Alone, one can live perfectly. But not a life.
Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my reading and conversations, I’ve yet to find a credible defense of it.
And historians have now discovered an even earlier Thanksgiving than the 1621 Plymouth celebration that English-American historians made famous. Half a century before Plymouth, early American settlers celebrated Thanksgiving with the Timucua Indians in what is now Florida – the best evidence suggests that the settlers were Catholic rather than Protestant, and spoke Spanish rather than English. They dined on bean soup.
And I’ll tell you another thing: if consumers don’t want to pay the farmer to do it right, they shouldn’t eat meat.
The best reason to think that there could be a better future is the fact that we know just how bad the future could be.
The inside of life became far smaller than the outside, creating a cavity, an emptiness.
The less a citizen knew, the more adamantly he or she argued.
He had a birthmark on the third toe of his left foot. He wasn’t able to urinate if someone could hear him. He thought cucumbers were good enough, but pickles were delicious – so absolutely delicious, in fact, that he questioned whether they were, indeed, made from cucumbers, which were only good enough.
The average distance our meat travels hovers around fifteen hundred miles. That’s like me driving from Brooklyn to the Texas Panhandle for lunch.
How do you know all that?” “I like knowing things.” “Me, too.
I can’t live, I’ve tried and I can’t. If that sounds simple, it’s simple like a mountain is simple.
We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth of about eating animals?
Even Alf is not humorous at times.
Wat is er mis met dat verlangen en dat nodig hebben? Niets. En de gapende afstand tussen de plek waar je bent en je oorspronkelijke voorstelling hoeft niet per definitie mislukking in te houden. Teleurstelling hoeft niet teleurstellend te zijn. Het verlangen, het nodig hebben, de afstand, de teleurstelling: groeien, weten, toewijden, naast elkaar oud worden. Je kunt heel goed alleen leven, maar niet een leven lang.
Food matters and animals matter and eating animals matters even more. The question of eating animals is ultimately driven by our intuitions about what it means to reach an ideal we have named, perhaps incorrectly, “being human.
What’s weird,” I said, “is that I’ve never seen you cry.” He said, “I cry all the time.
These factory farmers calculate how close to death they can keep the animals without killing them. That’s the business model. How quickly can they be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or how little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying.
This is what we’re like. We are broken individuals, committing to what will be a broken union in a broken world.
Ik geloof dat je een enorm belang hecht aan geluk – van jezelf en anderen – en ongelukkig zijn zo bedreigend vindt dat je liever met het hele schip naar de kelder gaat dan toegeeft dat er een lek in zit.
Instiinct’ blijft ook daarna de gebruikelijke verklaring wanneer het gedrag van dieren te veel op intelligentie lijkt te wijzen.