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35152ac
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Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
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science
factory-farming
veganism
vegetarianism
meat
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c542e17
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Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) 'meet and exceed requirements' for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores.
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veganism
vegetarianism
meat
health
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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af35cf1
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Do you know why most survivors of the Holocaust are vegan? It's because they know what it's like to be treated like an animal.
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veganism
holocaust
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Chuck Palahniuk |
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846b7bb
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Needless to say, jamming deformed, drugged, overstressed birds together in a filthy, waste-coated room is not very healthy. Beyond deformities, eye damage, blindness, bacterial infections of bones, slipped vertebrae, paralysis, internal bleeding, anemia, slipped tendons, twisted lower legs and necks, respiratory diseases, and weakened immune systems are frequent and long-standing problems on factory farms.
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science
factory-farming
veganism
vegetarianism
meat
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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c8a7aff
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This brings me back to the image of Kafka standing before a fish in the Berlin aquarium, a fish on which his gaze fell in a newly found peace after he decided not to eat animals. Kafka recognized that fish as a member of his invisible family- not as his equal, of course, but as another being that was his concern.
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kafka
veganism
vegetarianism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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04776bd
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This for many people is what is most offensive about hunting--to some, disgusting: that it encourages, or allows, us not only to kill but to take a certain pleasure in killing. It's not as though the rest of us don't countenance the killing of tens of millions of animals every year. Yet for some reason we feel more comfortable with the mechanical killing practiced, out of view and without emotion by industrial agriculture.
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animal-welfare
animal-rights
veganism
vegetarianism
meat
hunting
animals
food
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Michael Pollan |
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eb9035d
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You don't have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate.
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morality
philosophy
veganism
ethics
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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cb0d8aa
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There is no particular merit in being nice to one's fellow man... We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is a result of our emotions - love apathy, charity of malice - and what part is predetermines by the constant power play among individuals. True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buries from view), consists of attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental all others stem from it.
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mankind
veganism
vegan
vegetarian
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Milan Kundera |
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7a9c449
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...Food serves two parallel purposes: it nourishes and it helps you remember. Eating and storytelling are inseparable--the saltwater is also tears; the honey not only tastes sweet, but makes us think of sweetness; the matzo is the bread of our affliction.
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family
religion
veganism
vegetarianism
mythology
food
stories
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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a5c4d21
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Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.
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morality
philosophy
veganism
ethics
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Robert M. Sapolsky |
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4acfd87
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An area of land used for crops will feed about ten times as many people as the same area of land used for grass-fed beef.
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morality
philosophy
veganism
ethics
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Peter Singer |
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8978a9d
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Many people who think nothing of buying factory-farmed ham or chicken from a supermarket are quick to condemn hunting; yet hunting is more defensible than factory farming.
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morality
veganism
philosophy-of-life
ethics
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Peter Singer |
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3470794
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Cruelty: Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it.
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suffering
veganism
vegetarianism
cruelty
animals
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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32e8e22
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The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.
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eating-animals
factory-farming
veganism
vegetarianism
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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55180d2
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If we have learned anything from the liberation movements, we should have learned how difficult it is to be aware of the ways in which we discriminate until they are forcefully pointed out to us. A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.
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equality
liberation
veganism
vegan
oppression
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Peter Singer |
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46021e7
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We might treat a rabbit as a pet or become emotionally attached to a goose, but we had come from cities and supermarkets, where flesh was hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures. A shrink-wrapped pork chop has a sanitized, abstract appearance that has nothing whatever to do with the warm, mucky bulk of a pig. Out here in the country there was no avoiding the direct link between death and dinner.
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veganism
vegetarianism
meat
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Peter Mayle |
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3b5bed5
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"As told by Kafka's close friend Max Brod: "Suddenly he began to speak to the fish in their illuminated tanks. 'Now at least I can look at you in peace, I don't eat you anymore.' It was the time he turned strictly vegetarian."
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kafka
veganism
vegetarianism
vegan
vegetarian
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Jonathan Safran Foer |
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f552d73
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I don't like vegans, either. Bunch of whiny zealots. A cow or a pig wouldn't give a damn if a person died... animals tear apart other animals while they're still alive, but we aren't so cruel, so vegans should learn to shut up. Vegans use palm oil and never think about the forests and endangered species at risk from that... and they all exploit the world in other ways, buying their computers and their sweatshop clothes and their Starbucks coffees. Anyway, cats and dogs eat their owners after the owner dies. I saw on the news a few times that there was a lot of open animal food in the houses where that sort of thing happens, but the pets eat the dead owner... just because. Maybe a pet's notion of 'unconditional love' is like Jeffrey Dahmer... he used to eat and kill the people he professed to love, too. He was a sicko... I don't believe animals have any empathy. Do elephants ever consider Holocaust victims? Do dogs ever cry over the Rwanda Genocide?
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empathy
morality
jeffrey-dahmer
pet-ownership
veganism
vegan
ethics
hypocrisy
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Rebecca McNutt |
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97d2bb9
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He weeps like a child, catching his breath and hiccuping,his face drenched with tears.We are random animals. That is who we are, and we have only ourselves, nothing more--there is no greater relationship. [..] We are risen does, not fallen angels. Tomas is strangled by loneliness.
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faith
veganism
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Yann Martel |
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9be242e
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Without your sheep, you would have no livelihood, you would die. This dependency creates a sort of equality, doesn't it? Not individually, but collectively. As a group, you and your sheep are at opposite sides of a seesaw, and somewhere in between there is a fulcrum. You must maintain the balance. In that sense, we are no better than they.
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veganism
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Yann Martel |
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f9479c8
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Dairy farmers routinely remove calves from their mothers at an early age so that the milk will be available for humans; anyone who has lived on a dairy farm will know that, for days after the calves have gone, their mothers keep calling for them.
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morality
veganism
philosophy-of-life
ethics
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Peter Singer |
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231af36
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"Despite my deep unease about animal advocates working for things we don't want and asking for changes we don't believe in, I am not an "abolitionist." First, the abolition of animal slavery will no more end speciesism by itself than the abolition of American slavery ended racism. To change the world, I think we should aim higher. Second, I'm increasingly convinced that no matter who uses the term, it hides a slur. When used to refer to others, it connotes zealotry and obstructionism, and when taken as self-definition, it is seen as an attack by anyone who does not apply it to herself. Yes, it's a highly defensible moral philosophy, right up there with Peter Singer's application of Utilitarianism to animal liberation, and Tom Regan's Theory of Rights, but like those other intellectual concepts, it's useful only so far as it engenders right action."
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philosophy
advocacy
grassroots
animal-rights
veganism
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Sarahjane Blum |