In an unexpected mixing of books and ideology, Jon Mooallem writes in the latest issue of The Believer about a new literary genre he coins Meat Writing. The article, available online, cites as the genre’s forebear Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and as its exemplars a staggering total of over a dozen books that include Peter Lovenheim’s Portrait of a Burger As a Young Calf, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal; and Howard F. Lyman’s Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat.

Ultimately serving as more than a catalogue of books pertaining to factory farms, Mooallem’s piece provides an insightful history of the American agricultural industry, explains why “reading about how disgusting our food is has become a new American pastime,” and raises interesting political aspects of factory farming that include the concept of “digestive dissonance,” or the increasing “disconnect between what we eat and how little we know about it.”

Related links:
Click here for Mooallem’s article in The Believer