Quotes About Food

Whether we're talking about fish species, pigs, or some other eaten animal, is such suffering the most important thing in the world? Obviously not. But that's not the question. Is it mort important than sushi, bacon, or chicken nuggets? That's the question.

Jonathan Safran Foer

The choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any other culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore - "I'm easy; I'll eat anything" - can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.

On average, Americans eat the equivalent of 21,000 entire animals in a lifetime—one

When we lift our forks, we hang our hats somewhere. We set ourselves in one relationship or another to farmed animals, farmworkers, 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.

The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat their horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.

E allora quanta sofferenza è accettabile? È questa la base di tutto, ed è questo che ognuno di noi deve chiedersi. Quanta sofferenza sei disposto a tollerare per il tuo cibo?

One of the greatest opportunities to live our values —or betray them —lies in the food we put on our plates.

The point of eating these special foods with those special people at those special times was that we were being deliberate, separating those meals out from the others. Adding another layer of deliberateness has been enriching. I'm all for compromising tradition for a good cause, but perhaps in these situations, tradition wasn't compromised so much as fulfilled.

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?

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.

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).

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.

Not making a decision —eating "like everyone else" —is to make the easiest decision, a decision that is increasingly problematic. Without question, in most places and in most times, to decide one's diet by not deciding —to eat like everyone else —was probably a fine idea.

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. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity. For some, that irrationality leads to a kind of resignation. Food

270,000 more people become hungry each day).

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 average distance our meat travels hovers around fifteen hundred miles. That's like me driving from Brooklyn to the Texas Panhandle for lunch.

Ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore -- I'm easy; I'll eat anything -- can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society. Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.

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.

Producing and eating our own food is, historically, much of what made us Americans and not subjects of European powers. While other colonies required massive imports to survive, early American immigrants, thanks to help from Native Americans, were almost entirely self-sustaining.