"If this entire book could be decanted into a single question - not something easy, loaded, or asked in bad faith, but a question that fully captured the problem of eating and not eating animals - it might be this: Should we serve turkey at Thanksgiving?"

So asks Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close), and it must be said without pun that in his first nonfiction foray he has bitten off a great deal, inviting serious debate over troubling questions of morality, biology, culture, environmental stewardship and much more.

Foer's question about Thanksgiving dinner crystallizes his approach in Eating Animals. Of course, most of us in the West eat meat all year long, marking the calendar with carcasses from the July 4 hot dogs to the Christmas tamales, but Foer singles out Thanksgiving because this most family-centered holiday neatly illustrates how we humans elevate the mere biological fact of eating into ceremony and ritual. That golden-brown turkey is not just a dead bird but somebody's expression of love.

Hence the paradox that is everywhere in our relationship to the animals we eat: " ... what we do to living turkeys is just about as bad as anything humans have ever done to any animal," Foer writes. "Yet what we do with their dead bodies can feel so powerfully good and right."

So powerfully good and right. And that's why, as so many wavering vegetarians have discovered, it can be excruciatingly difficult to expunge meat from our diet. We are in fact what we eat, and to walk away from the circle of carnivores is to stop being, in some important and time-honored ways, what we were, and to sever some of the bonds that tie us to family and culture.

"Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories," Foer writes. Our memories are marbled with fat, marinated in grease.

Foer himself has opted for a vegetarian life and has raised his children to shun meat. But he does not write with "vegangelical" zeal; he is not the literary arm of PETA. Instead, Foer tries to build bridges to the meat-loving reader, approaching animal suffering in the factory farming system and the larger question of man's relationship to his fellow creatures as "our" problem.

However, any honest treatment of this topic is bound to make many readers wince in disbelief. While Foer's book is nowhere near as stomach-turningly graphic as Gail Eisnitz's Slaughterhouse, which he often quotes, he does include some extremely disturbing eyewitness accounts of wanton cruelty in animal processing.

Still, it's hard to know whether a book like Eating Animals will make a great deal of difference in the way most Western people eat. It's not as if Foer is breaking new ground. Every adult knows that animals don't volunteer to be dinner.

As Paul McCartney likes to say, following George Bernard Shaw, if slaughterhouses had glass walls, we'd all be vegetarians. Which brings us back to that question about the Thanksgiving menu.

Eating Animals - Jonathan Safran Foer Reg. Price: $32.95 Sale Price: $29.20 Save: $3.75