Foer's crusade

RELAX: FOR all his headline-grabbing talk about skinning and cooking dogs, Jonathan Safran Foer doesn't want to challenge your values or change your mind about animals. He does want to persuade you to stop eating factory-farmed meat - not because it's against his beliefs, but because it's against yours.

That's the argument Foer, the author of "Everything is Illuminated" (as well as "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"), develops in his new book, "Eating Animals" (Little, Brown and Co., $25.99), which he'll read and discuss at the Central Branch of the Free Library tonight. His "modest proposal" about dogs (including a recipe!) is a way of showing that we already know animals are individuals - we treat pets as persons, as members of our family - and he wants to make clear how thoroughly their lives are violated by factory farming.

Throughout the book, Foer details the commonplace animal suffering and misery in the system providing 99 percent of the meat and dairy we eat. He believes most Americans are still hazy on how bad it is and need to grasp the scope of the problem. "It's not a question of needing to change anyone's values," he said by phone last week. "It's just making certain lines of sight clear, making connections."

Foer came to his newfound advocacy upon becoming a father. He and his wife had flirted with vegetarianism, always falling off the wagon. But now that he was responsible for someone's lifetime nutrition and health, Foer got serious about food and started researching its sources.

After sending repeated requests to well-known meat companies to visit their facilities - and receiving, not a rejection, but no reply at all from anyone - Foer started looking deeper into the industry. Eventually his research led him to accompany an activist in breaking into a factory farm. What he saw and learned there helped turn him into a crusader.

As an already-celebrated author, Foer is positioned to shine a spotlight on common but little-known patterns and practices. He believes, for instance, that if more people were aware that all male chicks (around one out of every two chicks born) at big hatcheries are killed in terrible ways (including being thrown, alive, into a grinder), they would change their egg-buying habits.

But he knows not everyone who reads the book will go vegetarian.