Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

by Alan Jacobs

Here’s an example: there will be a time, I am certain, when our descendants will be positively aghast that we ever ate animals. How could we possibly have been so thoughtlessly cruel? What could we say for ourselves, should someone from the future travel back in time and shake an admonitory finger at us? If she came to our moment, the vegetarians and vegans among us would crow in triumph as the rest of us muttered excuses. And what we’d probably say was that we never really thought it through, that we were raised eating meat, it was what we had always done, the restaurants were full of meat dishes, trying to go vegetarian seemed sort of daunting, we always had other things to think about that took higher priority—that last point above all. And we would say those things to the visitor of the future because those are the things we have been saying to ourselves for a very long time.