Lizzie Skurnick reads the Foer and the Chabon alike in search of understanding what's gotten so hideously annoying about modern dads. "Foer's unhinged screed against the dangers of the modern meat-industrial complex takes 'me too' fathering to a new level.... There is nothing wrong with falling into wonderment at one's own child. (It is contraindicated over the long term.) There's also nothing wrong with being against the wholesale ripping of beaks off innocent chickens to keep Tyson Foods in business, an image Foer returns to frequently. Who, after all, is for a food system that, among other things, routinely releases a geyser of fecal matter into the air to spray neighboring crops? The problem is that Foer suddenly cares-and, by extension, so must we-because some day one micrometer of that shit might fall on the head of Jonathan Safran Foer's son."

The New Yorker gets mail about its review of Jonathan Safran Foer's vegetarian book. Including someone who said he was writing from the parking lot of a slaughterhouse: "I wonder if Foer has ever visited, or considered the impact of, a thousand-acre soybean monoculture. We have demanded cheap food, and so we have received cheap, destructive food production. Second, vegetarian moralism denies an essential fact of living: death. Everything dies, and not always in its due time." The great beyond eagerly waits for all forms of meat, including the writing kind of meat!

Tom Scocca: Did they time this whole rollout around Jonathan Safran Foer's vegetarianism book so as to get the maximum number of semi-precocious 15-year-olds to ruin their family Thanksgiving dinners? READ MORE