ABSTRACT
A basic fact of human religious life is that killing and eating animals for food is not taken lightly and is invariably the subject of intense regulations and energetic disagreement. Food in general is always bound to identity, but meat consistently influences people’s sense of identity more than other foods. This chapter considers some ways Jewish traditions have responded to the fraught question of the ethics of eating animals. It briefly considers the most authoritative Jewish text on the topic, the biblical book of Genesis, and the reflections of a prominent contemporary Jewish writer, Jonathan Safran Foer. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the broken state of animal agriculture and the power of storytelling—both canonical stories from tradition and informal stories we tell in the present moment—as a vehicle to alter the future of food.
