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No foods are bad for you. Fats are healthy — all fats, always, in any quantity. Sugars are very healthy.
It just made me a child, ignorant of the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t.
there were things she believed while lying in bed at night, and there were choices made at the breakfast table the next morning.
Stories establish narratives, and stories establish rules.
A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing, but it’s not what I’ve written here.
It’s a slippery, frustrating, and resonant subject. Each question prompts another, and it’s easy to find yourself defending a position far more extreme than you actually believe or could live by.
Facts are important, but they don’t, on their own, provide meaning — especially when they are so bound to linguistic choices.
Like a photograph, she cannot say what she lets me see. She is an embodied secret. And I must be a photograph to her.
Our taboo against dog eating says something about dogs and a great deal about us. The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses.
George Orwell’s words (from Animal Farm) apply here: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The protective emphasis is not a law of nature; it comes from the stories we tell about nature.
I am among the 95 percent of male dog owners who talk to their dogs — if not the 87 percent who believe their dogs talk back.
Can the familiarity of the animals we have come to know as companions be a guide to us as we think about the animals we eat?
“I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” — can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.
Like pornography, factory farming is hard to define but easy to identify.
Globally, roughly 450 billion land animals are now factory farmed every year.
More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or “externalize” such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering.
Factory farming considers nature an obstacle to be overcome.
GPS monitors are deployed along with “fish-attracting devices” (FADs) across the ocean. The monitors transmit information to the control rooms of fishing boats about how many fish are present and the exact location of the floating FADs.
the ability of a single vessel to haul in fifty tons of sea animals in a few minutes — it becomes easier to think of contemporary fishers as factory farmers rather than fishermen.
Technologies of war have literally and systematically been applied to fishing. Radar, echo sounders (once used to locate enemy submarines), navy-developed electronic navigation systems, and, in the last decade of the twentieth century, satellite-based GPS give fishers unprecedented abilities to identify and return to fish hot spots.
If we wish to disavow a part of our nature, we call it our “animal nature.”
Because they have no teeth or stomach, food moves through them almost instantly, requiring them to eat constantly. (Hence such adaptations as eyes that move independently, which allow them to search for prey without turning their heads.)
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.
Animal agriculture makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined; it is the number one cause of climate change.
Anthropomorphism is a risk we must run, because we must refer to our own human experience in order to formulate questions about animal experience. . . .
Layers make eggs. (Their egg output has more than doubled since the 1930s.) Broilers make flesh. (In the same period, they have been engineered to grow more than twice as large in less than half the time.
Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch.
Common Farming Exemptions make legal any method of raising farmed animals so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry. In other words, farmers — corporations is the right word — have the power to define cruelty.
It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think.
And it’s also true that animals on the very best farms often have better lives than they would in the wild. But nature isn’t cruel. And neither are the animals in nature that kill and occasionally even torture one another.
Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.
Sharing food generates good feeling and creates social bonds.
More important, though, and what Pollan curiously doesn’t emphasize, is that attempting to be a selective omnivore is a much heavier blow to table fellowship than vegetarianism.
Imagine an acquaintance invites you to dinner. You could say, “I’d love to come. And just so you know, I’m a vegetarian.” You could also say, “I’d love to come. But I only eat meat that is produced by family farmers.”
More recent and authoritative studies by the United Nations and the Pew Commission show conclusively that globally, farmed animals contribute more to climate change than transport.
Rogers argues that our present knowledge of bird brains has made it “clear that birds have cognitive capacities equivalent to those of mammals, even primates.”
Organic foods in general are almost certainly safer and often have a smaller ecological footprint and better health value. They are not, though, necessarily more humane.
The folks at PETA will do almost anything legal to advance their campaigns, no matter how bad they look (which is impressive) and no matter who is insulted (which is not so impressive).
If possible, I would also like to speak with some of your farmers. I can make myself available at just about any time, and on relatively short notice, and am happy to travel as is needed.
The power brokers of factory farming know that their business model depends on consumers not being able to see (or hear about) what they do.
The truth is so powerful in this case it doesn’t even matter what your angle is.
Rather, domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own.
BUT SPECIES DON’T MAKE CHOICES, individuals do. And even if species somehow could, to imply that they would select perpetuity over individual well-being is hard to apply more broadly.
(Instead of Live free or die, the motto we script for our food animals is Die enslaved but live.)
Having little exposure to animals makes it much easier to push aside questions about how our actions might influence their treatment.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that “beauty always takes place in the particular.” Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.
It’s always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.
By his own acknowledgment, the efficiencies of these lines inspired Henry Ford, who brought the model into the auto industry, leading to a revolution in manufacturing. (Putting together a car is just taking apart a cow in reverse.)
They owned the genetic pool (today two companies own three-fourths of the genetics for all broiler chickens on the planet), the birds themselves (farmers only tended to them, like counselors at a sleepaway camp),
The concern is not only bird flu or swine flu or whatever-comes-next, but the entire class of “zoonotic” (animal-to-human or vice versa) pathogens — especially viruses that move between humans, chickens, turkeys, and pigs.