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…

“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.

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.

“Myth: We have to save the Earth. Frankly, the Earth doesn’t need to be saved. Nature doesn’t give a hoot if human beings are here or not. The planet has survived cataclysmic and catastrophic changes for millions upon millions of years. Over that time, it is widely believed that 99 percent of all species have come and gone while the planet has remained. Saving the environment is really about saving our environment: making it safe for ourselves, our children, and the world as we know it. If more people saw the issue as one of saving themselves, we would probably see increased motivation and commitment to actually do so.”
-Robert M. Lilienfeld and William L. Rathje