Eat This Book: A Carnivore's Manifesto

If we want to improve the treatment of animals, Dominique Lestel argues, we must acknowledge our evolutionary impulse to eat them and we must expand our worldview to see how others consume meat ethically and sustainably. The position of vegans and vegetarians is unrealistic and exclusionary. Eat This Book calls at once for a renewed and vigorous defense of animal rights and a more open approach to meat eating that turns us into responsible carnivores.

Lestel skillfully synthesizes Western philosophical views on the moral status of animals and holistic cosmologies that recognize human-animal reciprocity. He shows that the carnivore's position is more coherently ethical than vegetarianism, which isolates humans from the world by treating cruelty, violence, and conflicting interests as phenomena outside of life. Describing how meat eaters assume completely--which is to say, metabolically--their animal status, Lestel opens our eyes to the vital relation between carnivores and animals and carnivores' genuine appreciation of animals' life-sustaining flesh. He vehemently condemns factory farming and the terrible footprint of industrial meat eating. His goal is to recreate a kinship between humans and animals that reminds us of what it means to be tied to the world.

Author: Dominique Lestel
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 03/08/2016
Pages: 160
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 6.90h x 5.40w x 0.50d
ISBN: 9780231172974

About the Author
Dominique Lestel is an associate professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris. He is a founding member and part of the Archives Husserl Research Center and, with Thierry Bardini, is coauthor of Journey to the End of the Species.

Gary Steiner is professor of philosophy at Bucknell University. He is the author of Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism; Anthropocentrism and Its Discontents The Moral Status of Animals in the History of Western Philosophy; and Animals and the Moral Community: Mental Life, Moral Status, and Kinship.