Jonathan Safran Foer - Eating Animals (2009)

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Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Isn't it strange how upset people get about a few dozen baseball players taking growth hormones, when we're doing what were doing to our food animals and feeding them to our children?

Jonathan Safran Foer
How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

Jonathan Safran Foer
A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, 'Everything is possible again.' It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. We could retell our stories and make them better, more representative or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Almost always when I told someone I was writing a book about "eating animals", they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.

Jonathan Safran Foer
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?

Jonathan Safran Foer
We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe. We can't stop our eating from radiating influence even if we want to.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The responsibility lies with the mentality of the meat industry that treats both animals and "human capital" like machines... human beings cannot be human (much less humane) under the conditions of a factory farm or slaughterhouse.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Something having been done just about everywhere just about always is no kind of justification for doing it now.

Jonathan Safran Foer
If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?

Jonathan Safran Foer
I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

Jonathan Safran Foer
We believed in our grandmother's cooking more fervently than we believed in God.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We aren't exactly emptying the oceans; it's more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

Jonathan Safran Foer
It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.

Jonathan Safran Foer
When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Chickens can do many things, but they cannot make sophisticated deals with humans.

Jonathan Safran Foer
Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?

Jonathan Safran Foer
Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We need a better way to talk about eating animals, a way that doesn't ignore or even just shruggingly accept things like habits, cravings, family and history but rather incorporates them into the conversation. The more they are allowed in, the more able we will be to follow our best instincts.

Jonathan Safran Foer
The factory farm has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat.

Jonathan Safran Foer
We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

Jonathan Safran Foer