Why is taste, the crudest of our senses, exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses? If you stop and think about it, it’s crazy. Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it?
Every time you make a decision about food, Paul pleaded, quoting Berry, “you are farming by proxy.
And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.
Jewish-motherly.
Sitting with her now, rehearsing the horrible conversation, Jacob wondered if maybe, all those years, he had misunderstood the spaces surrounding Julia: her quiet, her steps back. Maybe they weren’t buffers of defense, but of the most extreme humility, the purest generosity. What if she wasn’t withdrawing, but beckoning? Or both at the same time? Withdrawing and beckoning? And more to the point: making a world for their children, even for Jacob.
I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life.
Make us better than we are. Make us good.
Wolf Blitzer had once again relieved the horrible tension of his purgatorial beard – neither a beard nor not a beard – with yet another new pair of glasses.
Food ethics are so complex because food is bound to both taste buds and taste, to individual biographies and social histories.
On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime – one.
Before child labor laws, there were businesses that treated their ten-year-old employees well. society didn’t ban child labor because it’s impossible to imagine children working in a good environment, but because when you give that much power to businesses over powerless individuals, it’s corrupting. When we walk around thinking we have a greater right to eat an animal than the animal has a right to live without suffering, it’s corrupting.
After fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland, Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer compared species bias to the “most extreme racist theories.” Singer argued that animal rights was the purest form of social-justice advocacy, because animals are the most vulnerable of all the downtrodden. He felt that mistreating animals was the epitome of the “might-makes-right” moral paradigm. We trade their most basic and important interests against fleeting human ones only because we can.
The persistence of the story of animal consent into the contemporary era tells of a human appreciation of the stakes, and a desire to do the right thing.
We live in a world in which it’s conventional to treat an animal like a hunk of wood and extreme to treat an animal like an animal.
Compounding Julia’s irritation was the fact that Mark and Jennifer were the parents of one of Sam’s friends, and thought of Jacob and Julia as their friends, and wanted to have a coffee after to “catch up.” Julia liked them and, insofar as she could muster enthusiasm for extrafamilial relations, considered them friends. But she couldn’t muster much. At least not until she could catch up with herself.
We can think of our atmosphere as a budget and our emissions as expenses: because methane and nitrous oxide are significantly larger greenhouse expenses than CO2 in the short term, they are the most urgent to cut. Because they are primarily created by our food choices, they are also easier to cut.
Maybe it’s true that you can use up all of your tears... It was nice to think about, because what I wanted was to be empty.
According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, if cows were a country, they would rank third in greenhouse gas emissions, after China and the United States.
Sometimes my hand starts to burn and I am convinced we are writing the same word at the same moment.
Their relationship was defined not by what they could share, but what they couldn’t. Between any two beings there is a unique, uncrossable distance, an unenterable sanctuary. Sometimes it takes the shape of aloneness. Sometimes it takes the shape of love.