Eating Animals

I'd like to simply post a few excerpts from the book Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer.

‎"We have grander legacies than the quest for cheap products. Martin Luther King jr. wrote passionately about the time when 'one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular.' Sometimes we simply have to make a decision because 'one's conscience tells one that it is right.' These famous words of King's,... are also our legacy. We might want to say these social-justice movements have nothing to do with the situation of the factory farm. Human oppression is not animal abuse. King and Chavez were moved by a concern for suffering humanity, not suffering chickens or global warming. Fair enough. One can certainly quibble with, or even become enraged by, the comparison implicit in invoking them here, but it is worth noting that Cesar Chavez and King's wife, Coretta Scott King, were vegans, as is King's son Dexter. We interpret the Chavez and King legacies - we interpret America's legacy - too narrowly if we assume in advance that they cannot speak against the oppression of the factory farm." 

‎"If we are at all serious about ending factory farming, then the absolute least we can do is stop sending checks to the absolute worst abusers. For some, the decision to eschew factory-farmed products will be easy. For others, the decision will be a hard one. To those for whom it sounds like a hard decision (I would have counted myself in this group), the ultimate question is whether it is worth the inconvenience. We know, at least, that this decision will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve public health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in world history. What we don't know, though, may be just as important. How would making such a decision change us?"

‎"It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism. It would have sounded equally fantastic if you were told in the early 1970's before Cesar Chavez's workers' rights campaigns, that refusing to eat grapes could begin to free farmworkers from slave-like conditions. It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it's hard to deny that our day-to-say choices shape the world. When America's early settlers decided to throw a tea party in Boston, forces powerful enough to create a nation were released. Diciding what to eat (and what to toss overboard) is the founding act of production and consumption that shapes all others."