Quotes from Jonathan Safran Foer

Vegetarians are at best kindly but unrealistic. At worst they are delusional sentimentalists.

La biodiversità era stata rimpiazziata dall'uniformità genetica, nelle università i dipartimenti di scienze animali erano diventati dipartimenti di scienze zootecniche, un'attività economica un tempo dominata dalle donne era ormai passata in mano ai maschi, e pollicoltori esperti erano stati rimpiazzati da dipendenti stipendiati. Non ci fu un colpo di pistola a segnare l'inizio della corsa verso il basso. Il terreno si inclinò e tutti scivolarono giù.

You only get to keep what you refuse to let go of

I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.

I like to see people reunited, maybe that's a silly thing, but what can I say, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone…

I can't count the times that upon telling someone I am vegetarian, he or she responded by pointing out an inconsistency in my lifestyle or trying to find a flaw in an argument I never made. (I have often felt that my vegetarianism matters more to such people than it does to me.)

It is always possible to wake someone from sleep, but no amount of noise will wake someone who is pretending to be asleep.

omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.

me, not only because it seemed true, but because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don't hurt family members. We don't hurt friends or strangers. We don't even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include animals in that list didn't make them the exceptions to it.

Americans eat 150 times as many chickens as we did only eighty years ago.

Chickens once had a life expectancy of fifteen to twenty years, but the modern broiler is typically killed at around six weeks. Their daily growth rate has increased roughly 400 percent.)

It's possible you can't afford to care, but it's certain you can't afford not to care.

More than any set of practices, factory farming is a mind-set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or "externalize" such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering.

That's what's at the bottom of all of this, and what each person has to ask himself. How much suffering will you tolerate for your food?

In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food (twice as many such animals are euthanized as are adopted).

Isaac was buried in a pocketless shroud, six hundred yards from his wife of two hundred thousand hours.

unless you obtain your food in secret and eat it in the closet, you don't eat alone. We eat as sons and daughters, as families, as communities, as generations, as nations, and increasingly as a globe.

He wrestled because he recognized that the blessings were worth the struggle. He knew that you only get to keep what you refuse to let go of.

We could retell our stories and make them better, more representational or aspirational. Or we could choose to tell different stories. The world itself had another chance.

Dünya hep ayn? kal?rken ölen insan say?s?n?n artmas? ve günün birinde kimseyi gömecek yer kalmayacak olmas? tuhaf deÄŸil mi?

Species don't make choices, individuals do. And even if species somehow could, to imply that they would select perpetuity over individual well-being is hard to apply more broadly. By this logic, enslaving a group of humans is acceptable if the posed alternative were nonexistence. (Instead of Live free or die, the motto we script for our food animals is Die enslaved but live.)

Ninety-nine percent of all land animals eaten or used to produce milk and eggs in the United States are factory farmed. So although there are important exceptions, to speak about eating animals today is to speak about factory farming.

But I loved them. I loved the truth they conveyed: that kids aren't yet able to fake it. Or they aren't yet able to conceal their disingenuousness. They're wonderful smilers, the best; but they're the very worst fake smilers. The inability to fake a smile defines childhood.

Life is upsetting," Irv said. "Like blood is wet.