So says Seattle Weekly's Jonathan Kauffman, in a smart piece today on the Weekly's food blog:

Spurred in part by his adoption of a cute lil' puppy, Foer converted permanently to vegetarianism a short while ago and has decided to spend 352 pages telling us why. In the WSJ article, Foer appropriates Jonathan Swift's 1729 essay, "A Modest Proposal," a savage satire of the British indifference toward famine in Ireland; Swift suggested the Irish should eat their babies if they had no food. In the same spirit of logical excess, Foer proposes that we start eating the dogs and cats euthanized by the humane shelter. At the climax of his rhetoric, he reprints a Filipino recipe for "Stewed Dog, Wedding Style." After presumably making readers ewwwwww for a thousand words, the writer concludes, "And despite it being entirely reasonable, the case for eating dogs is likely repulsive to just about every reader of this paper. The instinct comes before our reason, and is more important." ...

It galls me that Jonathan Safran Foer taps into that xenophobia to suggest that everyone should anthropomorphize animals the way he does, to have the same relationship to cows and halibut that Americans do to our "pets." There are far fewer people in the world who designate certain species as intimate members of their families than there are people who think of animals as a food source, regardless of how close those animals live to them.

As a former longtime vegetarian myself (10 years),  I stopped eating animals because I was appalled by the US industrial food system and the lack of respect it showed for animals, for human workers, and for the environment. I started eating animals again because I realized there was a way to do so consciously—by eating meat only on occasion, by buying only from humane producers, and by avoiding beef (the worst environmental offender on the food chain) except on rare occasions. I don't think that makes me superior to people who lack the resources and privilege that enable me to pay more for better quality, and I don't think Safran Foer's "instinctive" sense of superiority to folks who eat dogs is any more reasonable.