Veggie Nugget #31

Mt. Rainier, Md.: I want to care about the health and well-being of cows and chickens and pigs. Really, I do. But I don't. How can you convince me to eat less meat if I could not care less if 10,000,000,000 chickens or cows are tortured?

Jonathan Safran Foer: I couldn't. You are on the periphery of society---96% of Americans think animals should have legal protection. But you have every right to be.

Perhaps the environmental arguments mean something to you? Perhaps you like breathing good air, drinking good water? Perhaps you don't want E. Coli or campylobactor. Perhaps you like your antibiotics to work when you're ill? Perhaps not.

-From an online discussion at the Washington Post on Thursday with Jonathan Safran Foer.

His tone could be less snarky, but the substance of his answer couldn't be more spot-on.

Veggie Nugget #30

"Children confront us with our paradoxes and dishonesty, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, from this piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine, adapted from Foer's upcoming book Eating Animals.

Really looking forward to reading this book. This will be the last nugget from it for a while, since the book doesn't come out till some time in November.

Veggie Nugget #29

"This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. 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, from this piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine, adapted from Foer's upcoming book Eating Animals.

Veggie Nugget #28

"To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting — even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, from this piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine, adapted from Foer's upcoming book Eating Animals.

Veggie Nugget #27

"Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat. Turkeys have been so genetically modified they are incapable of natural reproduction. To acknowledge that these things matter is not sentimental. It is a confrontation with the facts about animals and ourselves. We know these things matter."

-Jonathan Safran Foer, from this piece that ran in the New York Times Magazine, adapted from Foer's upcoming book Eating Animals, which I'm very much looking forward to.

I'll be posting a few more nuggets from that piece and once I read the book I'll probably be posting more from that. It's so refreshing to see a literary-type writer tackle animal issues. Makes for a lot of well-written insight.