Eating Animals

by Jonathan Safran Foer

In America, fifty years later, we ate what pleased us. Our cupboards were filled with food bought on whims, overpriced foodie food, food we didn’t need. And when the expiration date passed, we threw it away without smelling it. Eating was carefree.

True

Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joyfulness, humiliation, religion, history, and, of course, love. As if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.

Thats deep shit

UNEXPECTED IMPULSES STRUCK WHEN I found out I was going to be a father. I began tidying up the house, replacing long-dead light bulbs, wiping windows, and filing papers. I had my glasses adjusted, bought a dozen pairs of white socks, installed a roof rack on top of the car and a “dog/cargo divider” in the back, had my first physical in half a decade . . . and decided to write a book about eating animals.

Ahahahahah thats so funny

When I was four, we fostered a cousin’s dog for a summer. I kicked it. My father told me we don’t kick animals. When I was seven, I mourned the death of my goldfish. I learned that my father had flushed him down the toilet. I told my father — in other, less civil words — we don’t flush animals down the toilet.

Lol

When I was nine, I had a babysitter who didn’t want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn’t having chicken with my older brother and me: “I don’t want to hurt anything.” “Hurt anything?” I asked. “You know that chicken is chicken, right?” Frank shot me a look: Mom and Dad entrusted this stupid woman with their precious babies?

Ahahaahah

I never thought of a response to our babysitter’s code, but found ways to smudge, diminish, and forget it. Generally speaking, I didn’t cause hurt. Generally speaking, I strove to do the right thing. Generally speaking, my conscience was clear enough. Pass the chicken, I’m starving.

Ahahhahaahha it was clear enough indeed

This story didn’t begin as a book. I simply wanted to know — for myself and my family — what meat is. I wanted to know as concretely as possible. Where does it come from? How is it produced? How are animals treated, and to what extent does that matter?

In middle school, we watched a video on food during our baking class and there was this part about meat and where it came from and i almost cried becuase i was so shocked. I love animals but they were treated so horribly , kept in such tight cages, rough handled with claw excavators while they're alive and we're talking about large cows slipping, falling and getting back up so they can survive these claw machines; oh it was horrible. I can still remember the image very vividly in my head. oh my gosh im even tearing up talking about it. It was really really brutal.....but i never had the determination to become a vegetarian but i always did say i WANT to be one in the future

(What assumptions did you make upon seeing the title of this book?)

I didn’t read the synopsis and thought it was either a book about being aware of the consequences/bacteria that comes with eating animals or it was about painting the animals we eat in a different light where it's gonna make me see every meat i eat as loving animals. Either way it subconsciously support veganism

But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.

Oh my gosh im gonna be sick

A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing. Eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.

The massive power of larger fish meant that two and sometimes three men were required to pull in a single animal. Special pickax tools called gaffs were (and still are) used to pull in large fish once they were within reach. Slamming a gaff into the side, fin, or even the eye of a fish creates a bloody but effective handle to help haul it on deck.

Oh my god poor fishes

The Internet is overflowing with video footage of fishing. Shitty B rock as soundtracks to men behaving as if they just saved someone’s life after reeling in a wearied marlin or bluefin. And then there are the subgenres of bikini-clad women gaffing, very young children gaffing, first-time gaffers. Looking past the bizarre ritualism, my mind kept returning to the fish in these videos, to the moment when the gaff is between the fisher’s hand and the creature’s eye. . . .

No reader of this book would tolerate someone swinging a pickax at a dog’s face. Nothing could be more obvious or less in need of explanation. Is such concern morally out of place when applied to fish, or are we silly to have such unquestioning concern about dogs? Is the suffering of a drawn-out death something that is cruel to inflict on any animal that can experience it, or just some animals?

Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?

Ayyy Tannen reference

FOR EVERY TEN TUNA, SHARKS, and other large predatory fish that were in our oceans fifty to a hundred years ago, only one is left. Many scientists predict the total collapse of all fished species in less than fifty years — and intense efforts are under way to catch, kill, and eat even more sea animals. Our situation is so extreme that research scientists at the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia argue that “our interactions with fisheries resources [also known as fish] have come to resemble . . . wars of extermination.”

No more sushi

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

Sea horses have complicated routines for courtship, and tend to mate under full moons, making musical sounds while doing so. They live in long-term monogamous partnerships. What is perhaps most unusual, though, is that it is the male sea horse that carries the young for up to six weeks. Males become properly “pregnant,” not only carrying, but fertilizing and nourishing the developing eggs with fluid secretions. The image of males giving birth is perpetually mind-blowing: a turbid liquid bursts forth from the brood pouch, and like magic, minuscule but fully formed sea horses appear out of the cloud.

I’ve seen a video of a seahorse giving birth. It just looks like he had diarrhea. Plus bacteria cuz those diarrhea pieces started moving.

I felt shame for living in a nation of unprecedented prosperity — a nation that spends a smaller percentage of income on food than any other civilization has in human history — but in the name of affordability treats the animals it eats with cruelty so extreme it would be illegal if inflicted on a dog.

Remember : cutting costs means inching towards unethicality. The author might be talking about animals and how cheap food comes from treating animals really bad. But the same can be applied to humans. Cheap labor means the workers are payed less with unbearable working hours, for example, sweatshops factories or SHEIN factories.

KFC Formerly signifying Kentucky Fried Chicken, now signifying nothing, KFC is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history.