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35152ac 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. science factory-farming veganism vegetarianism meat Jonathan Safran Foer
ac963b0 Whether we change our lives or do nothing, we have responded. To do nothing is to do something. vegetarianism vegetarian Jonathan Safran Foer
a339a4f He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians. vegetarianism Gabriel García Márquez
c542e17 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. veganism vegetarianism meat health Jonathan Safran Foer
f4ee457 Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good? factory-farms vegetarianism chicken Jonathan Safran Foer
7ca5db1 Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim, between the successful and the defeated. vegetarianism Philip K. Dick
846b7bb 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. science factory-farming veganism vegetarianism meat Jonathan Safran Foer
56f72c6 Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience. The justifications for eating animals and for not eating them are often identical: we are not them. vegetarianism ethics humans Jonathan Safran Foer
c48274c "Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society." vegetarianism Jonathan Safran Foer
3319931 I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. vegetarianism civilization Henry David Thoreau
02d780f This isn't animal experimentation, where you an imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Tell me something: Why is taste, the crudest of our sense, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other sense? If you stop and think about it, it's crazy. Why doesn't a horny person has as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? vegetarianism Jonathan Safran Foer
c8a7aff 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. kafka veganism vegetarianism Jonathan Safran Foer
f609f55 I remember one bobcat they had in here - now bobcats are an endangered species in this neck of the woods - they'd caught it somewhere and they must have put that cat through a dozen rounds of burn experiments before they finally determined that it was utterly useless to them. Like an empty beer can. And then you know what they did to it? Claudius was late for a lunch date so rather thanput the destroyed but still breathing animal to sleep, he picked it up by its hind legs and simply smashed its head against a wall repeatedly until it was dead. How can I forget it: I was the one told to clean up the mess. The head dented in. The eyes slowly closing. The once proud claws hanging down, stunned and lifeless, the utter senselessness of it all, and the hate, a hatred that was consummated in me which is as dangerous a hormone, or chemical, or portion of the brain, as any neutron bomb. Except that I didnt know how to explode. I was like a computer without a keyboard, a bird without wings. Roaring inside. I wanted to kill that man. To do unto others what they had done unto me. I was that bobcat, you better believe it. science animal-testing vivisection animal-rights vegetarianism vegan Michael Tobias
df5841b You can't possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It's absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that. humor vegetarianism Oscar Wilde
b8e2221 Despite the fact that an Indonesian island chicken has probably had a much more natural life than one raised on a battery farm in England, people who wouldn't think twice about buying something oven-ready become much more upset about a chicken that they've been on a boat with, so there is probably buried in the Western psyche a deep taboo about eating anything you've been introduced to socially. humor vegetarianism vegetarian ethics Douglas Adams
e02f6d4 We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it? vegans vegetarians vegetarianism meat eating food Jonathan Safran Foer
91f5dca "You're joining us for dinner, I hope?" asked his mom. She was small and brunette and vaguely mousy. "I guess?" I said. "I have to be home by ten. Also I don't, um, eat meat?" "No problem. We'll vegetarianize some," she said. "Animals are just too cute?" Gus asked. "I want to minimize the number of deaths I am responsible for," I said. Gus opened his mouth to respond but then stopped himself." vegetarianism John Green
04776bd 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. animal-welfare animal-rights veganism vegetarianism meat hunting animals food Michael Pollan
3bff32b These folk are hewers of trees and hunters of beasts; therefore we are their unfriends, and if they will not depart we shall afflict them in all ways that we can. tolkien deforestation earth-first ecocide peta vegetarianism vegan vegetarian meat environment ecology elves J.R.R. Tolkien
62a7770 "Scientific studies and government records suggest that virtually all (upwards of 95 percent of) chickens become infected with E. coli (an indicator of fecal contamination) and between 39 and 75 percent of chickens in retail stores are still infected. Around 8 percent of birds become infected with salmonella (down from several years ago, when at least one in four birds was infected, which still occurs on some farms). Seventy to 90 percent are infected with another potentially deadly pathogen, campylobacter. Chlorine baths are commonly used to remove slime, odor, and bacteria. Of course, consumers might notice that their chickens don't taste quite right - how good could a drug-stuffed, disease-ridden, shit-contaminated animal possibly taste? - but the birds will be injected (or otherwise pumped up) with "broths" and salty solutions to give them what we have come to think of as the chicken look, smell, and taste. (A recent study by Consumer Reports found that chicken and turkey products, many labeled as natural, "ballooned with 10 to 30 percent of their weight as broth, flavoring, or water." vegetarianism health Jonathan Safran Foer
2e3e05b It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself. food-safety non-fiction vegetarianism food Jonathan Safran Foer
0d060f8 This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity--that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself--and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life! vegetarianism morals Leo Tolstoy
aac0038 We think of dogs as being more like people than pigs; but pigs are highly intelligent animals and if we kept pigs as pets and reared dogs for food, we would probably reverse our order of preference. Are we turning persons into bacon? vegetarianism personhood ethics Peter Singer
ee29e3a One time I took my knife and sliced off the end of a hog's nose, just like a piece of salami. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it sat there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt and rubbed it on the wound. Now that hog really went nuts. It was my way of taking out frustration. Another time, there was a live hog in the pit. It hadn't done anything wrong, wasn't even running around. It was just alive. I took a three-foot chunk of pipe and I literally beat that hog to death. It was like I started hitting the hog and I couldn't stop. And when I finally did stop, I'd expended all this energy and frustration, and I'm thinking what in God's sweet name did I do. violence slaughterhouse vegetarianism pigs meat sadism brutality cruelty frustration Gail A. Eisnitz
7a9c449 ...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. family religion veganism vegetarianism mythology food stories Jonathan Safran Foer
3588109 Will you dance for me? Let your breasts roam for a moment -- I need to see how they dance.' 'Okay.' She danced, and as she danced, she tried to think of the most delicious salads she could imagine -- with artichokes and sundried tomato and blue cheese dressing, and beets, lots of beets. sex humor beets salad vegetarianism erotica food Nicholson Baker
f75c865 The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been minced and destroyed and painlessly merged with the shapes of insensate vegetables, plump green bodies that invite his appetite's innocent gusto. Candy. chinese-food vegetarianism meat hypocrisy John Updike
999cccf But John Chapman told us he didnt eat meat cause he couldnt stand for somethin livin to be killed jest to keep him alive. johnny-appleseed vegetarianism Tracy Chevalier
78e4da4 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. phylosophy factory-farming vegetarianism nonfiction Jonathan Safran Foer
0298c9b When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision--eating 'like everyone else'--is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic. vegetarianism Jonathan Safran Foer
32e8e22 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. eating-animals factory-farming veganism vegetarianism Jonathan Safran Foer
1ecd48f A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing. Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible. vegetarianism nonfiction ethics Jonathan Safran Foer
fe32bdf "The choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any other culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore - "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" - can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list." vegetarianism nonfiction ethics Jonathan Safran Foer
5549501 Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn't ban child labor because it's impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it's corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it's corrupting. child-labor vegetarianism nonfiction ethics Jonathan Safran Foer
42c66f1 The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing. vegetarianism nonfiction ethics Jonathan Safran Foer
bb99a4f Fish are divided from us by surfaces and silence. fish vegetarianism Jonathan Safran Foer
3470794 Cruelty: Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it. suffering veganism vegetarianism cruelty animals Jonathan Safran Foer
3f8199d "Sister Carmelita says animals don't have souls" "Of course animals have souls, where did she get that idea?" "She said the Pope says." "The Pope's an old meanie. Animals have much nicer souls than we do. They never tell lies or blow anybody up." "They eat each other." "Well, they have to eat each other; they can't go to Dairy Queen and get a large vanilla cone with sprinkles, can they? " "They could eat grass." "So could we, but we don't. We eat hamburgers." religion vegetarianism Audrey Niffenegger
3b5bed5 "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." kafka veganism vegetarianism vegan vegetarian Jonathan Safran Foer
46021e7 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. veganism vegetarianism meat Peter Mayle
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