Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals went viral on the Illinois College campus early in 2010. At least eight faculty members read it, and many others read about it. A Spanish professor paused to cry midway through the book. My wife, a professor of American literature then teaching on a Fulbright in Japan, dramatically reduced her meat consumption and purchased us a subscription to Vegetarian Times. A candidate for our writer-in-residence position had read the book, and it became a place of common ground during a dinner conversation.

The book’s impact on my life was fairly dramatic. Late one night in March, I was lying in bed after a long day of teaching, grading and meetings and following my standard practice of reading every day no matter what. That night, I had chosen Eating Animals because a colleague had asked for my opinion about it. After finishing only two chapters, I closed the book and petted Hector, our black-and-white calico cat. “This book is disturbing,” I told him. “I am not eating meat tomorrow.”

A few weeks into my meat moratorium, while I was still adjusting to the harsh stress of such an abrupt change in diet and calorie intake, our first issue of Vegetarian Times arrived in the mail. It contained a Q-and-A interview with Foer on the last page. “Did you know that the swine flu [a fear on our campus] came from factory farms in North Carolina?” I asked the students in my nonfiction workshop. “I’m going to keep thinking about this for a while, and until I decide on the right action, I am not eating meat.” They seemed to think I was crazy.

Now, I cannot claim my action was solely the result of the book’s power. That semester, I was teaching two nonfiction courses, and Foer’s book is interesting as a hybrid that blends immersion reporting, argumentative writing or advocacy prose, and narrative memoir. Structural and stylistic experimentation permeate the book. At one point, Foer includes a rectangle as a visual representation

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