Abstract
Employing Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestseller Eating Animals as a case study, this chapter forwards the rhetorical technique of “orchestrated appeals,” as a persuasive strategy for communicating vegetarianism to potentially resistant audiences. Orchestration, an overlaying of egocentric, anthropocentric, and ecocentric appeals, addresses a seemingly singular issue like food choice from multiple perspectives. In Foer’s case, the argument for vegetarianism resonates more broadly by way of its connections to family, ethics, health, and the environment. By mapping the web of relationships between food and varied life areas, rhetors can identify with values already held by audiences with diverse ideological commitments and explore alignments between existing beliefs and exigencies for change.
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Notes
- 1.
Marx specifically distinguishes between human and animal suffering when he defines alienation as an impoverishment of a human worker’s gattungswesen or “species being” (1994, 62–63).
- 2.
Referred to as “the last poultry farmer” because he avoids the industrial model of selective breeding and antibiotic use.
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Abeles, O., Lozon, E. (2021). Constituting Vegetarian Audiences: Orchestrations of Egocentric, Anthropocentric, Ecocentric Exigencies in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. In: Hanganu-Bresch, C., Kondrlik, K. (eds) Veg(etari)an Arguments in Culture, History, and Practice. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53280-2_11
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