Quotes from Carol J. Adams

Vegetarianism is an act of the imagination. It reflects an ability to imagine alternatives to the texts of meat.

Vegetarianism announces that it will destroy the pleasure of meals as they are now experienced. Thus it is a given that vegetarians will be unable to determine the shape of the discourse when eating with meat eaters.

We can isolate determining points in which the creation of meat recalls the movement of narration. There is a beginning, a postulating of origins that positions the beginning of the story: we give animals life. There is the drama of conflict, in this case, of death. And there is the closure, the final summing up, which provides resolution to the drama: the consumption of the animal.

The story of meat follows a sacred typology: the birth of a God, the dismemberment of the god's body, and the god's resurrection.

Wars will never be overcome until the belief that is is justifiable to take life, to kill - when expedient - is eradicated from human consciousness." - Agnes Ryan

If the wartime killing of human beings is used to establish the legitimacy of meat eating, then challenging meat eating challenges a world at war.

From cutting the throat of a young calf to cutting the throat of our brothers and sisters is but a step. While we are ourselves the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal conditions of the earth!" -Isadora Duncan

What, for example, could be more calculated to produce brutal wife-beaters than long practice of savage cruelty towards the other animals?" -Edith Ward

Equality isn't an idea; it is a practice. We practice it when we don't treat other people or other animals as objects.

We live in a culture that has institutionalized the oppression of animals on at least two levels: in formal structures such as slaughterhouses, meat markets, zoos, laboratories, and circuses, and through our language. That we refer to meat eating rather than to corpse eating is a central example of how our language transmits the dominant culture's approval of this activity.

Dominance functions best in a culture of disconnections and fragmentation. Feminism recognizes connections. Imagine

In some respects we all acknowledge the sexual politics of meat. When we think that men, especially male athletes, need meat, or when wives report that they could give up meat but they fix it for their husbands, the overt association between meat eating and virile maleness is enacted. It is the covert associations that are more elusive to pinpoint as they are so deeply embedded within our culture. My

Speak to meat eaters the way you would speak to a wild animal: softly and without any sudden movements.

The process of viewing another as consumable, as something, is usually invisible to us. Its invisibility occurs because it corresponds to the view of the dominant culture. The process is also invisible to use because the end product of the process - the object of consumption - is available everywhere.

I think that in terms of emotion, that our culture allows men to be angry. The animal rights movement gives men a legitimate reason to be angry. I don't think our culture should give men any more reason--that the animal rights movement should not be the place to give men more reasons to be angry. That is not what we need in the world.

It is as though the way to create a child's acceptance of animals' deaths is by convincing him or her that sometimes humans must be killed too. "Just" wars justify meat eating.

Adopting a vegan diet brings your choices and actions in line with those same beliefs that underlie a commitment to resisting regressive politics: generosity, compassion, and a commitment to justice and fairness. By acting in a way that reflects your values and what you believe, you relieve the cognitive dissonance that can make stress and depression worse.

Our lives are a meaningful stand against injustice, and we can make meaningful choices every day. Your food choices are far more powerful than you imagine. Veganism offers a daily way to enact your values while helping to protect the environment and enhance your health. It becomes a daily reminder that change is possible. Social change is not just something we must work for; it's something that constantly asks us to change.

Through butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals and name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals' lives precede and enable the existence of meat. If animals are alive they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are abent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food (51).

Manhood is constructed in our culture, in part, by access to meat eating and control of other bodies.

The attempt to create defensiveness through trivialization is the first conversational gambit which greets threatening reforms. This pre-establishes the perimeters of discourse.

The way in which the story of meat is conceptualized is with constant reference to humans' will: we allow animals their existence and we begin to believe that animals cannot exist without us.

If the body becomes a special focus for women's struggle for freedom then what is ingested is a logical initial locus for announcing one's independence. Refusing the male order in food, women practiced the theory of feminism thorugh their bodies and their choice of vegetarianism.

Justice should not be so fragile a commodity that it cannot be extended beyond the species barrier of Homo Sapiens.