Sitting in the church pew of a battered looking Catholic church complete with pulpit, peeling gold leaf, and stained glass is not the place I thought I would be waiting to listen to Jonathan Safran Foer talk about his new book.  The Brooklyn church, which Foer revealed is only four blocks from his house, served Thursday night as the forum for Foer to talk about his latest book, Eating Animals.  With his newest publication, the author steps away from fiction to explore what it means to, well, eat animals. Foer was everything I thought he would be—quiet, reserved, and articulate— but undoubtedly firm in his message.

Foer prefaced his talk by saying that, “The things that I write about are things that I’m convinced we all agree on. I’ve strived, when writing this book, to appeal to things we all agree on.” In the book, Foer explores the argument for eating or not eating meat. Though he hired two outside fact checkers, used only industry statistics, and included 60 pages of notes in the back of the book, Foer said, “I don’t think of it as journalism, I think of it as a story.”

Foer asserted that Eating Animals is “not a straightforward argument against meat, it’s a straightforward argument against factory farming.” He explained that factory farming is where 99% of the animal products we digest come from. These farms are places where animals are kept at very high unnatural conditions. In chicken farms, each chicken has no more space to live than the cover of a hardback book for the entirety of its life. Foer explained that, “Factory farming is the number one cause of global warming and the number one cause of loss of environmental diversity.” He went on to say that, “Our diets have been revolutionized in the past 50 years … Americans eat 120 times more chicken … the industry has manipulated our eating habits.” He explained, “If Americans took away one meat serving per week, it would be the equivalent of taking five million cars off the road. “

As someone who has always been an avid carnivore, I was shocked to hear how much my own eating habits have an impact, and how much the eating habits of Americans have been manipulated by factory farming. Usually environmental concerns seems so far removed from my life. I’m never really a witness to deforestation or water pollution, but thinking about the closeness of what I am actually putting in my mouth was very unsettling. Choosing to eat vegetarian is a very serious choice that I’ve never even considered before, but Foer’s book raised a lot of questions that I simply can’t ignore.

Foer admits that, “I miss things like my Grandmother’s chicken with carrots, my dad’s turkey burgers, barbecue on the fourth of July, and turkey at Thanksgiving.” I would miss things like this too. Not eating meat would be a big change, but maybe it’s a change that, in today’s world, needs to be made.