I invented a book that listed every word in every language. It wouldn’t be a very useful book, but you could hold it and know that everything you could possibly say was in your hands.
It felt as if an only life should be better than good enough, but how many efforts for more have ended with having nothing?
You used to write such honest books. Honest and emotionally ambitious. Maybe they weren’t finding millions of readers. Maybe they weren’t making you rich. But they were making the world rich.
It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it’s hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world.
And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed “unintentionally” in seafood production.
We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.
When you’re a dad, there’s no one above you. If I don’t do something that has to be done, who is going to do it?
They were miserable at sports, but great at fantasy sports. They avoided fights, but sought arguments.
I couldn’t tell what he was feeling, because I couldn’t speak the language of his feelings.
If we don’t demonstrate solidarity through small collective sacrifices, we will not win the war, and if we do not win the war, we will lose the childhood home of every human who has ever lived.
The four highest-impact things an individual can do to tackle climate change are eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children. Of those four actions, only plant-based eating immediately addresses methane and nitrous oxide, the most urgently important greenhouse gases.
Regarding US government recommendations that tend to encourage dairy consumption in the name of preventing osteoporosis, Nestle notes that in parts of the world where milk is not a staple of the diet, people often have less osteoporosis and fewer bone fractures than Americans do. The highest rates of osteoporosis are seen in countries where people consume the most dairy foods.
We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God. Her culinary prowess was one of our family’s primal stories, like the cunning of the grandfather I never met, or the single fight of my parents’ marriage. We clung to those stories and depended on them to define us. We were the family that chose its battles wisely, and used wit to get out of binds, and loved the food of our matriarch.
It’s nice to believe that when confronted with facts people will just suddenly respond to them but, in fact, most people don’t really work like that.
Nobody wants to be a caricature. Nobody wants to be a diminished version of herself.
Parents don’t have the luxury of being reasonable, not any more than a religious person does. What can make religious people and parents so utterly insufferable is also what makes religion and Parenthood so utterly beautiful: the All or nothing wager. The Faith.
In the struggle between yourself and the world, side with the world.
Did you manufacture any Z’s?
When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farm-workers, national economies, and global markets. Not making a decision – eating ‘like everyone else’ – is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic.
We believe that the environmental crisis is caused by large outside forces and therefore can be solved only by large outside forces. But recognizing that we are responsible for the problem is the beginning of taking responsibility for the solution.