Safran Foer, is the absence of ideological positions, applicants often in books on the subject of such vegetarianism, which eventually turns out to be a choice dictated by the growing awareness of the terrible practices where animals are subjected in 99% of the herds and the high environmental costs related to the system of food production.
"Literature - Safran Foer told us - it is useful to remember the things that, taken by the circumstances of life, often we end up forgetting . The point is that we can encourage to do better and we can also help you to feel things more deeply. " But, and here the writer is categorical, If anything does not matter is a work of art ("Art should be only an end in itself"), but the report of an investigation spanning three years that would lift the veil that hides the horrors and suffering that animals destined to become food for our tables suffer every day, and on a massive scale. Suffering, says Safran Foer, maybe we can understand only if we insert into a story about us. So, we ask, literature can somehow save us and animals? " A book does not save lives - said the writer - but can contribute to broad cultural changes . I believe that books can change the reader, and I hope that someone reading my essay may change your mind on the flesh. But anyway this is not the reason I started to write it. "
One of the recurring words in the pages of Safran Foer is shame (defined as "the work of memory against forgetting"): "Shame - he said - is very useful, and often prevents you from doing things that you should not, helps us to be better. Sometimes we really need more ashamed. " Extermination of animals in the extermination of human beings at times the pace may seem quick and there have been parallels with the Holocaust, but Jonathan Safran Foer does not like this comparison: "I have no problem with whoever wants to do, but it is not appropriate: we are talking about animals and not of men . We must not regard them as human beings, but simply as animals. " With the respect due to living beings and not forgetting that the problem affects all of us, as herds of animals contribute to global warming than all transportation in the world combined.
last remark on the Italian title (in original Eating Animals ): the reference is to the writer's grandmother that even in the darkest wartime famine in Ukraine did not eat pork donatale by a Russian peasant, because it was not kosher, even to save his life. "If nothing matters - the woman explained to his nephew - there's nothing to save."
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