By Jonathan Safran Foer (author of Everything is Illuminated), as published in the Wall Street Journal, an excerpt from his novel Eating Animals
Despite the fact that it’s perfectly legal in 44 states, eating “man’s best friend” is as taboo as a man eating his best friend. Even the most enthusiastic carnivores won’t eat dogs. TV guy and sometimes cooker Gordon Ramsay can get pretty macho with lambs and piglets when doing publicity for something he’s selling, but you’ll never see a puppy peeking out of one of his pots. And though he once said he’d electrocute his children if they became vegetarian, one can’t help but wonder what his response would be if they poached the family pooch. Continued…
Thoughtful Thinking, posted on September 14, 2009 at 03h08
tags used: quotes
“One of the problems that the biotechnology industry has is that it’s done nothing for the American consumer. There’s nothing there. There’s no genetically engineered food that does anything… no nutrition, nothing for us. So how are they going to sell this technology to the American people? Well, they’ve come up with this idea that maybe biotechnology should be sold as the way to feed a starving world.
“One major problem with that, the reason why roughly 800 million people starve every day – and that is a tragic fact – has nothing to do with the amount of food available. Most of these people around the world who are starving used to be farmers. But because of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund giving huge loans to these countries, these countries can no longer allow for subsisted farming. They had to grow expensive export crops back to the first world to pay back those loans. So they kicked these hundreds of millions of farmers off their farms, they end up in the Bopauls and the Mexico Cities and the Brazilias of the world. Without money. They are no longer growing their own food. And they’re competing for the scarce jobs available in the new industrialization of these countries. They are no longer food independent, they’re food dependent.”
- Andrew Kimbrell
Executive Director, Center for Food Safety
Transcribed from The Future of Food.
It’s been fiercely frustrating having conversations about animal rights lately. I have been offering myself to answer questions that friends might have, expecting to be asked about protein sources and such. But what I’ve found is that most of my otherwise rational and compassionate friends simply do not get it. While there are some genuine questions, the most frequent are ridiculous. What about insects, are they animals? What about plants, aren’t they alive? What’s wrong with eggs, and cheese, and milk, animals aren’t killed for that?
Vegans are scary. We must be, people treat us with such hostility. Continued…
The beliefs of omnivores have been so carefully constructed that despite how obvious its flaws, we do not question them. In elementary school, you learn about the four required food groups. You learn that protein comes from the muscle tissue of animals, but for one reason or another, they don’t mention broccoli, or bananas, or beans. We are taught not to inflict pain on other living creatures, and so we don’t. We let anyone else do it for us. And so there is a disassociation between the product and the cruelty. A child that tortures a dog is sent to therapy, as would be a child that tortures a cow. But if we move that cow into a factory it becomes a product, and despite there being no difference in suffering, we do not question that this conflict arises. If we did, we might wonder why we value certain living animals more than others. We might see the extent of our selective compassion for life. Continued…
I asked someone today, “Do you believe in God?”
We were already talking, you see. Or at least we had been earlier. But it was on my mind, so I asked him. He said no. So I asked him if he believed in a greater force, something we can’t understand or perceive.
Earlier we’d been talking about Pemberton. He loved it because he was drunk out of his mind the entire time; I hated it because there were all sorts of drunken twits running around. It was obvious that we weren’t going to see eye-to-eye, so thankfully I ended it here. But it was the words he used in his answer that confused me.
Spirituality is the greatest thing all of us have in common. Being in harmony with life only requires that you ask yourself a few questions. That you spend some time thinking about why and how you exist. And what he said seemed to me so indifferent. If he’d said no, at least he would have given it thought at some point. But he didn’t say no. He didn’t say yes. He didn’t even say, “You know, I’m not sure.”
He said, “I’m the wrong guy to ask.”
It was hard for me not to look at him and see most of the youth of the world.
An excerpt from the third chapter of I Don’t Believe in Atheists by Chris Hedges.
James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, spoke of the “old triumvirate of tyrants in the human soul, the libido sciendi, the libido sentiendi, and the libido dominandi” [The lust of the mind, the lust of the flesh and the lust for power]. Adams, who worked with the anti-Nazi church leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1935 and 1936 in Germany, warned us that these lusts are universal and intractable. They lurk beneath the surface of the most refined cultures and civilizations. “We may call these tendencies by any name we wish,” he said, “but we do not escape their destructive influence by a conspiracy of silence concerning them.”
The belief that science or religion can eradicate these lusts leads to the worship of human potential and human power. These lusts are woven into our genetic map. We can ameliorate them, but they are always with us; we will never ultimately defeat them. The attempt to deny the lusts within us empowers this triumvirate. They surface, unexamined and unheeded, to commit evil in the name of good. We are not saved by reason. We are not saved by religion. We are saved by turning away from projects that tempt us to become God, and by accepting our own contamination and the limitations of being human.
The belief in moral advancement implicitly calls on us to ignore the common good and place our faith in the empowerment of the state. It teaches that everything should be dedicated to private gain. The corporate state – the engine, we are assured, of our great moral progress – instructs us on how to view the world. Corporatism is about placing our faith in unchecked corporate advancement, as well as in the neutral disciplines of science and technology. The effect on the individual in the emergent corporate state is a kind of numbing acceptance of our political, economic and social disempowerment. We give over our rights as citizens because we are taught to believe these forces will lead us to utopia. There is, as John Ralston Saul wrote, a passivity and conformity “in those areas which matter and nonconformism in those which don’t.” We view the status quo as an unadulterated good. We are assured it is leading us to a wonderful and glorious future. We do not question. We are left to seek our individuality and our identity in the trivial and the banal.
A friend of mine had the following thing on his profile:
Who do you think is the worst president of the past 3 decades?
Of the possible answers of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, he chose George W. Continued…
Any restaurant owner that doesn’t have at least one vegetarian entrée on their menu does not know how to run a restaurant. It’s happened three times in the past months that I’ve left a restaurant because of this. Three different salads just don’t cut it; neither does having a main dish with a vegetarian option, which is basically leave out the meat and replace it with nothing. Vegetarianism isn’t a passing fancy; it’s a movement that is gaining popularity. And a business that doesn’t take this into consideration is out of touch with reality.
There are direct and indirect consequences to actions. One can perform a well-intentioned action and still have an indirect negative consequence, just as one can do something bad and indirectly do something good. We are not always, if ever, aware of indirect consequences because we are not actively looking for them; indeed, sometimes they can’t be seen unless pointed out. At these times it is easy to deny that we had any part in an indirect negative consequence, especially when we had good intentions. However, the success of our action is not determined by our intention, it is determined by the sum of its consequences. Continued…
From the liner notes of Propagandhi‘s Supporting Caste.
Effective Advocacy 101 by Jesus H. Chris
Everyone knows that the first rule of effective advocacy is to not insult people. This rule is especially important in terms of advocating on behalf of animals, mostly due to the fact that meat-eaters tend to cry and whine like a bunch of fuckin’ shitty babies when you pull down the diapers of their revolting lifestyle. Haha, just kidding. Calm down babies. Continued…
