And perhaps some in my family’s village were able to escape Nazi persecution, as some also had done in Foer’s story.

Just as “Everything Is Illuminated” helped me to better make sense of the trauma of the Holocaust, Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” helped me to process the events of Sept. 11 and the legacy of trauma that still leaves many reeling 10 years later. As a reader, I felt a connection to Foer in his quest for knowledge and identity in “Everything is Illuminated” and to Oskar, the main character of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, who was on a similar journey.

In 2009, Foer again sought to uncover truths and to better understand our moral obligations to others in a world continually wrought by the trauma of suffering, cruelty and death. Foer’s “Eating Animals,” which is part memoir, part field notes and observations and part correspondences with others, highlights the use and abuse of animals, which are raised and killed for food in our society.

Foer explores the complex relationship between culture and food, about how one’s identity and one’s relationship with family and friends often hinges on the foods we cook and eat. Similarly, Foer writes about our complex relationship with other beings and how our food choices affect our perception and relationship with other animals.

Foer explains, “Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.” For Foer and others, we are what we eat, insofar as our meals reflect individual identities, cultures and lifestyles.

But on a deeper level, our meals oftentimes literally mean the suffering and death of an animal raised and killed in hellish factory farms, recalling the trauma depicted in Foer’s previous two works.

Foer writes when one thinks about the meat they prepare to eat, they often imagine idyllic scenarios of the “fisherman reeling in fish, the pig farmer knowing each of his pigs as individuals, the turkey rancher watching beaks break through eggs,” but, in reality, the lives of these animals are anything but the romanticized narratives we conjure to ease our fears, worry or sense of guilt.

In trying to imagine the plight of egg-laying hens kept in small cages, known as battery cages, Foer proposes to the reader, “Step your mind into a crowded elevator, an elevator so crowded you cannot turn around without bumping into (and aggravating) your neighbor. The elevator is so crowded you are often held aloft. This is a kind of blessing, as the slanted floor is made of wire, which cuts into your feet.

“After some time, those in the elevator will lose their ability to work in the interest of the group. Some will become violent; others will go mad. A few, deprived of food and hope, will become cannibalistic.

“There is no respite, no relief. No elevator repairman is coming. The doors will open once, at the end of your life, for your journey to the only place worse.”

Throughout his book, Foer charts the disaster that is the industrialized rearing and killing of animals for food. Foer explains the ways in which the contemporary factory farming industry is destroying our health and our environment while simultaneously distorting our identities and relations with food.

But perhaps most importantly, Foer attempts to write about the unwritable exploitation, trauma, suffering and death inflicted upon animals by factory farming corporations. Foer’s moving prose speaks for itself in “Eating Animals,” as it does in all his works. I hardly can do his narrative justice here, so I highly would recommend picking up a copy as we reflect on Foer’s work this fall.

As members of the MSU community — where animals are killed routinely and served daily in our facilities on and off campus ­— it behooves us to re-examine our relationship with other beings, those we once had thought to eat, to wear or to exploit in any other way.

As Foer writes in “Eating Animals,” the issues surrounding eating animals are complex, but with one’s own research and personal reflection, the compassionate decision is clear.

Mitch Goldsmith is a State News guest columnist and social relations and policy, women’s and gender studies senior. Reach him at goldsm40@msu.edu.