Reading Eating Animals (And Not Eating Animals)

Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer, is not a book about vegetarianism. It is a book about right, wrong, and thoughts on what we eat in consumer America today. As a vegetarian, I am often asked about what I eat, why I eat it, and why I don't eat what I don't eat. The questions began when, in the sixth grade, I became a vegetarian, like my mother and sister (who has recently returned to what we playfully call "the dark side" and now eats meat). Since then I have fluctuated between vegetarian and pescitarian (fish only), finally deciding on being a true blue veggie in high school. The reason? The questions I was asked made me think, what makes fish different from any other animal, what justifies the slaughter and consumption of one creature but not that of another? In the first two sections of his book, Foer asks this question more directly and more bluntly than anyone I have encountered in his chapter "All or Nothing or Something Else."
"Dogs," says Foer, "are wonderful. . . But they are remarkably unremarkable in their intellectual and experiential capacities. Pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling, by any sensible definition of the words. They can't hop into the back of a Volvo, but they can fetch, run, and play. . . So why don't they get to curl up by the fire? Why can't they at least be spared being tossed on the fire?" Already, on page 25, Foer has asked a question i've asked myself, and been asked, for years. Why are some animals better than others? Why do we, as Americans, think it taboo to eat a dog, but perfectly commonplace to consume cow or pig or chicken or fish? Foer discusses fish in special detail when he describes gaffing, the process of taking a kind of pickaxe and slashing it into the side, gill, or eye of a fish to haul it into a boat. Do that to a dog and it would be heinous, disgusting, cruel to any sane person. But do it to a fish, and it's "okay". To put things in a new perspective, Foer asks the reader "If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?" Is it that we feel pain? That we think? What made me feel guilty about eating animals (when I did) were the kinds of questions Foer asks, questions that Americans ought to consider when they go to restaurants and the grocery.
What we eat says a lot about how we think as a society, and the kinds of questions we are willing to (or remain unwilling to) ask ourselves. Having asked myself these questions and thought hard about who I am and what I eat, I became a vegetarian long ago. Now I am interested in others' views on eating animals. I hope to, by reading Eating Animals, discover how carnivorous/omnivorous America justifies itself. Any thoughts?