Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.

If you are interested in preventing animal suffering, the first thing you should give up is eggs and milk, because the animals who produce those foods lead the most unhappy lives. You would do better to eat meat and stop eating eggs and dairy products.

If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian. We feel better about ourselves and better about the animals, knowing we're not contributing to their pain.

Seriously, I think everybody needs to be more disciplined; nobody needs any meat. But from a perspective of how many animals suffer, it's probably better to kill and eat one whale than it is to eat fish, chickens, cows, lambs and eggs.

I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway.

If modern civilization man had to kill the animals he eats, the number of vegetarians would rise astronomically.

We need a better way to talk about eating animals. We need a way that brings meat to the center of public discussion in the same way it is often at the center of our plates. This doesn't require that we pretend we are going to have a collective agreement. However strong our intuitions are about what's right for us personally and even about what's right for others, we all know in advance that our positions will clash with those of our neighbors. What do we do with that most inevitable reality? Drop the conversation, or find a way to reframe it?

It's just that I have this funny objection to torturing small animals no matter how scrumptious their body parts might be. ... Our food industries are equal opportunity abusers: cows, chickens, pigs, and a special mention to those little calves who for their short, miserable lives are locked into crates too small to allow movement just so we can eat veal.

The distinction between meat and other animal products is total nonsense. Vegetarianism is a morally incoherent position. If you regard animals as members of the moral community, you really don’t have a choice but to go vegan.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

We can't plead ignorance, only indifference. Those alive today are the generations that came to know better. We have the burden and the opportunity of living in the moment when the critique of factory farming broke into the popular consciousness. We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?

Do you eat chicken because you are familiar with the scientific literature on them and have decided that their suffering doesn't matter, or do you do it because it tastes good?

Like other Americans, I've reconciled myself to the idea that an animal's life has been sacrificed to bring me a meal of pork or chicken. However, industrial meat production - which subjects animals to a life of torture - has escalated the karmic costs beyond reconciliation.

Inside me, I think that an animal goes through a lot of pain in the whole cycle of death in the slaughterhouse; just living to be killed. That whole situation is really messed up for animals, growing up in those little cooped-up pens. I just don't think its worth eating that animal. I think animals should be free. There's so much other food out there that doesn't have to involve you in that cycle of pain and death.

For most humans, especially for those in modern urban and suburban communities, the most direct form of contact with nonhuman animals is at meal time: we eat them.... The use and abuse of animals raised for food far exceeds, in sheer numbers of animals affected, any other kind of mistreatment.

There is no difference between sitting around the pit watching dogs fight and sitting around a summer barbecue roasting the corpses of tortured animals or enjoying the dairy or eggs from tortured animals.

To avoid causing terror to living beings, let the disciple refrain from eating meat.

Why...is the hunter who shoots a deer for venison subject to more criticism than the person who buys a ham at the supermarket? Overall, it is probably the intensively reared pig who has suffered more.

It is beyond doubt that the chief motive of Vegetarianism is the humane one. Questions of hygiene and of economy both play their part, and an important part, in a full discussion of food reform; but the feeling which underlies and animates the whole movement is the instinctive horror of butchery, especially the butchery of the more highly organized animals, so human, so near akin to man.

I'm a bit of a dude. I like meat. But I am buying it more responsibly, where it's more sourced responsibly.

The kind of funny irony is that a lot of people talk about ethical meat eating as if it's a way to care about things, but also not to alienate yourself from the rest of the world. But it's so much more alienating than vegetarianism.

If you love animals, please don't eat them.

I don't think that eating bones is necessarily gruesome unless you're a vegetarian.

It's harder to eat meat when you know the animal's name...I have found.

Unconscious behavior is at the core. Think of the 40 billion animals we abuse and eat who are born into suffering. It's a karmic disaster.