Yesterday I got a chance to see my favorite author speak at a bookstore in Boston. Jonathon Safran Foer, the acclaimed novelist of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Everything is Illuminated, has recently turned toward nonfiction with his latest book, Eating Animals. At the risk of understating the importance of this book, I’ll say that it’s about being a vegetarian. But really it’s so much more. Eating Animals covers a wide array of issues focusing on factory farming and its subsequent environmental effects. Child obesity, greenhouse gas emissions, fatherhood, education reform…it’s all there.

For a Jewish vegetarian from New York, one might expect Foer to be one of those guys with a degree in pot-smoking from Berkeley. Actually, the way that he insists on an urgent shift from indifference to environmental action is moderate. He doesn’t go on any tirades and he isn’t beating the drum for veganism. The author explained how he has spent the last three years compiling data, visiting farmers and talking to experts about the links between the food we eat and the health of our bodies, our earth, and the future generation. The statistics he uses are from conservative estimates and he had two independent fact checkers editing the book. So he’s got enough unbiased facts to make even someone who eats steaks like a caveman re-think his lifestyle. Eating Animals is worth a read because it’s a way to understand one of the most important issues of our day—the environmentally unfriendly sources of our food—without feeling heckled by Chicken Little.

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