The Modern Savage Quotes

“When I first began to criticize small farming, a number of critics (most of them small-scale farmers) roundly condemned me for supporting agribusiness. In my favorite example to date, Joel Salatin, who figures prominently in the grass-fed-beef chapter, condemned my “love affair with confinement hog factories”! This reaction, while wildly inaccurate, is nonetheless important to take seriously. Most notably, it’s almost comically indicative of how narrowly we have framed our options. Joel was serious. His accusation shows that by constricting our choices to animal products sourced from either industrial or nonindustrial operations, by holding up the animal-based alternatives to industrial agriculture as our only alternative, we have silenced discussion of the most fertile, most politically consequential, and most reform-minded choice: eating plants. This alternative to the alternatives changes the entire game of revolutionizing our broken food system. It places the food movement on a new foundation, infuses it with fresh energy, and promotes the only choice that keeps agribusiness executives awake at night.”
― James E. McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

“None of this is to argue that growing plants for people to eat isn’t beset with uncontrollable variables as well. It’s only to note that, while there will always be ecological and ethical costs to growing food for billions of people, kale doesn’t have to be sent to a slaughterhouse. Kale doesn’t have to be fed with forage grown elsewhere. Kale won’t wander off to the highway and get hit by a semi. And if it dies a sudden death, rotten kale makes terrific compost.”
― James E. McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

“This death, no matter how “humane,” no matter how respectfully administered, no matter how thickly clothed in feel-good rationalizations (“it had a good life”), essentially negates the moral consideration that inspired us to condemn factory farms in the first place. You can’t claim to truly care about an animal, alter her environment to demonstrate your care for that animal, and then, when the animal is nowhere near even the middle of her natural life, kill the animal for no vital reason. Doing so is morally and logically inconsistent. It’s worse than ambiguous. It’s wrong. It is, alas, the omnivore’s contradiction.”
― James E. McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

“You cannot kill and eat animals and expect to help them, much less challenge the food system that profits from our choice to keep eating them.”
― James McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

“We have to make reasonable inferences, assume similarity over difference, and learn to accept some ambiguity while conceding the strong likelihood that the animals we kill and eat are emotional beings that suffer when we kill and eat them.”
― James McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

“While researching his book Comfortably Unaware he did a quick calculation and discovered something that captures the folly of trying to have our steak and eat it too.56 He figured that if you had two acres of decent land and placed a cow on it, you would, after two years, have about four hundred pounds of edible beef. That same land, in the same amount of time, for much less of the cost, could produce five thousand pounds of kale and quinoa. This kale and quinoa could be obtained without the additional methane output or trampling impact and, most important, without the slaughter of sentient animals who would rather not be born in order to be killed and eaten by people with a warped sense of what cows were meant to do.”
― James E. McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

“Her comparison of grass-fed versus conventional production, published in leading peer-reviewed journals, found that, pound for pound, grass-fed beef had an overall carbon footprint that was roughly 20 percent higher than feedlot production.53”
― James E. McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals

“Intentional death is the essential feature of both systems. This claim is neither melodrama nor overstatement. It is a fact. Without systematic animal death, you have no animal farm—factory or otherwise, big or small, conventional or organic. It might take longer to get an animal to slaughter weight in the alternative arrangement, and that animal might have a lot more fun having sex and eating real food, but that animal’s foundational and functional role in the system remains exactly the same as in the factory farm: to get fat fast, die relatively young, and feed people food they do not need to eat.”
― James E. McWilliams, The Modern Savage: Our Unthinking Decision to Eat Animals